Crescent Magazine

Washington DC-Crescent-online
February 3, 2010 - 12:25 pm EST

The US budget for fiscal year 2010-2011 of $3.8 trillion unveiled on February 1 has a very large military component: $708 billion. This increases th US military expenditure by 3.4 percent over last year, already the biggest defence outlay of any country in the world. While the budget will have a $1.3 trillion deficit and deficits will continue to accumulate well into the next decade, American war planners are not deterred.

In the defence budget is also a request for more funds to escalate drone attacks by 75 percent in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Already, US drone attacks have kille thousands of innocent civilians in Pakistan. The American warmongers believe that by killing more innocents, they can achieve their objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “With this funding, we will increase the unmanned Predator and Reaper orbits from 37 to 65, while enhancing our ability to process, exploit and disseminate information gathered by this game-changing technology.” He went on: “As we’ve seen firsthand through eight years of war, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets are absolutely critical enablers for the war-fighter.” US Defence Secretary Robert Gates chimed in with claims saying that the new drones would be added to the American military’s arsenal “in a couple of years” and these would be “the most advanced UAVs”.

The $708 billion defence budget has three components: a base budget of $548.9 billion for 2011; $159.3 billion for overseas contingency operations in 2011 and a supplemental budget of $33 billion for 2010. This last item will cover the cost of additional troop deployments in Afghanistan that President Barack Obama announced on December 1 last year as well as intensified military operations in Pakistan. The counter-insurgency funds are for US military operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

“America’s ability to deal with threats for years to come will depend importantly on our success in the current conflicts,” Mullen said. Such success is likely to elude Americans, especially in Afghanistan where the Taliban have gained much traction and are now operational throughout the country. Mullen was forced to concede this during his Congressional testimony on February 3.

Release of US budget proposal on February 1 coincided with the Quadrennial Defence Review (QRD) that outlines Pentagon thinking about future conflicts and what resources might be needed. The QRD clearly lays emphasis on counter-insurgency, and lists China as one of America’s main “potentially hostile” states along with North Korea and Iran.

Breaking with past policy of maintaining large numbers of troops and weapons that could fight two major regional wars at the same time, for example in the Middle East and Asia, the new proposals call for building “substantial” forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon believes that the conflicts “will substantially determine the size and shape of major elements of US military forces for several years.”

“In the mid- to long-term, we expect there to be enduring operational requirements in Afghanistan and elsewhere to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies,” the report says. Invoking the bogey of al-Qaeda and alternating it with threats from Taliban are two components of US strategists to continue to whip up hysteria and paranoia in order to justify massive military expenditures even while unemployment remains at 10 percent and millions of people are forced to abandon their homes and live in tent cities.

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