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Pentagon Chief: US Considering Slowing Exit from Afghanistan

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Afghan President Ashraf Ghani addresses a new conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015.  Carter made his international debut Saturday with a visit to Afghanistan to see American troops and commanders, meet with Afghan leaders and assess whether U.S. withdrawal plans are too risky to Afghan security.  (SAP Photos/Jonathan Ernst, Pool)

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani addresses a new conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015.  (SAP Photos/Jonathan Ernst, Pool)

Robert Burns, ASSOCIATED PRESS

 
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The United States is considering slowing its military exit from Afghanistan by keeping a larger-than-planned troop presence this year and next because the new Afghan government is proving to be a more reliable partner, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Saturday.

Carter, on his first overseas trip since starting the Pentagon job Tuesday, also said the Obama administration is “rethinking” the counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan, although he did not elaborate.

No decisions have been made, but President Barack Obama will discuss a range of options for slowing the U.S. military withdrawal when Afghan president Ashraf Ghani visits the White House next month, Carter said at a news conference with Ghani. The presidents also plan to talk about the future of the counterterrorism fight in Afghanistan, he said.

Carter did not say Obama was considering keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016, only that the president was rethinking the pace of troop withdrawals for 2015 and 2016.

There are about 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of 100,000 as recently as 2010-11.

While the White House recently acknowledged it was reconsidering the exit plan, Carter’s remarks were the most direct explanation by a Pentagon official amid criticism from opposition Republicans that the Democratic commander in chief is beating a hasty and risky retreat.

On Feb. 11, the White House said Ghani had requested “some flexibility in the troop drawdown timeline” and that the administration was “actively considering” that. A day later, Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that he had presented U.S. leaders with several options that would allow him to better continue training and advising Afghan forces, particularly through this summer’s peak fighting season.

The “common denominator” in the new thinking about the U.S. military mission is a belief in Washington that the formation of a unity government in Kabul last year has opened new possibilities for progress on both the political and security fronts, Carter said.

The unity government of Ashraf and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah offers new promise for a more effective partnership in stabilizing the country, Carter said.

U.S. officials had grown grew impatient with former President Hamid Karzai, who sometimes publicly criticized the U.S. military and took a dimmer view of partnering with the Americans.

“That’s a major change,” Carter said, something “that just a few months ago we couldn’t have planned on.”

Obama’s current plan calls for troop levels to drop by half from 10,000 by the end of this year and be at nearly zero by the end of 2016. The U.S. would maintain a security cooperation office in Kabul. Ghani has made it known he thinks that should be slowed down in order to better support Afghan forces battling a resilient Taliban insurgency.

In remarks to reporters later Saturday, Campbell said progress in stabilizing Afghanistan is evident in the security forces’ ability to plan and execute complex military operations. He said they are in the early stages of a major offensive in Helmand province, combining air and ground forces to retake lost ground. The top U.S. commander said he could not discuss details in order to preserve security for the operation, but said it currently involves fighting near the city of Sangin.

Carter did not specify what changes Obama is considering in the U.S. military presence. But he said could include slowing the withdrawal pace and changing the timing and sequencing of U.S. base closures.

He said Obama also was “rethinking the details” of the U.S. counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan, where there are remnants of al-Qaida as well as signs that the Islamic State militant group is seeking to make inroads here in addition to Iraq and Syria.

Campbell said he is monitoring IS recruiting efforts in Afghanistan, noting that the militant group showed in Iraq that it can, under the right circumstances, spread its influence quickly. But he was adamant that Afghanistan’s situation is not like Iraq’s and thus not as big a worry.

“We’ve got a government here that wants us to be here,” he said.

In his remarks to reporters, Ghani thanked Obama for being flexible and showing a willingness to consider “the realities on the ground.” Using similar phrasing, Carter said that when he returns to Washington he will work up recommendations to Obama, in advance of the March talks, that “reflect reality on the ground.”

Carter lauded the progress that Afghanistan has made during the 13 years since U.S. forces invaded and toppled the Taliban rule. Obama’s goal, he said, is to “make sure this progress sticks” so that Afghanistan does not again become a launching pad for terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Carter also met in the Afghan capital with Campbell and Gen. Lloyd Austin, the commander of U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and across the Middle East.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

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“Two things can be true at once.” An Afro-Latina Voter Weighs in on Identity and Politics

“As a Puerto Rican I do not feel spoken to in discussions about Latino voters… which is ironic because we are one of the few Latino communities who are also simultaneously American,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, have American citizenship by birth but they do not have the right to vote for president if they live on the island. “I think that we miss out on a really interesting opportunity to have a nuanced conversation by ignoring this huge Latino population that is indigenously American.”

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Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño at her graduation from UC Berkeley after receiving her master’s degree in City Regional Planning. Alongside her, are her parents holding a Puerto Rican flag. Courtesy photo.
Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño at her graduation from UC Berkeley after receiving her master’s degree in City Regional Planning. Alongside her, are her parents holding a Puerto Rican flag. Courtesy photo.

By Magaly Muñoz

On a sunny afternoon at Los Cilantros Restaurant in Berkeley, California, Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño, a 27-year-old Afro-Latina with tight curly hair and deep brown skin, stares down at her carne asada tacos, “I’ve definitely eaten more tortillas than plantains over the course of my life,” says Cedeño, who spent her childhood in South Texas, among predominantly Mexican-American Latinos. As she eats, she reflects on the views that American politicians have of Latino voters.

“As a Puerto Rican I do not feel spoken to in discussions about Latino voters… which is ironic because we are one of the few Latino communities who are also simultaneously American,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, have American citizenship by birth but they do not have the right to vote for president if they live on the island. “I think that we miss out on a really interesting opportunity to have a nuanced conversation by ignoring this huge Latino population that is indigenously American.”

Ortiz-Cedeño, an urban planner who is focused on disaster resilience, homelessness and economic prosperity for people of color, says that political conversations around Latinos tend to shift towards immigration, “I think this ties back into the ways that our perception of ‘Latino’ tends to be Mexican and Central American because so much of our conversation about Latinos is deeply rooted in what’s happening on the border,” she says. “I don’t think that the Afro-Latino vote is frequently considered when we’re talking about the Latino vote in the United States.”

Primarily surrounded by Mexican-Americans while growing up in South Texas, Keyanna participated in many Chicano cultured events, such as being a dama in several quinceñeras. Courtesy photo.

Primarily surrounded by Mexican-Americans while growing up in South Texas, Keyanna participated in many Chicano cultured events, such as being a dama in several quinceñeras. Courtesy photo.

As Ortiz-Cedeño sifts through childhood photos of her as a happy teen dancing with the Mexican ballet folklorico group in high school and as a dama in quinceñeras, she reflects on growing up in South Texas, an area with a large population of white and Mexican-Americans. The Black population was small, and within it, the Afro-Latino population was practically nonexistent.

“It was interesting to try to have conversations with other Latinos in the community because I think that there was a combination of both willful ignorance and a sort of ill intent and effort to try and deny my experience as a Latino,” she says. “There are a lot of folks in Latin America who experience a lot of cognitive dissonance when they think about the existence of Black Latinos in Latin America.

Ortiz-Cedeño comments on the long history of anti-Blackness in Latin America. “Throughout Latin America, we have a really insidious history with erasing Blackness and I think that that has been carried into the Latino American culture and experience,” she says. “People will tell you, race doesn’t exist in Latin America, like we’re all Dominicans, we’re all Puerto Ricans, we’re all Cubans, we’re all Mexicans. If you were to go to the spaces with where people are from and look at who is experiencing the most acute violence, the most acute poverty, the most acute political oppression and marginalization, those people are usually darker. And that’s not by accident, it’s by design.”

Because of the lack of diversity in her Gulf Coast town, as a teenager, despite being the only Spanish-speaker at her job in Walmart, Latinos refused to ask for her help in Spanish.

“Even if monolingual [Spanish-speaking] people would have to speak with me, then they were trying to speak English, even though they could not speak English, versus engaging with me as a Latina,” she says.

“I think that the perception of Latinos in the United States is of a light brown person with long, wavy or straight hair. The perfect amount of curves and the perfect combination of Indigenous and white genes. And very rarely will people also consider that maybe they also have a sprinkle of Blackness in them as well,” she says. “Over 90% of the slave trade went to the Caribbean and Latin America.”

Keyanna as a toddler, holding a whiteboard up with her last name, Ortiz-Cedeño, on it. Courtesy photo.

Keyanna as a toddler, holding a whiteboard up with her last name, Ortiz-Cedeño, on it. Courtesy photo.

Ortiz-Cedeño remembers when a Cuban family moved in next door to her in Texas. The teen daughter had blue-eyes, blonde hair and only spoke Spanish, which caused neighboring Latinos to take pause because she didn’t fit the Latino “look” they were used to.

“People didn’t have an option to try and negate her [Latino] identity because they had to acknowledge her for everything that she was,” Ortiz-Cedeño says.

Later on, the girl’s cousins, a Black, Spanish-speaking Cuban family, came into town and again locals were forced to reckon with the fact that not all Latinos fit a certain criteria.

“I think it forced everybody to have to confront a reality that they knew in the back of their mind but didn’t want to acknowledge at the forefront,” Ortiz-Cedeño says.

Having gone through these experiences as an Afro-Latina, Ortiz-Cedeño says it’s easy for her to understand Kamala Harris’ mixed Indian and Jamaican heritage, “It comes really naturally to accept that she is both Indian and Black. Two things can exist at the same time,” she says. “I had a long term partner for about seven years who was South Indian, from the same state as Kamala Harris, so if we had had a kid, they would look like [Harris],” Ortiz-Cedeño jokingly shares.

She says she can relate to having to walk the road of people only wanting to see Harris as a Black American. The talking point about [Harris] not being Indian or not being Black, just deciding to be Black, is really disingenuous and cheap,” she says.

Ortiz-Cedeño believes that the Harris campaign has not capitalized on the vice president’s mixed identity, which could be vital in bringing together different communities to understand each other on a new level and allow for improvements on America’s racial dynamics.

Keyanna co-managed a recovery center with her mother after Hurricane Harvey. They packed essentials, such as diapers, food, and water for families in need. Courtesy photo.

Keyanna co-managed a recovery center with her mother after Hurricane Harvey. They packed essentials, such as diapers, food, and water for families in need. Courtesy photo.

As she rushes into a Berkeley Urban Planning Commission meeting straight out of Ashby BART station, Ortiz-Cedeño explains her love for talking about all things infrastructure, homelessness, and healthcare access. The topics can be dry for many, she admits, but in the end, she gets to address long-standing systemic issues that often hinder opportunities for growth for people of color.

Having lived through the effects of Hurricane Katrina as a child, with the flooding and mass migration of Louisiana residents into Texas, Ortiz-Cedeño was radicalized into issues of displacement, emergency mitigation, and housing at nine years old.

“I remember my principal had to carry her students on her shoulders and swim us home because so many parents were trying to drive in and get their kids from school [due to] the flooding that was pushing their cars away,” she recalls.

Her family relocated to Houston soon after Katrina, only to be met with a deadly Hurricane Rita. They wound up in a mega-shelter, where Ortiz-Cedeño says she heard survivors stories of the unstable conditions in New Orleans and beyond, which got her wondering about urban planning, a term she wasn’t familiar with at the time.

“I think that when you put people in the context of the things that were happening in this country around [these hurricanes], a lot of us started to really think seriously about who gets to make decisions about the urban environment,” she adds.

Watching the heavy displacement of disaster survivors, hearing stories of her Navy veteran father’s chronic homelessness, and her own mother’s work and activism with homeless communities in the non–profit sector put her on the path to progressive politics and solutions, she says. After attending college on the East Coast- where she says she was finally recognized as a Puerto Rican- and working in housing, economic development, and public policy, she returned to California to earn a Master’s in City Regional Planning from UC Berkeley.

Young Keyanna volunteering at a beach clean up. Activism and giving back to her community has always been a key part of her upbringing. Courtesy photo.

Young Keyanna volunteering at a beach clean up. Activism and giving back to her community has always been a key part of her upbringing. Courtesy photo.

Her vast interest in the urban success of underserved communities even took her abroad to Israel and Palestine when she was an undergraduate college student. “I’ve seen the border with Gaza, I’ve had homestays with farmers in the West Bank,” she says. “For me personally, Palestine is an issue that is really close to the heart.”

“I have a very intimate understanding of the conflict and I’m very disturbed by the way in which the [Democratic] party has not been willing to engage in what I would perceive to be a thoughtful enough conversation about the conflict,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. “The issue of Palestine is going to be one of those that is a make or break issue for her. It has not been one that has been taken seriously enough by the party.”

Ortiz-Cedeño is not under the illusion that one candidate will address every policy issue she wants to see tackled by the president. But she believes it’s better than what former President Donald Trump has to offer.

“Trump has made it very clear what his intentions are with Palestine, and what his relationship is with [Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Ortiz-Cedeño says. “I understand the political strategy that many people are trying to engage in by withholding their vote, but I would also encourage them to re-engage in the political process.”

Casting her vote for Harris is a decision grounded in calculation rather than outright support. “I think I can vote in this election in order to have harm reduction… because I have deep care and concern for other communities that are going to be impacted by a Trump presidency,” Ortiz-Cedeño says.

She also hopes that American politicians will consider the nuance and perspective that Afro-Latinos bring to the table when it comes to politics, policy, and race in America, “When we don’t think expansively about who is Latino in the United States, the breadth of Latino experiences in the United States, we miss an opportunity to capture how diverse Latinos interests are politically.”

This story was reported in collaboration with PBS VOCES: Latino Vote 2024.

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California Black Media

Ahead of Nov. Election, Event to Check Pulse of California’s Political Landscape

The Public Policy Institute of California is hosting a “2024 Speaker Series on California’s Future,” a preview event outlining the political landscape of the state and the nation ahead of the upcoming November elections. The event, which will be held Sept. 26 from 12 noon to 1 p.m., will include a panel of prominent political journalists who will assess the mood of the electorate and discuss themes and issues that are likely to shape the election outcome in November.

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PPIC
PPIC

By Bo Tefu, California Black Media

The Public Policy Institute of California is hosting a “2024 Speaker Series on California’s Future,” a preview event outlining the political landscape of the state and the nation ahead of the upcoming November elections.

The event, which will be held Sept. 26 from 12 noon to 1 p.m.,   will include a panel of prominent political journalists who will assess the mood of the electorate and discuss themes and issues that are likely to shape the election outcome in November.

The welcome and opening remarks of the event will be led by Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the president and chief executive officer of the PPIC. The discussion will be moderated by FOX 11 news anchor Elex Michaelson, journalists joining the conversation include senior political writer Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, national politics reporter Astead Herndon of the The New York Times, political correspondent for KQED Marisa Lagos, and senior political reporter POLITICO Melanie Mason.

A statewide survey by the PPIC revealed key findings that highlighted people’s concerns regarding candidates of choice for the 2024 presidential election, the 10 state propositions on the ballot, and the financial direction of the state in the next 12 months.

Since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party standard bearer, 6 in 10 California likely voters support the Democratic presidential ticket compared to the Republican party and other candidates.

“Californians’ support for the Democratic presidential candidate — and partisans’ overwhelming preference for their party’s candidates — were the consistent trends before Harris replaced Biden,” the survey report stated.

Among the 10 ballot measures, approximately 71% of voters are expected to vote yes on Proposition 36, allowing felony charges and increased sentences for some drug and theft crimes.

According to the survey, the majority of voters, “think it is a good thing that a majority of voters can make laws and change public policies by passing initiatives.” Voters agree that initiatives on the ballot, “bring up important public policy issues that the Governor and Legislature have not adequately addressed.”

The survey also revealed that nearly half of voters think the state and country are headed in the wrong direction and expect financial struggles in the next 12 months.

The event will be held at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Sacramento.

The PPIC Speaker Series on California’s Future invites thought leaders and changemakers to address challenges in the state. Residents can visit the PPIC website for more information and register for the event available online and in person.

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