This evening's music features soul singer Arthur Conley.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

U.S. Is Escalating a Secretive War in Afghanistan

As an October chill fell on the mountain passes that separate the militant havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a small team of Afghan intelligence commandos and American Special Operations forces descended on a village where they believed a leader of Al Qaeda was hiding.

That night the Afghans and Americans got their man, Abu Bara al-Kuwaiti. They also came away with what officials from both countries say was an even bigger prize: a laptop computer and files detailing Qaeda operations on both sides of the border.

American military officials said the intelligence seized in the raid was possibly as significant as the information found in the computer and documents of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after members of the Navy SEALs killed him in 2011.

In the months since, the trove of intelligence has helped fuel a significant increase in night raids by American Special Operations forces and Afghan intelligence commandos, Afghan and American officials said.

The spike in raids is at odds with policy declarations in Washington, where the Obama administration has deemed the American role in the war essentially over. But the increase reflects the reality in Afghanistan, where fierce fighting in the past year killed record numbers of Afghan soldiers, police officers and civilians.

American and Afghan officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing operations that are largely classified, said that American forces were playing direct combat roles in many of the raids and were not simply going along as advisers.

Obama’s War Authorization Request Runs Into a Brick Wall

Unveiling a draft authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against ISIS on Wednesday, President Obama blundered pretty dramatically, turning what many expected would be an easy approval into a huge obstacle.

During his speech on the matter, President Obama claimed the AUMF was severely limited, and almost immediately lost the support of the hawkish leadership in Congress, particularly in the Senate, which want a hugely more bellicose war [resolution].

The bigger problem is that Obama was lying in the speech, and the White House press secretary tried to get the hawks back on board by admitting as much, saying the AUMF was deliberately vaguely worded to allow the president to unilaterally escalate as much as he wants. ...

While some hawks might get back on board with the AUMF knowing the bill allows limitless escalation, many are likely to continue to object to it, wanting officials to be more overt about their hostile intentions for the region.

Hat tip Azazello for this must-read article:

Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy

Europe’s confrontation with Greece, the West’s with Russia as the Ukraine crisis runs nearly out of control: Why is it more useful by the week to think of these together?

They are both very large, moments of history. There is this. They both reach critical moments this week, as if in concert. The outcomes in each case will be consequential for all of us.

As noted with alarm last week, most Americans have by now surrendered to a blitz of propaganda wherein Russia and its leadership are cast as Siberian beasts, accepting as truth tales the National Enquirer would be embarrassed to run. In Europe, Greeks and Spaniards show us up, indeed, as a supine, spiritless people incapable of response or any resistance to the onslaught. There is this, too.

At writing, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s imaginative new finance minister, has just made his first formal effort to present European counterparts with new ideas to get foreign debts of €240 billion ($271 billion) off the books and the Greek economy back in motion. These ideas can work. Even creditor institutions acknowledge that Greece cannot pay its debts as they are now structured. But at a session in Brussels Wednesday, the European Union’s arms remained folded.

Also at writing, the Poroshenko government in Ukraine appears to have recommitted to a cease-fire signed last September in Minsk and promptly broken. It is not surprising given Kiev’s very evident desperation on all fronts. But neither would it be if Poroshenko once again reneges. There is a sensible solution on the table now, but these are not people who have so far been given to one.

There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around. Economic conflict, then, has been transformed into humanitarian disasters. This is what Greece and Ukraine have most fundamentally in common.

It is in search of a logical explanation of the illogic at work in these two crises that something else, something larger, emerges to bring them into a coherent whole. Washington has so many wars going now, none declared, one can hardly keep the list current. But the most sustained and havoc-wreaking of them is unreported. This is the war for neoliberal supremacy across the planet. Greece and Ukraine are best viewed as two hot fronts in this war, a sort of World War III none of us ever imagined.

As Public Pensions Shift to Risky Wall Street, Local Politicians Rake in Political Cash

This is a really excellent piece, worth reading in full:

GOP shows it doesn't understand Social Security disability--and doesn't care

The killing floor was the hearing room of the Senate Budget Committee. There, Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) not only displayed a shocking level of ignorance of Social Security and the disability program, but offered no solutions whatsoever to the looming crisis--which he repeatedly mischaracterized. ...

The raw truth is this: The reserve, or trust fund, from which the disability program receives about 20% of its funding is expected to run dry in 2016. If nothing is done, disability payments, which currently average about $1,068 a month to 11 million disabled persons and their family members, will have to be cut by that same percentage. Colvin called that "a death sentence" for those beneficiaries.

Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin spoke up for the most reasonable fix: reallocate a small portion of the Social Security payroll tax from its old-age account to disability for five years. That would extend the life of the disability reserve to 2033; the exhaustion date of the old-age reserve would move from 2034 (according to the system trustees' latest reckoning) to 2033. As Colvin stated, this staves off any near-term benefit cuts, brings the financing of both programs into line, as it should be, and leaves nearly two decades for Congress and the White House to work out a longer-term strategy.

How little does Enzi understand about Social Security? He kept repeating that disability is going "broke." It's not "going broke"; it will continue to have enough money coming in year after year to fund 80% of currently scheduled benefits. That's not "broke" by any definition of the word.

As we've written before, this assertion is nothing but an attempt to cheat working Americans of the benefits they've paid for. The trust funds hold trillions of dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds bought and paid for by payroll taxes collected from American workers since 1983; these transfers have been certified, in writing, every year by U.S. treasury secretaries and other cabinet members, Republican and Democrat, and accepted by Congress. If the money's gone, they should all go to jail--but you won't hear that said by Enzi or his cronies.