Wrong Again

Glenn Greenwald condemns David Brooks most recent idiocy in far great detail and with far greater passion than I can summon, but there is one small point of fact that I'd like to point out regarding Brooks' column. This, from Brooks' column:

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

There is simply no historical record to support these illusions. The historical evidence suggests that these middling strategies just create a situation in which you have enough forces to assume responsibility for a conflict, but not enough to prevail.

The record suggests what Gen. Stanley McChrystal clearly understands — that only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success. This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable report, that puts population protection at the center of the Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.

To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.

Yeah, about that Mr. Brooks:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military officer in Afghanistan, has told his commanders to pull forces out of sparsely populated areas where U.S. troops have fought bloody battles with the Taliban for several years and focus them on protecting major Afghan population centers.

But the changes, which amount to a retreat from some areas, have already begun to draw resistance from senior Afghan officials who worry that any pullback from Taliban-held territory will make the weak Afghan government appear even more powerless in the eyes of its people.

Senior U.S. officials said the moves were driven by the realization that some remote regions of Afghanistan, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountains that range through the northeast, were not going to be brought under government control anytime soon. "Personally, I think I am being realistic about this," said Maj. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan. "I have more combat power than my predecessors did, but I won't be as spread out. . . . This is all about freeing up some forces so I can get them out more among the people."

The changes are in line with McChrystal's confidential assessment of the war, which urges U.S. and NATO forces to "initially focus on critical high-population areas that are contested or controlled by insurgents."

I'm not actually just going to type "gotcha!" with a smirk on my face to conclude this post. McChrystal has certainly not abandoned COIN and yes, protecting the population is obviously the key behind this move. But to write a column suggesting that the only appropriate strategy is to deploy American forces to sparsely populated ares and "remote valleys" only days after the U.S. senior military commander in Afghanistan has announced his intent to pull forces from such places, is just sheer idiocy. Nonetheless, I do not expect Brooks' next column to acknowledge this change in events, or more absurdly, call out McChrystal for not understanding the importance of deploying American soldiers to remote places where they both fail to protect Afghan civilians and are more easily killed.

Wednesday Morning News of Note

Some things you should be reading on this Wednesday, the first full day of Fall:

1. You may have heard recently that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, issued a dire report indicating that the security situation in Afghanistan is certain to deteriorate without the infusion of thousands more U.S. and NATO troops. The report makes clear how much the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated already (conditions which have prompted McChrystal to consolidate American forces in more populous areas) and that, combined with the sagging legitimacy of the Karzai government in the wake of fraudulent elections, apparently has the Obama administration considering a widespread shift in strategy:

Mr. Obama met in the Situation Room with his top advisers on Sept. 13 to begin chewing over the problem, said officials involved in the debate. Among those on hand were Mr. Biden; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; James L. Jones, the national security adviser; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

They reached no consensus, so three or four more such meetings are being scheduled. “There are a lot of competing views,” said one official who, like others in this article, requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden’s suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.

The Americans would accelerate training of Afghan forces and provide support as they took the lead against the Taliban. But the emphasis would shift to Pakistan. Mr. Biden has often said that the United States spends something like $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 in Pakistan, even though in his view the main threat to American national security interests is in Pakistan.

Of course we've been wondering since earlier this year if a shift in Afghanistan is warranted, though liberals remain divided on the issue (the opinion of conservatives is typical, thoughtless and so pointless to examine.) Is such a shift around the corner? We'll see.

2. The Obama administration is considering limiting use of the State Secrets privilege:

The new policy, which could be announced as early as Wednesday, would require approval by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. if military or espionage agencies wanted to assert the privilege to withhold classified evidence sought in court or to ask a judge to dismiss a lawsuit at its onset.

“The department is adopting these policies and procedures to strengthen public confidence that the U.S. government will invoke the privilege in court only when genuine and significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake and only to the extent necessary to safeguard those interests,” says a draft of a memorandum from Mr. Holder laying out the policy and obtained by The New York Times.

[...]

Leading Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have filed bills that would restrict how the privilege could be used. The Obama administration has not taken a position on those bills, but the new policy, which is intended to rein in use of the privilege by erecting greater internal checks and balances against abuse, could blunt momentum in Congress to pass legislation.

The bills would encourage courts to find a way for lawsuits to continue, even if particular documents or information must be withheld. They would also require judges to take a more searching look at executive branch claims that certain evidence cannot be used in court because its disclosure would result in a “significant harm” to national security.

That requirement would be tougher than the current legal standard, which comes from a 1953 Supreme Court decision approving the withholding of information whenever there is “reasonable danger” of exposing information that should not be divulged for national security reasons.

The real problem of course is that since that 1953 decision, courts have held that it's the government, not a federal judge, who decides whether there exists a "reasonable danger" of exposing delicate national security information. This new policy doesn't change that, so I'm not entirely sure how useful it will be. Glenn Greenwald has hammered the Obama administration on this and other national security policies; I expect him to have quite a bit to say about this announcement.

3. And look who's coming around now:

Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, two of the nation’s biggest banks, announced plans on Tuesday to drastically overhaul their debit card programs by lowering or eliminating fees, changing the way they credit transactions and allowing customers to opt out of overdraft protection.

The moves come as lawmakers and regulators in Washington push proposals to reform what critics say are excessive charges of which consumers are unaware. The penalties, known as overdraft fees, bring the banking industry tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.

Bank of America said it would allow current customers to turn off the ability to spend when their account hits zero, starting Oct. 19. Next June, the bank plans to limit the number of times each year that current customers can overdraw their accounts when using a debit card at a store. It will let new customers choose whether they want overdraft protection when they are opening their account.

Chase plans to eliminate by the first quarter of next year a common industry practice that enraged many consumers. Instead of lumping a day’s worth of debit card and A.T.M. transactions together and then processing the highest amounts first — a practice that has caused large numbers of consumers to overdraw more quickly and pay more fees — it will credit the transactions chronologically. Chase also plans to allow customers to opt out of overdraft coverage.

I'm sure this has absolutely nothing to do with the extremely bad press these banks have gotten as of late, or the fact that Congress is chomping at the bit to regulate them. In all seriousness though, I'm sure lobbyists for the banks are right now pointing out to members of Congress how legislation is now completely unnecessary because the Banks are taking steps to regulate themselves. To which I say, screw that, pass the legislation.

Afghanistan

Glenn Greenwald, at his mocking finest:

But at least we paid lip service to (even while often violating) the notion that wars should be waged only when absolutely imperative to defending the nation against imminent threats. We largely don't even bother to do that any more. Consider today's defense of the war in Afghanistan from the war-loving Washington Post Editorial Page. Here's their argument for why we should continue to wage war there:

Yet if Mr. Obama provides adequate military and civilian resources, there's a reasonable chance the counterinsurgency approach will yield something better than stalemate, as it did in Iraq.

Does that sound like a stirring appeal to urgent national security interests? Why should we continue to kill both Afghan civilians and our own troops and pour billions of dollars into that country indefinitely? Because "there's a reasonable chance the counterinsurgency approach will yield something better than stalemate." One can almost hear the yawning as the Post Editors call for more war.

Ouch. Of course, he's right. This exactly the sort of open-ended language of commitment that plagues our discourse regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Reasonable chance the counterinsurgency approach will yield something better than stalemate" is a notch above "we can't afford to lose" rhetorically, but it's at the same level logically. What chance is "reasonable"? Eighty percent? Thirty? Any? What "something" is "better than a stalemate"? The Taliban controlling half of Afghanistan? A quarter? Pakistan only? And if you think officials in the Obama administration are talking in more concrete terms than this, then you my friend are naive. This is how we've been fighting wars since Korea; the "pure" 1991 Gulf War was the exception, not the rule.

And as has become depressingly common, an airstrike in Afghanistan has killed at least eighty civilians, all to achieve the dubious military goal of blowing up a couple of stolen fuel trucks. Spencer Ackerman is wondering if we even know how to achieve specific goals in Afghanistan such as not turning Afghans against us:

McChrystal has already restricted airstrikes in Afghanistan. This one still happened. And it caused a civilian death count that, if history is any guide, will be revised upward. After each of these airstrikes, there are lots of promises to fix what went wrong, and still this one happened. Any military commander will say that he or she can’t completely rule out the tool of airstrikes. But if avoiding civilian casualties and protecting the population from violence really is the preeminent goal of the Afghanistan war, and if McChrystal believes that Afghan sentiment really is strategically decisive, then as absurd as it may seem, the logic of counterinsurgency really does point to ruling them out. There is no reset button to be hit on an eight-year war. The legacy of years of U.S. and NATO airstrikes and the civilian casualties they have caused hovers like a shadow over today’s Kunduz attack.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not out on the war...yet. But I am out on the sort of counterinsurgency "strategy" that relies on airstrikes to achieve minor military victories, and I'm definitely out on editors and pundits encouraging us to remain committed to Afghanistan because there's some chance that something might still go right in the end. Soldiers should be made to die for less fuzzy goals.

U.S. to shift Aghanistan drug policy

Good news:

The United States announced a new drug policy Saturday for opium-rich Afghanistan, saying it was phasing out funding for eradication efforts and using the money for drug interdiction and alternate crop programs instead.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, told The Associated Press that eradication programs weren't working and were only driving farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, where he said it had been warmly received, particularly by the United Nations.

The previous policy was always short-sighted and more or less put our stupid war on drugs before the war in Afghanistan. It didn't reduce significantly the cash flow to the Taliban and just gave Afghans another reason to hate the U.S. for destroying their livelihoods.

Maybe along with an increased force and a real policy to reduce civilian casualties, we might actually salvage our efforts there.

Legislative Update XVI

The House of Representatives passed a bill tripling aid to Pakistan, including both economic aid and military aid (with conditions that require the Obama administration to certify that Pakistan remains committed to combating terrorist groups) to help the national battle extremism on more than one front. The House also passed the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act to enhance the U.S. foreign policy efforts of the State Department and the Peace Corps.

Also, the House passed "cash for clunkers" legislation that would offer up to $4,500 in cash rebates to help people who trade in cars or SUVs with a combined fuel economy of 18 miles per gallon or less to buy newer, more fuel efficient vehicles (I may take them up on that!).

And lawmakers who steer money and contracts to favored companies, and receive campaign contributions in return for funding for pet projects in the form of earmarks, might face a House ethics committee investigation.

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill (even our two Republicans Senators here in Texas voted for it!) allowing the FDA to regulate tobacco products - allowing the agency to regulate nicotine content and advertising gears towards the young. The House already passed a similar bill, but they will pass the Senate version Friday to get it quickly to President Obama's desk for signature. Unsurprisingly, many of the Senators voting "nay" receive a lot of tobacco lobby money...

The Senate also confirmed by unanimous consent the nominations of Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to be the next commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan and Navy Adm. James Stavridis to be commander of U.S. forces in Europe and the top NATO commander.

UPDATE: The House and Senate have reached compromises to give retroactive bonuses to those in the military under "stop-loss" orders and on several issues in the held-up war funding bill.

More on the Afghanistan Peace Talks

The New York times has a follow-up on earlier reports that the representatives of the Taliban are engaged in peace talks with the Karzai government in Afghanistan:

The talks, if not the withdrawal proposals, are being supported by the Afghan government. The Obama administration, which has publicly declared its desire to coax “moderate” Taliban fighters away from armed struggle, says it is not involved in the discussions and will not be until the Taliban agree to lay down their arms. But nor is it trying to stop the talks, and Afghan officials believe they have tacit support from the Americans.

The discussions have so far produced no agreements, since the insurgents appear to be insisting that any deal include an American promise to pull out — at the very time that the Obama administration is sending more combat troops to help reverse the deteriorating situation on the battlefield. Indeed, with 20,000 additional troops on the way, American commanders seem determined to inflict greater pain on the Taliban first, to push them into negotiations and extract better terms. And most of the initial demands are nonstarters for the Americans in any case.

[...]

While the talks have been under way for months, they have accelerated since Mr. Obama took office and have produced more specific demands, the Afghan intermediaries said.

The Taliban leaders, through their spokesman, and those of other armed groups publicly deny that they are involved in any negotiations. But several Afghans here and in Pakistan say they have been talking directly to the Taliban leadership group headed by Mullah Muhammad Omar, the movement’s secretive founder. The council is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Discussions have also been held with representatives of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a longtime warlord with a record of extreme brutality, and with Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose guerrilla army is based in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Mr. Haqqani’s group is also known for its ruthlessness and for sending suicide bombers into Afghanistan.

“America cannot win this war, and the Taliban cannot win this war,” Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador and one of the intermediaries, said in an interview. “I have delivered this message to the Taliban.”

The talks under way now appear to be directed not at individual bands of antigovernment insurgents — the strategy suggested by President Obama — but at the leaders of the large movements.

In other words, this is a "grand" peace, not a strategy to peel away isolated Taliban leaders from the movement in general. Can it work? Who knows? But it gives hope for the prospect of peace in Afghanistan.

Bad Excuses for Wars

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I am not opposed to our military presence in Afghanistan. If anything, the three of us have been arguing (in futility, largely) since about the beginning of the Iraq war that Afghanistan requires more military, economic and diplomatic attention. But neither have we been dismissive or unconcerned about the very real possibility that nothing we do in Afghanistan may be enough to contain the resurgent Taliban. Looking at the ever-increasing odds of failure with a clear eye, having written about Afghanistan many, many times, we conclude that more can still be done to secure Afghanistan (and now hopefully Pakistan) against the threat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. However, no such thoughtfulness is apparently required on the part of Richard Cohen, who pens the 100,000th or so column in the last six years by a media pundit who acknowledges the difficulty of winning in Afghanistan but argues that we must stay the course or very, very bad and awful things will happen:

The challenge for President Obama is to explain to the American people why Afghanistan and potentially Pakistan are worth the lives of yet more Americans. So far, Obama has stuck pretty close to the message that he is determined to eliminate al-Qaeda -- and more power to him. But that is too little, too late. The Taliban has already spilled over the border. A bit of nation-building is what Pakistan needs. That will take time -- considerably more than the year Obey and others are willing to grant.

The relevant history here may not be Vietnam at all. It could be World War I. The assassination of a single man somehow set off a chain reaction in which millions were killed and, after a pause, it all resumed under a different name: World War II. (Books are still being written about the cause of World War I.) Now, though, the stakes are so much greater. The region is a nuclear neighborhood, a pharmacy for nuclear addicts with Pakistan choosing to add even more weapons instead of -- just an idea -- opening some schools. The region is roiled. The only constant is enmity.

The critics of Obama's policy for the region are not easily dismissed. Vietnam has its lessons; Iraq, too. What's more, they have their cumulative effect. A kind of national weariness has set in. Why us? Why is it that Americans are always asked to risk their lives? Where the hell is everyone else?

These are hard questions to answer. But an even harder question could someday come after a nuclear catastrophe when people demand to know why nothing much was done to head it off. The answer cannot be that our year was up.

Do you follow? Even though there are "hard questions", we don't need to worry too much about the actual answers to those questions (beyond a little column-ish hand wringing and acknowledgment of the hardness of the questions) because the hardest question of all would be posed by a little crying American child asking why we let Al Qaeda nuke New York or something.

I give Cohen points for trying, in that he at least acknowledges that there are no good answers to the hard questions (but I also deduct points for bad questions like "Where the hell is everyone else? The answer is, getting killed in Afghanistan too.) But we've seen quite pointedly the results of the "there's a 5% chance that this very, very awful thing could happen if we don't go to war so of course all serious people should acknowledge that we must go to war (and don't worry about the odds of bad things happen because we go to war because those things aren't as awful as the 5% chance very, very awful thing)" school of foreign policy. That's not a serious approach to foreign policy and warmaking and quite honestly, it's annoying to have to read in major newspapers (over and over again) columns written by people like Cohen, who I'm sure was grimacing and grimly stroking his beard as he came to the necessary conclusion that we must forever fight in Afghanistan if we are to prevent certain catastrophe, after which he submitted the column to his editors and then went out and had a latte or something. 

"Pakistan on the Brink"

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid warns that Pakistan "now reaching a tipping point" between an effective resistance of the "Talibanization" of the country, and collapse and chaos. The entire article is a good overview of the present situation and how Pakistan arrived to this point, but there are a few passages that deserve highlighting. While many fear that the Pakistani government will be overthrown by the Taliban, Rashid says that Pakistani is in reality facing the danger of a permanent state of anarchy and the Pakistani government is largely paralyzed in the face of the danger:

Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.

In northern Pakistan, where the Taliban and their allies are largely in control, the situation is critical. State institutions are paralyzed, and over one million people have fled their homes. The provincial government of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) has gone into hiding, and law and order have collapsed, with 180 kidnappings for ransom in the NWFP capital of Peshawar in the first months of this year alone. The overall economy is crashing, with drastic power cuts across the country as industry shuts down. Joblessness and lack of access to schools among the young are widespread, creating a new source of recruits to the Taliban. Zar-dari and Gilani have spent the past year battling their political rivals instead of facing up to the Taliban threat and the economic crisis.

Much press is focused on the threat that the Taliban will somehow get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons. While this possibility cannot be completely dismissed, it seems silly to focus on that possibility over the very tangible catastrophe of Pakistan's slow descent into chaos. We should be under no illusions that we can or should secure Pakistan against their own domestic insurgencies, but we do have to understand that a failed Pakistani state will result in a level of danger to us that we haven't seen since prior to 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan:

The Taliban in Swat quickly grew to more than eight thousand fighters, including hundreds of foreign and al-Qaeda militants, seasoned Pashtun fighters from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and extremist groups from Punjab and Karachi. They invited Osama bin Laden to come live in Swat. In fact al-Qaeda and the Taliban had targeted Swat three years earlier in their search for a safe, secure sanctuary that would be at a good distance from the Afghan border, with better facilities for an insurgency than FATA, as well as far away from the US drone missiles that have been falling on the tribal areas, killing Taliban leaders. 

If al Qaeda has their way then, Swat will become the sort of safe haven that they haven't operated in since the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. This is by far the greatest danger that the deteriorating situation present to us. Naturally, if the Pakistani army is engaged in combat with the Taliban al Qaeda will not be entirely free to plot attacks against the West, and much of their effort may be focused on launching suicide attacks and other terrorist operations on parts of Pakistan still controlled by the government. But they will be freer to operate than at any time since the Taliban fell and barring operations on the part of our military deeper into Pakistan than anything we've seen before, they will be entirely free of harassment by our forces.

Rashid also answers the question of why Pakistan is so much worse off than Afghanistan, which faces a related Taliban insurgency:

The insurgency in Pakistan is perhaps even more deadly than the one in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there is only one ethnic group strongly opposing the government—the Pashtuns who make up the Taliban—and so fighting is largely limited to the south and east of the country, while the other major ethnic groups in the west and the north are vehemently anti-Taliban. Moreover, more than a few Pashtuns and their tribal leaders support the Karzai government. In Pakistan, the Pashtun Taliban are now being aided and abetted by extremists from all the major ethnic groups in Pakistan. They may not be popular but they generate fear and terror from Karachi on the south coast to Peshawar on the Afghan border.

In Afghanistan the state is weak and unpopular but it is heavily backed by the US and NATO military presence. In addition, the Afghans have several things going for them. They are tired of nearly thirty years of war; they have already suffered under a Taliban regime and don't want a return of Taliban rule; they crave development and education; and they are fiercely patriotic, which has kept the country together despite the bloodshed. The Afghans have always refused to see their country divided.

In Pakistan there is no such broad national identity or unity.

Rashid notes the domestic insurgency in Baloch, where separatists are looking to break away from Pakistan, and the growing divide between rich and poor, are divisions that the Taliban are capable of exploiting. Decades of war and an eagerness for peace helped fuel the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Social disunity and division may do the same for the Pakistani Taliban.

Rashid arrives at this conclusion:

The last two years have bought some hope in the growth of the middle class, an articulate and increasingly influential civil society made up partly of urban professionals and publicly involved women. Most Pakistanis are not Islamic extremists and believe in moderate and spiritual forms of Islam, including Sufism. However, Pakistan is now reaching a tipping point. There is a chronic failure of leadership, whether by civilian politicians or the army. President Zardari's decision to invade Swat in early May came only after pressure was applied by the Obama administration and the army and the government had been left with no other palatable options. But with the Taliban opening new fronts, it will soon become impossible for the army to respond to the multiple threats it faces on so many geographically distant battlefields. The Taliban's campaigns to assassinate politicians and administrators have demoralized the government.

The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot recreate the state's will to resist the Taliban and pursue more effective policies. Pakistan desperately needs international aid, but its leaders must first define a strategy that demonstrates to its own people and other nations that it is willing to stand up to the Taliban and show the country a way forward.

In other words, there's almost nothing we can do about the worsening security situation in Pakistan without more decisive action by the Pakistani government. Despite all of our weapons and money, the fate of Pakistan is almost entirely out of our hands.

The New Guy

Perchance by now you've heard of the ouster of the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernen, in favor of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a favorite of CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, who it is hoped will bring a new and innovative approach to the war in Afghanistan. Certainly we will need the military's best and brightest if we hope to have a chance to stabilize Afghanistan, but McChrystal's resume is somewhat blemished for accusations of detainee abuse made against his soldiers during his time in Iraq, and his involvement in the Pat Tillman cover-up. McChrystal's appointment as commander of the Afghanistan forces must be confirmed by the Senate. While I think we're behind the curve in Afghanistan, I'm also skeptical that a mere change in personnel is going to dramatically improve our progress against the Taliban, so I don't see why now isn't as good a time as any to get to the bottom of McChrystal's knowledge and or involvement of detainee abuse and the Tillman cover-up.

Highlighting Professionalism in the U.S. Military

Now I don't link to these stories to bag on the military, so much as I link to them to bag on the right-winger Christians and bigots in the military. Item #1:

After posting his resume on online job site CareerBuilder.com, Corey Andrew was contacted by an army recruiter about a job.

The email exchange between Andrew and the recruiter, Sergeant Marcia Ramode, quickly turned hostile when Andrew revealed that he was a homosexual.

"You are definitely unqualified," wrote Ramode. "Now take you gay self [sic] back to someplace else we do not tolerate gay people like you in any part of the military."

"Her response was appalling," Andrew told CNN.

The email exchange grew more heated, with Ramode suggesting that Andrew should, "go back to Africa and do your gay voodoo limbo tango and wango dance."

One reprimand, coming up. And then there are these yahoos:

Al Jazeera has posted a video alleging to show American soldiers trying to proselytize in Afghanistan -- which would be a clear violation of the military code and, potentially, the U.S. Constitution. More from Crooks and Liars here.

[...]

The video shows, among other things, a prayer circle of evangelical soldiers discussing how and whether to distribute a set of bibles in Afghanistan. If the soldiers ended up doing it, that would be a clear violation of military rules and a great way to earn enmity in a crucial corner of the world. But the video doesn't show that. Rather, what it shows is the soldiers talking about whether such behavior would be kosher or not, acknowledging clearly that proselytizing is wrong. One of them wonders aloud whether it's OK to distribute the bibles as "gifts" as a way of getting around the rules, and the prayer leader quickly cuts him off, saying "Alright, let's talk about it. What do you think?" The video shows no conclusion being reached.

One moment that is slightly greater cause for concern (but not necessarily damning) shows Afghanistan's chief of chaplains -- Lt. Col. Gary Hensley -- telling a congregation of military personnel that every Christian is commissioned to be a "witness" that "hunts people for Jesus...get the hound of heaven after 'em so we get 'em in the Kingdom...That's what we do, that's our business!" To those not in the know, this is boilerplate evangelical rhetoric that's to be expected in such a service. The problem is that for soldiers, it's not clear who exactly they should be trying to convert.

So, draw your own conclusions, but let's just say there are many, many Christians who don't see any problem with invading a predominantly Muslim country and then trying to hand out Bibles and convert people.

More Torture Revelations

You may recall that in December, the Senate Armed Services Committee released an executive summary containing the key conclusions of a report the committee authored on the treatment of terrorist suspects in American custody, specifically, the use of torture against those suspect detainees. This evening the Committee has released the full report, which provides more detail than ever about how the methods of torture used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay (and later against detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan) evolved and proliferated. I haven't yet read the full report myself (it totals 232 pages) but already the report is being processed by various media outlets. Time has a relatively short (but informative) summary here, which is as good a place to start as any. But for the best break down of the report I recommend Spencer Ackerman, who explains exactly how officials at the Pentagon "reverse-engineered" techniques first developed to train U.S. military personnel to resist torture, techniques which they then went on to apply detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Throughout it all, it becomes clear that senior Bush administration officials were well aware of what was going on. Says Democrat Carl Levin of the report's conclusions:

“The record established by the Committee’s investigation shows that senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” Levin said. “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

Coincidentally (I presume) the NY Times published an article today which reveals the apparent thoughtlessness with which senior officials of the Bush administration approved these various torture techniques, without-amazingly-ever being quite aware that many of these techniques were descended from methods that the Chinese used to extract false confessions from American prisoners during the Korean War:

Overwhelmed with reports of potential threats and anguished that the agency had failed to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet and his top aides did not probe deeply into the prescription Dr. Mitchell so confidently presented: using the SERE tactics on Qaeda prisoners.

A little research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

[...]

One former senior intelligence official who played an important role in approving the interrogation methods said he had no idea of the origins and history of the SERE program when the C.I.A. started it in 2002.

“The agency was counting on the Justice Department to fully explore all the factors contributing to a judgment about legality, including the surrounding history and context,” the official said.

But it was the C.I.A. that was proposing the methods, and John Yoo, the Justice Department official who was the principal author of a secret August 2002 memorandum that authorized the interrogation program, was mostly interested in making a case that the president’s wartime powers allowed for the harsh tactics.

In other words, the OLC gave the CIA exactly what they wanted, which was basically permission to employ whatever techniques they thought they needed to against the detainees. I think it's appropriate to excerpt this snippet from Brian Tamahana's post regarding the circular reasoning of the OLC memos:

Here is the circularity in the analysis: Time and again the OLC memos conclude that the use of these interrogation techniques do not amount to the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental suffering (the torture standard) based upon the CIA’s own finding that these techniques don’t cross that line. But that is precisely the legal question the CIA (purportedly) is posing to the OLC: Do the interrogation techniques violate the anti-torture statute?

Presumably, the OLC cannot answer the legal question by relying upon the CIA’s own determination that these techniques do not violate the torture statute. That is, however, exactly the analysis in the torture memos. This circularity is explicit in the following passage (March 10 memo), opining on the combination of sleep deprivation with other techniques:

This possibility [that sleep deprivation reduces pain tolerance] suggests that use of extended sleep deprivation in combination with other techniques might be more likely than the separate use of the techniques to place the detainee in a state of severe physical distress and, therefore, that the detainee might be more likely to experience severe physical suffering. However, you [CIA] have informed us that the interrogation techniques at issue would not be used during a course of extended sleep deprivation with such frequency and intensity as to induce in the detainee a persistent condition of extreme physical distress such as may constitute ‘severe physical suffering’ within the meaning of sections 2340-2340A.

To summarize the above passage: the OLC concluded—as a legal matter—that the CIA’s combination of techniques does not violate the torture statute based upon the CIA’s assurance that it combines the techniques in a way that does not violate the torture statute. It doesn’t get more circular than that.

Of course, this was all possible because the conclusion was already pre-ordained; the OLC's job was merely to find a way to "legalize" it all. The Bush administration "knew" that torture would work, so there was really no need to debate the issue; especially not with CIA Director George Tenet running around claiming that Al Qaeda was getting ready to deply biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. They just needed the methods, and they needed somebody to say that it was legal to employ them. And they got both, without too much trouble, and without any messy inquiry into whether the approved techniques were actually useful in getting real information out of detainees (as opposed to just convincing them to say whatever the interrogator wanted to hear)or whether there was actually any legal precedent that argued against the use of torture.

I think it's also interesting to note from both Spencer Ackerman and the NY Times' stories how eager some SERE interrogators and psychologists were to get in on the action, only to balk at the various methods being employed in the coming months and years. But the genie was already out of the bottle at that point, and the methods they had helped to devise were already being employed in places as far away as Abu Ghraib and Bagram and, presumably, the CIA's secret detention facilities the world over.

If this can be easily summarized in anyway, it would be to say that Pentagon staffers, members of the military, and agents and contractors for the CIA and the DOD, put much thought, time and consideration into the exact methods of torture they would employ against recalcitrant detainees. Senior members of the Bush administration on the other hand, did not. And thus were terrorists suspects being detained indefinitely in various facilities and black sites around the world tortured in the name of national security. 

Backfiring

In February the government of Pakistan signed a truce with Taliban militants in the Swat Valley, in a move that it was hoped would help to split Baitullah Mehsud's Taliban from the Taliban of Maulana Fazlullah, who supposedly was more interested in imposing Sharia law upon the Swat than imposing it on the rest of Pakistan. Unfortunately, things haven't quite shaken out that way, and now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Swat is becoming a safe haven for Taliban militants who are opposed to the Pakistani government:

Thousands of Islamist militants are pouring into Pakistan's Swat Valley and setting up training camps here, quickly making it one of the main bases for Taliban fighters and raising their threat to the government in the wake of a controversial peace deal.

President Asif Ali Zardari effectively ratified the government's deal with the Taliban Monday by signing a bill that imposes Islamic law in Swat, a key plank of the accord, hours after legislators overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging it. Pakistani officials have touted the deal, reached in February, as a way to restore peaceful order in the bloodied region -- which lies just a few hours' drive from the capital -- and halt the Taliban's advance.

Yet a visit to the Taliban-controlled valley here found mounting evidence that the deal already is strengthening the militants as a base for war. U.S. officials contend the pact has given the Taliban and its allies in al Qaeda and other Islamist groups an advantage in their long-running battle against Pakistan's military.

The number of militants in the valley swelled in the months before the deal with the Taliban was struck, and they continue to move in, say Pakistani and U.S. officials. They now estimate there are between 6,000 and 8,000 fighters in Swat, nearly double the number at the end of last year.

And as the NY Times reports, these militants do not seem to be content to merely rule the Swat, and are allying with other Pakistani militants to spread violence to the heart of Pakistan:

Taliban insurgents are teaming up with local militant groups to make inroads in Punjab, the province that is home to more than half of Pakistanis, reinvigorating an alliance that Pakistani and American authorities say poses a serious risk to the stability of the country.

The deadly assault in March in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, against the Sri Lankan cricket team, and the bombing last fall of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the national capital, were only the most spectacular examples of the joint campaign, they said.

Now police officials, local residents and analysts warn that if the government does not take decisive action, these dusty, impoverished fringes of Punjab could be the next areas facing the insurgency. American intelligence and counterterrorism officials also said they viewed the developments with alarm.

“I don’t think a lot of people understand the gravity of the issue,” said a senior police official in Punjab, who declined to be idenfitied because he was discussing threats to the state. “If you want to destabilize Pakistan, you have to destabilize Punjab.”

Pakistani Intelligence has long played the Taliban to their advantage in their efforts to influence Afghanistan and bleed off their own homegrown militants. It would seem now that the situation is completely out of their control.

Legislative Update X

The House of Representatives and Senate passed nonbinding budget plans that closely mirrored President Obama's proposals (there were some modest cuts) and will offer guidance on future legislation (though not a planned health care overhaul). However, the Senate passed an amendment calling for a lowered estate tax. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the budget outline, but more interestingly, 38 House Republicans voted against a GOP alternative.

The House passed a bill that would allow the FDA to regular tobacco. Under the bill, the FDA would be granted sweeping powers to regulate the production and marketing of tobacco products. The agency would be able to regulate nicotine levels, and makers of tobacco products would face tough new marketing and advertising restrictions. The bill now goes to the Senate.

The Senate confirmed Karl Eikenberry as ambassador to Afghanistan.

War

Once again, the Boston Globe brings us astonishing pictures from Afghanistan, and reminders of the terrible price our military families will pay for our security.

Morning Links

1. Apparently all it takes to get published is 1) a title that makes an over-the-top claim 2) a thesis based on the most conventional of wisdom and the most superficial analysis of modern affairs and 3) a track record of publishing similar books.

2. Iran offers to help in Afghanistan, pledging reconstruction aid and assistance in stopping the drug trade.

3. Our ridiculous policies towards Cuba are finally being questioned on the Hill.

4. Samueal Johnson says that America cannot recover until the oligarchy that controls the financial sector is broken.

5. Are Taliban militants in Pakistan extending their reach beyond the tribal areas?

6. Iraq: another suicide bombing in Mosul. Iraqis fear that the present "peace" is merely the eye of the storm, and some are not prepared to lay their weapons down.

7. Israel closes its investigation into claims of atrocities in Gaza.

Saturday Links

1. More on studies showing that children do not in fact make people happier. I'm not sure how much I can add to what I said last year; children actually make some people happier (as opposed to making them think they're happier) but yes, children also make a lot of people less happy. I don't know why we're pitter-pattering around the obvious truth, which is that there are a lot of people who should never have kids. That does not mean that the people who are having kids are falling prey to a "noble lie."  

2. Senate Democrats are considering increasing funding to the Legal Services Corporation, which in turn funds legal aid programs across the country. The poor in our country are in desperate need of adequate legal representation. This won't provide it, but more money is always better than less.

3. Tribal disenrollments over gambling money? Gambling has benefited Native tribes immensely, but it's hardly made some tribal members less selfish or short-sighted.

4. Disappointingly, the Obama administration indicates no interest in settling the over a decade long case against the Federal government over misappropriated trust funds. The the Federal government's ineptitude has long been highlighted by this case, officials in the Interior Dept. apparently believe that more time in court is the way to go.

5. Afghanistan: Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, says we need a "complete rethink" of drug policy towards Afghanistan. No ideas what this means yet, but it's better than the more of the same approach that's failed so far. Fred Kaplan breaks down the Obama administration's war plan in Afghanistan; "counter terrorism plus" but again, nobody seems to know what success in Afghanistan will entail.

Early Afternoon Links

For your reading pleasure:

1. Obama's plan for Afghanistan: once again, the key appears to be figuring out what an administration means by "benchmarks."

2. Pakistan: suicide bomber kills upwards of fifty people in a mosque in Peshawar. Part of Baitullah Mehsud's campaign against the Pakistani government?

3. Iraq: U.S. forces are largely withdrawing from the cities as agreed upon, but may remain behind in areas where sectarian violence is still widespread, like Mosul.

4. Building nanobots...with DNA. Incredible.

5. How health care reform benefits small businesses.

6. Lawyer's should not be judged for who they represent...except when they worked for the tobacco companies, and were balls-deep in the tobacco companies' wrong-doing.

More Recommended Reading

End of the day links for your edification:

1. John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, in which Atwood takes something of a meta-view of debt. In essence our profligate ways with our own money reflect our attitudes towards the capital that is our planet, but that the Earth will not be so kind as the present crisis when it's time to pay it back.

2. U.S. officials accuse Pakistan's ISI of supporting Taliban attacks in Afghanistan in a very direct manner, with ISI agents going so far as to strategize with the Taliban about attacks on American forces. Meanwhile, former members of the Taliban say that talks with the Taliban are a possible route to peace, though one says of American forces: "They have a right to ensure that there is no danger to them from Afghanistan...[but] That is the limit of their rights in this country."

3. An aging Dalai Lama concedes that his strategy of engaging the Chinese leadership on Tibet has failed not only to gain traction for Tibetan autonomy, but to slow down the Chinese makeover of the country. China's response to any burgeoning demonstrations of Tibetan independence is met only with repression and violence, but alternative strategies are wanting.

4. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister-delegate, insists that Israel is a "partner for peace" while at the same time he's making backdoor deals to expand Israeli settlements in a particular part of the West Bank, a move that the U.S. government has long opposed as an impediment to peace.

5. In an op-ed for the WSJ, three former Presidents of Latin American countries argue that the "war on drugs" is a dismal failure, and it's time for a new course of action.

News of the Day

Things I'm reading about, but don't have much input on right now.

1) The Obama administration's bank rescue plan: Wall Street loves it. Liberal pundits hate it. Between the two whose opinion are you inclined to value? Yeah, me too.

2) Iraq: I missed my chance to post on the sixth anniversary of the invasion on Friday, but I found this article on the vast disconnect between what the Iraqis think of the war and what American perceive from half a world away, starting with the very name of the conflict, as very instructive. And whereas the war seems to have dropped off the radar screens of most Americans, Iraqis are worried that the conflict is nowhere near being played out. They have reason to be worried; the insurgency has never been entirely stamped out in Mosul, an ethnic flashpoint, a streak of large-scale suicide bombings has erupted since the beginning of the month, and Sunni fighters are fuming over what they see as the Iraq government's broken promise to employ them. The Iraq war is far from over. 

3) Afghanistan: the Afghan government has opened up negotiations with the branch of the Taliban commanded by Jallaludin Haqqani. President Obama, appearing on "60 Minutes", stated clearly that “Making sure that Al Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests and our allies" is our nation's number one priority in Afghanistan.

"Fundamental Question"

Regarding this post yesterday, encouraging signs from the Obama administration:

As part of the same set of decisions, according to senior civilian and military officials familiar with the internal White House debate, Mr. Obama will have to choose from among a range of options for future American commitments to Afghanistan.

His core decision may be whether to scale back American ambitions there to simply assure it does not become a sanctuary for terrorists. “We are taking this back to a fundamental question,” a senior diplomat involved in the discussions said. “Can you ever get a central government in Afghanistan to a point where it can exercise control over the country? That was the problem Bush never really confronted.”

A second option, officials say, is to significantly boost the American commitment to train Afghan troops, with Americans taking on the Taliban with increasing help from the Afghan military. President Bush pursued versions of that strategy, but the training always took longer and proved less successful than plans called for.

A third option would involve devoting full American and NATO resources to a large-scale counterinsurgency effort. But Mr. Obama would be bound to face considerable opposition within NATO, whose leaders he will meet with early next month in Strasbourg, France. At the very time the United States is seeking to expand its presence in Afghanistan, many of the allies are scheduled to leave.

Emphasis mine. Of course this anonymous statement comes in the same article that discusses how administration officials are weighing drone strikes even deeper into Pakistan...but still, at least they're talking a good game.