Dove World Outreach (Bargain) Center

Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. –C.S. Lewis

Without any other background or clues, how does the phrase “Dove World Outreach” hit you? A small percentage of you might guess that those words describe an aggressive marketing campaign for a popular moisturizing soap. That wouldn’t be a bad guess because, it just so happens that, since the 1990’s, Dove soap has grown from a US-only product to one of Unilever’s biggest global brands. Nevertheless, you would be wrong. Similarly, if you have a more metaphorical tendency, you would be wrong if you guessed that “Dove World Outreach” is an international congress of anti-war peace activists. A very few might even venture a guess that DWO has something to do with pigeon racing.

The disquieting truth is that Dove World Outreach is the touchy-feely facade for a suspiciously “for-profit business in tax-exempt clothing” that describes itself as a New Testament Apostolic Church (with one location, worldwide – Gainesville, Florida) that is run more like a cult than a church. DWO might have managed to fly under the radar longer except that its founders and senior pastors, Dr. Terry and Sylvia Jones, like money and attention a little too much for their own good. And so it is that they decided to jump on the Islamaphobia bandwagon and demonstrate their patriotism and devotion to Christian values by announcing their intention to publicly burn a batch of Korans on September 11^th. Dr. Jones is also the author of the treatise Islam is of the Devil and sole source vendor of the spin-off products — Islam is of the Devil t-shirts, baseball caps and coffee mugs.

The shirts were premiered during “Flaunt Your Bigotry in School Day,” in Gainesville, in which parents (pastors and congregants of DWO) sent their kids off to the first day of school decked out in Islam is of the Devil t-shirts. Here’s what that looks like:

Christian Child Abuse

The usual First Amendment brouhaha ensued when the kids were asked to lose/cover up the shirts while in school. When the kids followed the instruction of their loving parents and refused, they were sent home. A bigger and better encore performance was staged the following day; but it appears that the school prevailed, in the long run.

The ACLU expressed their dismay over the sentiment expressed on the shirts but duly filed a lawsuit defending the childrens’ right to wear them under the First Amendment; legal counsel for the school district stated that:

“a school may regulate a student’s free speech rights if the exercise of those rights materially and substantially interferes with maintaining appropriate discipline at school, or if the conduct impinges on the rights of other students.”

The kids will probably outgrow the shirts by the time that debate is sorted out.

* * *

The history of Dove World Outreach is no less colorful. It all starts with a vision (as is so often the case) in which Dr. Terry Jones discovers how very special he is and what God has planned for his own special fellow. Forthwith, Dr Jones picks up his wife and three kids and decamps to Cologne, Germany to carry out his special mission – which Dr. Jones describes as Restore! Rebuild! Destroy!

As with similar missions, down through the ages, not everything went swimmingly for Dr. Jones. No one in the Jones’ entourage spoke a word of German and no one besides Dr. Terry had had a vision or heard from God. An interview printed in the Apostolic magazine The Voice gives some idea of how things went for the Jones family in Cologne:

THE VOICE: How would you describe the spiritual opposition to Christianity in Germany? What is the spiritual climate like there?

DR. JONES: I would say the opposition to Christianity in Germany is nothing we have ever experienced in the States. Because of the history of Germany I believe it’s easy to understand the opposition to Christianity in Germany as very violent. We have received here a lot of persecution, whether it be from the government, the news media, the school system, the city itself. I would say the spiritual climate and opposition to Christianity in Germany is one that manifests itself in a very violent way. We had a man kill his wife, who was a part of our church, because she had converted to Christianity.

DR. JONES: As I already stated, we have had much opposition, whether it be from parents, the school, the government, the news media, but I believe that probably our biggest opposition has come from the Christians within the community. I believe that has been one of our biggest oppositions through over 24 years of ministry here. Within that time we have never been accepted in the city or with our vision or what we do. I believe that has been one of our biggest oppositions.

OK, let’s back up here a bit the “opposition to Christianity in Germany is very violent” . . . Huh? Perhaps the disconnect here has something to do with one’s definition of “Christianity.” When the Germans invited the Joneses to leave their country it had more to do with things like “tax evasion,” disregard for child labor laws, misuse of church funds, charges of cultism, and lying about the largely decorative use of the “Dr.” prefix that Jones appends to his name and which Germans take rather seriously (and for which he ultimately paid a fine of €3000).

In case anyone finds those rumors hyberbolic or unsubstantiated, Emma Jones, Dr. Terry’s estranged daughter is happy to corroborate and expand upon the sins of the father. Actually, it’s pretty evident from the attention that Jones is getting here in the US, lately, that he has simply moved his religion-for-profit business to Gainesville, FL where, I suppose, he’s expecting a little more in the way of religious tolerance (except for Muslims, of course).

Actually, this Christian scofflaw stance is part and parcel of Jones’ particular brand of Christianity; Jones, like Sarah Palin and growing legions of wealthy, politically connected American conservative Christians are practicing Dominionists who believe that it is their duty to seek influence or control over secular civil government through political action. The goal is either a nation governed by Christians, or a nation governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law.

Once again, in The Voice interview, Jones makes his thoughts on Dominionism pretty clear:

THE VOICE: We are beginning to hear more about the Kingdom and how God has given us dominion. What does it really mean to take dominion?

DR. JONES: I believe that it means something I just mentioned. I believe that taking of dominion obviously includes prayer and spiritual warfare. It obviously does mean the recognizing of the strongholds that hold every nation in bondage. Every nation has its own type of strongholds. In Germany there is very much fear and control. In America a stronghold is rebellion and selfishness. In the ministry area a stronghold is having your own ministry, not willing to submit, not willing to be apart of the team, not willing to give up your benefit for the common church or the calling. I believe taking dominion practically means starting businesses. I believe that it is very important for the church to accumulate as much property and buildings as possible. I believe that dominion means also in the natural that we own and we posses. We do not rent from someone else, we are not renters of a building from a heathen nation or company but we buy and posses our own buildings. With that we are taking dominion. With that we are having a say over that area, what we do inside that building around that building because we own that building. We have taken dominion. We have taken control.

Therefore, it is less than surprising to find Pastor Jones setting up on a tax-exempt 20 acre plot in Gainesville to shepherd his 80-person congregation (which includes four pastoral families). To support his little dominion the pastor peddles his new book, Islam is of the Devil, as well as the associated spinoff products. He accepts cash donations via major credit cards and PayPal. But his real cash cow, here as in Germany, is his for-profit enterprise TSandCompany, which until very recently was a fixture on eBay. The TS is for Terry and Sylvia and that pretty much says it. TSandCompany is/was(?) an ever-growing antiques and vintage furniture company doing business all up and down the US East Coast, complete with showrooms and a fleet of trucks. The real secret of TSandCompany’s success though, is the free-labor provided by church volunteers who do everything from packing, delivering and picking up furniture to collecting food donations from area businesses and even dumpster-diving for discarded packing materials and inventory.

Ex church-members describe 12-14 hour workdays for no pay except room and board on church property which consists of low-income housing bought up by Jones in Gainesville neighborhoods that have seen better days. The Engels, a couple that emigrated from the Jones’ Cologne, said that for more than a year, they lived in an apartment in Pineridge in northwest Gainesville with their two young sons and worked more than 40 hours a week unpaid. The Engels said they didn’t pay rent for their apartment and that all their meals were provided by the church’s Lisa Jones House, which the church describes as an “outreach to the poor” that uses food from the local food bank. I guess if you’re a church member with no income, you qualify.

In an interview with the Gainesville Sun, the Engels described their stay at DWO this way:

“The couple, who were married in the Cologne church, described feeling mental or emotional pressure at the Gainesville church. Jennifer Engel said the pastors tried to convince her that if they left Gainesville to return to Germany, she would be damned.

“It wasn’t until after they left that the Engels say they realized they had been sucked into a rhetoric of preaching that the only way to heaven was to work for the church.”

Terry Jones told The Sun that all employees for TS and Company are church members who volunteer their time. Emma Jones, the pastor’s daughter puts it differently:

“It’s all about how much did you work, how much profit did you bring in,” said Emma Jones, the 29-year-old daughter of Terry Jones and his deceased first wife, Lisa Jones. “He made 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds work 12-hour days.”

Emma Jones said she is speaking out against her father and the church she grew up in with the hope of helping others leave what she calls a “cult” that “forced us with oppression to be obedient.”

* * *

The training ground for DWO’s workforce is something Jones calls Dove World Outreach Academy. The “academy” (with a current enrollment of three) is Sylvia Jones’ “special mission” and, according to information published in February on the academy’s Web site, it is a “training place for loyalty and discipline.”

“The main part of training is, the students live on the (Dove World Outreach Center property), they eat and sleep here, and work in the areas we offer, the (Lisa Jones House), TS and company or Dove Charismatic Ministries, the church,” stated an introduction published in February on the Web site and signed by Sylvia Jones. “Going through the whole process for three years breaks the pride, because the students need to humble themselves not only under God’s mighty hand but under the hand of man as well.”

Not to mention that “it takes a village” to support the Joneses.

The Academy’s “Rule Book” (which has undergone recent revisions like so many other aspects of the “church”) was described thus by the Cologne contingent:

“According to the original rule book, rules for those in the academy – mostly young adults who can be seen on the church property wearing khaki cargo pants as part of their uniform – include being obedient to all commands, asking for permission to talk and using only the academy e-mail account for personal correspondence. In the original rule book, academy attendees also are banned from dining in restaurants or eating sweets and cakes, with weekly weigh-ins to achieve a weight goal.”

“Visits from family and friends are not allowed, and occasions such as weddings, funerals or birthdays are no exception, according to the original rule book.”

According to property tax records pulled by The Sun:

All six properties, four in Phoenix and two in Pineridge, were purchased between March 2006 and August 2007 for a combined $647,500. Financing information for the properties was not immediately available.

Terry and Sylvia Jones also own 4.42 acres of vacant land in Chiefland purchased in 2004 for about $28,000.

The couple purchased a house in Slidell, La., in January 2007 for $303,900.

And they own a condo in the Paradise Island Towers Condo on Treasure Island, which was purchased before Terry Jones’ first wife died.

Terry Jones declined an interview to discuss his property holdings.

* * *

As the Bible says, though, “to everything there is a season” and it looks like the Joneses season might be coming to a close. The church property is listed on the real estate market for $4.2 million, TSand Company suddenly no longer operate on eBay (at least not under that name) but, as recently as this past May, the Joneses were advertising jobs for delivery drivers on ChristianCareerCenter.com

Oddly enough, the final straw seems to have been not the cult mentality, nor the slave labor issue, nor even the anti-Islamic book-burning. It was actually a DWO junior pastor’s rant about an openly homosexual candidate running for mayor of Gainesville that made the walls come tumbling down.

Here’s an account from a web-cached article on an aggregator site:

“In the weeks leading up to the run-off between Lowe and candidate Don Marsh, Dove World posted two videos, one on YouTube and another on the church’s Web site, in which a junior pastor, Wayne Sapp, warned against voting for Lowe, claiming he is “trying to convert Gainesville into Homoville.”

“Here in Gainesville,” Sapp said in the YouTube video, “they’re getting ready to have a run-off election between two candidates, and one of them is openly a homo, gay, fag – whatever you want to call him. We can’t have it.”

“The six-minute video, which was replete with offensive and outrageous rhetoric, was soon removed from YouTube for violating the site’s terms of service, but another appeared on the church’s Web site a few days later, to drive the point home.”

“[Homosexuality] is a sin that leads to hell,” Sapp continued. “[A] public office such as mayor, governor, president, should not be held by such people, because they’re perverts, they’re sexually perverted…. They cannot restrain themselves.”

“Sapp claimed he reached out to more than 100 churches in Gainesville to join the campaign against Lowe. To his disappointment, none would do so.”

On the heels of that tirade, Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Dove World Outreach Center’s violation of its tax-exempt status by getting involved in politics. According to Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, tax-exempt organizations can’t “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.

In the meantime, Pastor Jones told a reporter from The Sun that he believes the church is acting within its constitutional rights. But, as Lynn pointed out, “in fact, tax exemption is extended on a number of conditions, one of which bars intervention in partisan politics. Houses of worship may not endorse or oppose candidates.”

In his letter to the IRS, Lynn stated:

“Dove World Outreach Center,” Lynn continued, “has violated that standard, and its senior pastor admitted it. I urge the Internal Revenue Service to investigate this matter promptly and make certain that the law is enforced.”

Not to be outdone, the Alachua County Property Appraiser is also investigating the church’s exempt status when it comes to property taxes but for other reasons, primarily involving the church’s for-profit operation of TS and Company, which sells furniture through eBay, on the church’s 20-acre property. According to Florida state law, property — regardless of who owns it — is only exempt if it’s used for exempt purposes like holding church services.

One can only hope that DWO’s current problems will serve as a cautionary tale to those Dominionists and other assorted Christian soldiers who don’t take laws and constitutions seriously, let alone ethics, morals or social mores. I wouldn’t count on it, though; people who think that God is talking to them generally express disdain for earthly rules and regs. But at least, maybe the Alachua County Fire Marshall can put the kibosh to the book-burning . . . ?

[tags]Dove World Outreach Center, Dr. Terry Jones, Sylvia Jones, Emma Jones, Wayne Sapp, Gainesville Sun, dominionism, islamaphobia, homophobia, separation of church and state, tex-exempt status, TSandCompany[/tags]

Yesterday the world changed and a new epoch was ushered in with Wikileak’s release of the Afghan War Diary, 2004 – 2010. In case you’ve been vacationing off-planet, Afghan War Diary is a compilation of “raw data” derived from 90,000 leaked ground reports from the war in Afghanistan (approximately 15,000 have been held back for possible redaction before their release). The importance of this event is certainly not that the data uncovers shocking new revelations about how abysmally the war in Afghanistan has been conducted – an epic fail of such proportions is hard to cover up completely no matter how obedient the national media are. The true awesomeness of this development is that, in one brilliant and well-coordinated play, the rules of the game have been changed – forever after – and, not only has the playing field been leveled, it’s been moved out of town – no more home-field advantage.

Part of the genius of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange’s release was his gambit to assure that mainstream media would not obstruct or trivialize the importance of the leak – by giving them the scoop. Wikileaks provided the roughly 91,000 reports dated from January 2004 to December 2009 to three media outlets, The New York Times, the Guardian of London and Der Spiegel of Germany, under agreement to publish their individual coverage simultaneously on Sunday.

The “home team” however seems to be determined to ignore the change in game plan, at least for now. Despite a “heads up” from their loyal friends at The New York Times, the administration’s official flat-footed response was noticeably confused, and confusing. In my opinion, no one did a better job of parsing the White House’ official response than Jay Rosen; here are his reactions posted on NYU’s Pressthink blog:

The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive:

This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to.)

There’s nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm national security?)

Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn’t even try to contact us! (Hold on: you’re hunting the guy down and you’re outraged that he didn’t contact you?)

Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they’re not an objective news source. (So does that mean the documents they published are fake?)

“The period of time covered in these documents… is before the President announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three month policy review and a change in strategy.” (Okay, so now we too know the basis for the President’s decision: and that’s a bad thing?)

A great follow-up (that we’ll never see) from the White House would be a comprehensive analysis of how the “revolutionary Obama” strategy addresses shortcomings in the “lackluster Bush” strategy. For example, to the best of my knowledge, American taxpayers are still underwriting billions of dollars to continue the Sisyphean task of training an Afghan National Police Force.

As Tom Engelhardt put it, recently:

The Pentagon . . . hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police – and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again.

Engelhardt then follows up with the questions that lay bare the Coalition’s utter fecklessness in this endeavor:

“And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisers that money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting. They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.”

“Consider it, then, a modern miracle in reverse that the U.S. has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their war-fighting traditions.”

And if you think the Afghan Police Academy idea is stupid and wasteful, just go read Tom’s entire article describing the US plan to resurrect the Afghan Air Force (as soon as they can learn English) and procure some reconditioned Russian ‘coptors that the Afghans took a shine to in the last war. The timeline for that project? US Air Force personnel: guestimate 2016 – 2018 depending on how well the Afghans take to English, “the official language of the cockpit.” There are 450 US Air Force personnel tasked with this project @ $1 million/year/flight instructor plus, of course, pay and bennies for the Afghan recruits, and let’s not forget procurement and maintenance of the fleet of Russian helicopters – you do the math . . . .

What has changed, recently, was that the new Afghan “police academy” graduates will eventually be dealing with a possible “conflict of interest” with the freshly minted localized militias (that nobody wants to call militias) that Gen. Petraeus is so proud of successfully lobbying for.

Evidently, Catch-22 is alive and well in today’s army . . .

* * *

The Pentagon, for its part, has harrumphed out a hasty announcement that it is launching a “robust probe” of the Wikileaks matter (to differentiate, I suppose, from the “rather lame probes” that it launches in the event of collateral damage leaks). That development is curious in the face of their much ballyhooed apprehension, months ago, of Bradley Manning, an Army information analyst stationed in Iraq (not Afghanistan), charged with leaking classified information to Wikileaks. The Pentagon is acting suspiciously in this, perhaps they know that there are many leaks in their midst, or, maybe they just already know it’s not Manning but it’s good to have a guy in custody.

And the State Department, on the basis of leaked reports that the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI is aiding and abetting the Taliban insurgents, is threatening to take back the $7 billion aid package that it proudly bestowed on Pakistan a few weeks ago, if the ISI doesn’t cut it out. Of course none of this is “news” and Hillary Clinton knew it when she delivered this money bomb on her latest trip. Ah well, it’s taxpayers’ money, there’s more where that came from . . .

* * *

The real importance of this event is so hard to grasp and appreciate fully that it’s going to take some time to digest. If you look hard enough, though, a number of people have noticed and are scratching the surface in credible ways.

The following are excerpts from the first impressions of respected sources on media and the new news ecosystem; taken together, I believe that their comments comprise a cogent analysis of the unprecedented actions taken by Julian Assange and the possible impact that those actions might have on the future of information distribution, transparency and governmental accountability.

From Jay Rosen of NYU’s PressThink blog:

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, ‘They didn’t even contact us!

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.

And I can’t resist including a reader’s comment on Rosen’s article, because it says so much:

we enter an era now where we begin to be conscious of “collective consciousness” and its role as “prime mover” of the “world” and its events …”

analysis of the various parts and components proceeds only fitfully, because we do not yet have a language of whole …

the problem? adjusting to a pre-existing global reality larger than the individual thinking mind can grasp …

consciousness itself, however, has no problem with any of this … it is our limited self-concept that does …

solution? easy. identify with the whole…

inescapable and unavoidable, by the way … not if, but when

Posted by: gregorylent at July 26, 2010 2:56 AM | Permalink

From Alexis Madrigal, senior editor and lead technology writer for TheAtlantic.com:

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. ‘Wikileaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing,’ Times editors said in an online note. ‘The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today.

The New York Times’ David Carr may have nailed the issue when he tweeted that it was the “asymmetries” that Wikileaks introduces into the equation that have the government spooked. An administration official told Politico, ‘[I]t’s worth noting that Wikileaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.’ But the truth is that we don’t really know what Wikileaks is, or what the organization’s ethics are, or why they’ve become such a stunningly good conduit of classified information.

In the new asymmetrical journalism, it’s not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason Wikileaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn’t really matter. Their data is good, and that’s what counts.

From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world. Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret. But that’s what our National Security State does reflexively: it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing. WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall, enabling modest glimpses into what The Washington Post spent last week describing as Top Secret America. The war on WikiLeaks — which was already in full swing, including, strangely, from some who claim a commitment to transparency — will only intensify now. Anyone who believes that the Government abuses its secrecy powers in order to keep the citizenry in the dark and manipulate public opinion — and who, at this point, doesn’t believe that? — should be squarely on the side of the greater transparency which Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes single-handedly, are providing.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40251.html#ixzz0utLuIynG

And finally, for those who claim this is “old news” and “no big deal,” ponder this from Politico:

Whether WikiLeaks uncovered anything new isn’t actually important — it’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country; the media is now focused on Afghanistan, and that makes it a big deal,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on India and Pakistan.

The public is now more skeptical about the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan than they were last week, and that makes it real, said Markey, who was a South Asia analyst during the Bush administration.

[tags]Wikileaks, Afghan War Diary 2004 – 2010, Julian Assange, Alexis Madrigal, Glenn Greenwald, Jay Rosen[/tags]

If you don’t quite recognize the smug little pug in the photo here, don’t feel bad – he’s nobody important and I promise you can go right back to ignoring him as soon as you’re finished reading this post. He’s Dan Gainor, a staffer at the Media Research Center (MRC), and just another member of Brent Bozell’s Cabal of Conservative Wrath. Gainor holds the totally awesome title of MRC Vice President of Business & Culture and The T. Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow. As if that isn’t impressive enough, Gainor has racked up kudos from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich and makes frequent appearances (as an expert witness) on Fox News, the last bastion of fair and balanced news coverage – in the WORLD!

In other words, Gainor is a mainstay on the front lines of the battle against the diabolical lefty-liberal media bias and a modern-day Sir Lancelot of principled, ethical journalism. Gainor’s usual strategy in this noble struggle appears to be a “fight fire with fire” and to root out liberal media bias and plant conservative media bias in its place. Like so many of his colleagues, Gainor fails to see the hypocrisy in this approach and goes on his merry way fairly unnoticed save by those who share his stunted views.

Today, however, Gainor is enjoying his “fifteen minutes of fame” because, yesterday he indulged his inner passive-aggressive child and tweeted this offer (complete with misspelling):

As The Church Lady would say: “Isn’t that special?”

The occasion that so enraged Dan Gainor was Grayson’s speech, in Congress, prior to the vote on the emergency extension of unemployment benefits. Grayson aptly anticipated a GOP united attempt to deny passage and ended his speech with the words “May God have mercy on your souls” if they did that. Grayson’s emotional indictment of obstructive Republicans obviously rubbed Gainor the wrong way; evidently the GOP is feeling a little proprietary about political grandstanding these days, since it has become their sole contribution to the legislative process.

When a fellow journalist twittered anxiously over the notion of publicly soliciting violence, Gainor backed off just a smidge, said it was all in jest, but still allowed that if it happened he’d “love to see a video of it.”

Ah, that classic and classy conservative sense of humor . . .

For his part, Rep. Grayson (who is twice the man that Gainor is – in size and other things that matter) brushed the silly little weenie aside with a reminder that “I hit back.” Put that in your video, Gainor. Ah, but then, I’m forgetting, this is an arch-conservative – he doesn’t do his own intimidation, he pays someone else to do his dirty work. He doesn’t get up in Congressional representatives or fellow journalist’s faces when he doesn’t like how they conduct themselves, he writes smarmy, whiny little rants from the safety of Fort Conservative on the Potomac.

In a recent lamentation about journalism going to hell in a handbasket, Gainor offered this little gem in a Congressional hearing:

“The Society of Professional Journalists, to which I belong, has a detailed Code of Ethics. At its heart, it says journalists should provide “a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.” They do neither. It’s fitting, then, in a hearing to discuss the “diversity of voices,” that everyone here grasp a key point. Diversity of voices in print isn’t about news, it’s fiction.”

Fair enough. Here’s a random samling of Gainor’s recent contributions to the world of professional journalism . . . you be the judge:

In the lead-up to the recent World Cup, Gainor offered this tidbit about the politics of soccer:

“Soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman’s sport, the left is pushing [soccer] in schools across the country.”

Gainor must have impressed himself with that stupefying insight because he pulled it out of his bag tricks while visiting his conserva-buddy, G. Gordon Liddy on his radio program (June 10, 2010), and added further insight, while he was on a roll:

“the problem here is, soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman’s sport” and that “the left is pushing it in schools across the country.” He added: “generally football games in this country don’t devolve into riots or wars.” He later added that the sport of soccer “is being sold” as necessary due to the “browning of America.”

Charming . . .

* * *

Here’s a little report from Media Matters on Gainor’s crusade against Dave Weigel:

“From Politico, in an article about David Weigel’s resignation from the WashPost, where he wrote about the conservative movement [emphasis added]:”

“Starting last month, Dan Gainor, vice president for business and culture at the Media Research Center, the conservative media watchdog group, went on something of a crusade.”

“Angered by a joke that David Weigel made about Matt Drudge on his Twitter feed, Gainor contacted conservative groups asking them to stop cooperating with Weigel, who had recently taken his blog about the conservative movement to the Washington Post.”

“We encouraged conservatives not to deal with him,” he said. “We contacted other conservative organizations and said, ‘This guy is no friend of the conservative movement. We recommend that you deny him access.’ Some did.”

“Got that? A right-wing group that ostensibly monitors the media, contacted like-minded, right-wing organizations and urged them not to cooperate with a Washington Post reporter because the reporter was, supposedly, not a “friend” of the conservative movement.”

Gainor’s permanent snit about the unworthiness of Barack Obama to have taken up in the Oval Office, along with his mandatory adoration of Ronald Reagan, of course leads Gainor to compare Obama unfavorably with the Gipper; unfortunately, Gainor doesn’t have enough of a grip on the history required to do that very well. Gainor offered an assessment of Obama’s first year in office, which, of course, featured poor Obama falling deplorably short. At least that’s the point Gainor attempted to make — for the record, Gainor fumbled:

According to Gainor, when Obama increased defense spending in his first year it was somehow the exact opposite of Reagan’s first year increase in defense spending. Likewise, Obama’s stated goal of a “world without nuclear weapons”, and proposals to bilaterally reduce our nuclear weapons arsenal by 30 percent is somehow totally different from Reagan’s “ultimate goal” of “eliminating all nuclear weapons.”

As Christine Schwen of Media Matters put it:

“So, Gainor claimed that “Barack Obama’s no Reagan,” but it’s pretty clear that Gainor’s Reagan was no Reagan either.”

“Sarah Palin would be proud.”

* * *

When the Right invented the ACORN crisis, Gainor was beside himself that only Fox News had the courage and journalistic integrity to cover the story the way that it should be covered (24/7 with screaming headlines and lots of tsk-ing and finger-wagging). Like a voice crying in the wilderness came Gainor’s lament that the story had everything the media could possibly want in a blockbuster story (really, he thought that) “and yet no one, NO ONE, I say” in the lamestream LIBERAL media is covering it. This, of course, is proof that the liberal media are protecting Obama.

Except, as usual, Gainor was looking at the thing through elephant-colored glasses. According to Nexis/Lexis, these were mainstream media outlets that, prior to the publication of Gainor’s piece, had covered the ACORN story out of Baltimore. They were: Baltimore Sun, New York Post, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Grand Rapids Press, Kansas City Star, Newsday, Newark Star-Ledger, Washington Post, Washington Times, CNN.com, Washingtonpost.com.

Yup, those lousy lefties buried the story rather than tell the truth . . .

With that hole plugged, Gainor took on network TV and accused them of the same media bias because, I guess, the networks didn’t suspend normal programming to provide 24/7 coverage of ACORN.

* * *

So, that, in a nutshell, is the pathetic little puke that would like to pay one of the big kids to punch Alan Grayson’s lights out. Now you can go back to ignoring him . . .

DISCLOSURE: I am a totally unscrupulous old fart of a blogger with no ‘ethical journalist’ constraints and a liberal mean streak. I am also sick to death of the whining and social pathologies of the far Right. So sue me . . .

P.S. I’ll give a free 3-day pass to Dollywood to the first Republican who eats Dan Gainor’s lunch.

[tags]Dan Gainor, Rep. Alan Grayson, Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, G. Gordon Liddy[/tags]

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,
And falls on th’other. . . .

Macbeth Act 1, scene 7. 25–28

Hail to the Chief

If Sarah Palin and her “political machine” ever hope to see the business end of a run for POTUS, they’d all better stop thinking of this job as a nine-to-fiver. It’s going to take world class political handlers, policy wonks and spinmeisters, on a 24/7, basis to ever render this spectacularly silly woman even remotely ready for prime time – in our lifetime, let alone by 2012.

I don’t enjoy reading (or writing) ad hominem attacks on public figures. That said, if Sarah Palin was just another ditzy ex-beauty queen, with delusions of grandeur, making an embarrassing spectacle of herself on the national stage, it would be one thing. But, against all odds (and conventional wisdom), the woman is gathering serious momentum on her hell-bent, careening runaway train bound for glory and thereby merits some serious observation.

Example: on Sunday, La Palin, flying solo on the Twitter Machine, managed to expose her Islamaphobic dark side, her substandard facility with her native tongue, and a troubling lack of clarity and decisiveness — all while claiming parity with William Shakespeare – in the space of a couple of tweets.

The subject that had La Palin all-atwitter was the Right’s most recent obsession – the Mosque at Ground Zero.

It goes without saying, of course, that the “Mosque at Ground Zero” is neither a mosque nor is it to be located at “Ground Zero.” It is a Muslim community center (along the lines of a YMCA) that will include a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, restaurant, and bookstore as well as a prayer room that might technically be considered a “mosque” room. The site for this community center is two (city) blocks away from Ground Zero in an unassuming fifteen story building. No one is planning to build the world’s tallest minaret on the ruins of the World Trade Center.

As Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs mused:

“Suppose the community center was five blocks away instead of two blocks away.”

“Would that be OK?”

“How about if it was in midtown?”

“Far enough?”

“Maybe it needs to be in Queens?”

Without further ado, here are La Palin’s ruminations and refinements on the the Mosque at Ground Zero.

First Tweet:

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate”

Lucky for Sarah, she appears to have a few “guardian angels” keeping watch over her Twittery to tip her off when she tweets something stupid, because yesterday’s tweeting required a couple of do-overs before it was fit for the “campaign trail.” Lucky for the rest of us, we have a few “guardian angels” who like to save the essence and evolution of such cultural artifacts for posterity.

Revision #1: in which the author excises the imaginary word “refudiate” replacing it with an actual, albeit improperly used, word “refute.” And while she’s at it with the red pen, “Peaceful Muslims” morphs into “Peaceful New Yorkers,” to wit:

“Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real”

Far be it from me to plumb the depths of Palin Profundity, however these changes do raise questions like:

Could “refudiate” have resulted from an unfortunate typo on Palin’s teeny, tiny blackberry keyboard?

Probably not; it’s not like “f” and “p” are close to each other – even on a phone. Besides, as Charles Johnson pointed out, Palin recently used “refudiate” on a Fox News program; moreover, the use of this signature coinage also serves, as Johnson points out, to prove that these tweets were almost certainly composed by an “off-leash” Palin rather than some political flunky assigned to handle Palin’s Twittery.

The thornier issue is actually Palin’s dropping of the incendiary “peaceful Muslims” tag in favor of the more inclusive “peaceful New Yorkers.” Perhaps Palin’s new gal-pal, Pamela Geller persuaded her that “peaceful Muslim” was an oxymoron? Geller, who can be counted on to laud Islamaphobia wherever she finds it, was quick with the kudos for Palin’s standing up for the Ban the Mosque mob.

Geller tweeted the following:

“Sarah Palin Opposes Ground Zero Mega Mosque: Gd, I love this woman! She is not afraid of the jackals, hyenas, a..”

Also, I’m sure that it did not escape Geller’s attention, back in April, when Palin was one of the few who voiced a defense of evangelist Franklin Graham after he was uninvited to chair a major Pentagon event in May, in light of his inflammatory remarks against Islam.

On that occasion, Palin wrote on her Facebook page:

“It’s truly a sad day when such a fine patriotic man, whose son is serving on his fourth deployment in Afghanistan to protect our freedom of speech and religion, is dis-invited from speaking at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service.

What this “fine patriotic man” had to say about Islam was:

“We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”

That’s fairly straightforward . . . no quibbling over who’s a peaceful Muslim and who isn’t.

* * *

I suspect that, whatever thinly-veiled, paranoiac, low opinion Sarah Palin might have of Muslims (peaceful or otherwise), “New Yorkers” are probably a close second. After all, Manhattan pols and pundits have, over time, offered some of the sharpest criticisms of Palin’s most heartlandish notions. Nevertheless, she alleges to know a lot about New Yorkers “too raw, too real pain” and what should and shouldn’t be done about it.

Predictably, New York did not take Palin’s exhortations sitting down; in fact, a policy aide from New York Mayor Bloomberg’s office strafed Palin and Geller’s meeting of the minds, in the shallow end, with these tweets:

“@SarahPalinUSA mind your business”

Followed up with this:

“@SarahPalinUSA whose hearts? Racist hearts?”

In short order, the aide’s survival instincts kicked in and she deleted both tweets (more’s the pity).

Later, last evening, the same aide added the following tweets, as explanation:

“Deleted post bc I regretted curt response. But fact is, I believe this city belongs to everyone – and no one more than another”

“Unlike @SarahPalinUSA, I was born here grew up here. Was showing off to a visitor today – look at how beautiful and diverse my city is.”

“I felt pain of 9/11, the trauma. I got through it by believing in my city. Not through fear and hate.”

At least Sarah can’t complain about the do-over . . .

Once Palin got the high-five from Geller, she was back to the appeal to the “peaceful Muslims” with her closing gambit:

“Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing”

Aside from Palin’s breathtakingly patronizing insinuation that Muslims have to asked to be understanding of the human emotion of feeling stabbed in the heart, there is that odd UNNECESSARY provocation line. If I venture to paraphrase, all that I can come up with is that Palin believes that a) Muslims have quite enough mosques already, thank you very much and that b) Americans find the building of mosques by American Muslims, on the American land that they purchase for that purpose, somehow provocative.

If that’s the case, I would like to point out to Ms. Palin that individual Americans could just as easily find the building of a synagogue, an A.M.E. church, a Mormon tabernacle, a Shinto temple (or a Dominionist Megachurch, for that matter) an “UNNECESSARY provocation;” but because we are Americans, those individuals will have to learn to live with their “provoked” feelings because that’s who we are – we all agreed, a long time ago, that any American citizen can build, attend or support any church that s/he is inclined to.

Ironically, it goes without saying, of course, that the “Mosque at Ground Zero” is neither a mosque nor is it to be located at “Ground Zero.” It is a Muslim community center (along the lines of a YMCA) that will include a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, restaurant, and bookstore as well as a prayer room that might technically be considered a “mosque” room. The site for this community center is two (city) blocks away from Ground Zero in an unassuming fifteen story building. No one is planning to build the world’s tallest minaret on the ruins of the World Trade Center. As Charles Johnson mused:

“Suppose the community center was five blocks away instead of two blocks away.”

“Would that be OK?”

“How about if it was in midtown?”

“Far enough?”

“Maybe it needs to be in Queens?”

* * *

To some, this may seem to be merely a semantic tempest in a teapot but, as long as this ridiculous woman appeals to a dismayingly growing cross-section of disenchanted Americans, we have a problem that we can’t afford to ignore. It is a symptom of just how stressed and dysfunctional American society is, right now, that the notion of Sarah Palin in the White House is anything more than a cartoon nightmare. A Palin presidency would put the last nail in the coffin of American credibility, worldwide, and would represent a dangerous step toward a theocratic totalitarianism where yesterday’s tweets become tomorrow’s policy (among other, equally frightening possibilities).

Surely this is not the last of Sarahbelle’s Twittermania; she obviously finds Facebook and Twitter totally awesome because their “hit and run” format allows one that precious freedom of speech without having to get bogged down in annoying explanations and/or defenses of what is said – perfect for the attention- or fact-challenged politico. As a commenter on Huffington Post this morning incisively pointed out: “Giving Sarah Palin a Twitter account is like giving a monkey a machine gun.” That says it quite nicely, IMO.

[tags]Sarah Palin, Pamela Geller, Mosque at Ground Zero, Mayor Bloomberg, refudiate[/tags]

Imagine this: you’re a fifty-something four-star general in the US Army; you have achieved that lofty summit largely by laboring in the relatively peaceful halls of military academe. You spend 1970 – 1974 learning to be an officer and a gentleman at West Point during the death throes of what the Vietnamese people call “The American War” – which is really too bad, in a way, because the timing robbed you of the chance to see, up close and personal, just how horribly wrong things can go for a military that finds itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong strategy. Not for you the “fragging, the drugs, the widespread AWOLs and outright mutiny that occurs when young men are asked to risk death for absurd reasons against insurmountable odds.

Nevertheless you are young, smart and enthusiastic so your lack of first-hand experience doesn’t keep you from weighing in on the “lessons learned” from “The American War” when it comes time for you to tender your doctoral dissertation at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs; your thesis, “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era,” is a hit and you are duly awarded your Ph.D.

Now you are on the fast-track for brainy soldiers with political skills that will undoubtedly land you at “Ground Zero” (aka The Pentagon) or – who knows, maybe the Oval Office, someday. So it is that you eventually find yourself a general who has never seen combat – until Iraq. Unfortunately, you don’t get your hands on that command until things are so thoroughly screwed up that all the sensible people are looking for the exits and making their escape plans. But, as you are fond of saying: “just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.” Iraq in 2007, however, is more than hard, it’s a disaster – and a disaster of our own making so the US can’t exactly declare it all a big mistake and walk away.

The All-American solution for such situations? – throw more money at it. In this case, more money equates to more troops, along with their fabulously expensive trappings, as a last ditch effort. And we will call it a “surge” which has a confident, manly sound to it and we will give this surge a fresh commander to give it that “whole new ball game” feel. Maybe then the naysayers will shut up about being lied to and Geneva conventions and bad strategies; maybe they won’t notice that having to do a surge means that you underestimated to begin with in order to sell your war; maybe they won’t be so angry that their kids died for Poor Planning more than Iraqi Freedom . . .

Enter “Super Dave” Petraeus to save the day; surely this military brainiac, with the impressive string of degrees, who’s running out of “shirt” to hang his merit badges on, will be able to make some sense out of the mess his less gifted colleagues have made of Iraq. Long story short, due to a very favorable confluence of external events (and Petraeus’ own extraordinary ability to recognize an “out” and capitalize on it while spinning a compelling yarn about what a great idea he had) – The Miracle of Iraqi Freedom ensued complete with stirring taglines like The Anbar Awakening and the Sons of Iraq to remind disgruntled Americans of our sacred duty to impose democracy on every hamlet, shtetl, village and outpost in the world – whether they like it or not.

No doubt about it, Super Dave is one smart cookie who understands, among other things, the value of dodging bullets. He certainly knows, as well as many of the rest of us, that timing, the existence of an Iraqi government and national infrastructure, society and internal politics played a huge role in the precipitate drop in violence that occurred in spite of, not because of, the “surge” of American troops in Iraq. Petraeus knows that he went through barrels of cash to underwrite field trips to Anbar for Awakening therapy, he knows that he quelled some urban sectarian violence by establishing and enforcing apartheid in Baghdad, he knows that he used Stan the Man’s JSOC death squads to eliminate rabble-rousers but, most of all, I’m sure that the general knows that the “center will not hold” for long. And sure enough, Iraq is steadily devolving into Civil War. Super Dave managed to get out of Iraq before that could happen, though, and collected his reward – CENTCOM command in sunny Tampa – only inches away from a happy and lucrative retirement as a military mentor for broadcast media, a lobbyist for Raytheon or some such MIC concern, maybe even POTUS?

Unfortunately, the general’s superhero status has landed him back in the soup (i.e., Afghanistan) where he is now expected to “do that voodoo that he does so well.” Obviously, “Stan the Man” McChrystal is no dummy himself, because he managed to take a flamboyant shortcut to retired-military fame and fortune, with pension intact, whilst his hapless CO gets a POTUS-designed demotion to salvage another US military fiasco.

In his desperation to pull another rabbit out of the helmet, Super Dave appears to have come up with a particularly hare-brained idea to save our hash in Afghanistan. At least it seems hare-brained, at first glance; but after some careful consideration, I’m coming around to believe that Gen. Petraeus’ new idea has more than a little genius about it. Not that I expect Super Dave’s plan to result in Victory in Afghanistan (whatever the hell that might look like) but I think that it has a damned good chance of getting Super Dave and the rest of us out of that godforsaken dust bowl in short order.

Let me explain myself . . .

Super Dave still had one foot on the tarmac in Kabul when he first met with, and reportedly pissed off, President Karzai. The issue that Karzai is most sensitive to is the Americans’ idea that Afghanistan needs to establish (yet another) police force to protect the population from Taliban intimidation. But the general still has visions of the Sons of Iraq dancing in his head and probably figures it’s worth a shot. These “new” police forces would be localized and therefore, theoretically, more aware of insurgents in their midst, more inclined to protect their own communities from Taliban incursions and less inclined to shakedown, loot, rape or pillage their own neighbors. Standing up an effective national police force, one of the few clearly stated key milestones for eventual withdrawal of Western forces, has, so far, been an abysmal failure in Afghanistan for a myriad of well-documented reasons; this would be a fresh start not to mention the fact that it would distract any Afghanistan-Watchers who are still waiting for the Kandahar Offensive or for things to turn around in Marjah.

It all makes some sense (on paper) and, in the absence of any other bright ideas, it’s at least something that looks different to try. From President Karzai’s perspective, it looks like an invitation to insurrection. Karzai has been solidly against this notion any time that the US has suggested it; he knows that his hold on power is so tenuous that the last thing he needs is a few dozen fractious militias running around in various provinces setting their own agenda. Since the oft-repeated mission of the US in Afghanistan has been to concentrate and solidify power in the Kabul central government, Karzai has a point. No one is going to change the centuries-old provincial and tribal allegiances of ordinary Afghan citizens by deputizing them, arming them and putting them on the government payroll; they may prefer to keep Taliban extremists out of their lives but that doesn’t mean that they are anxious to help Karzai solidify his own bloc and no one knows that better than the Brothers Karzai whose only aspirations are to milk the NATO presence for every last euro and dollar they can before they must depart or lose their heads.

* * *

Despite grave misgivings, Karzai finally caved to Super Dave on this point, most likely because he knows that it’s a fool’s errand. Spencer Ackerman wrote a great brief on how dumb this idea is, just in case it escapes the average taxpayer who continues to underwrite this nonsense; here’s what Spencer says which I totally agree with:

“General David Petraeus has persuaded Karzai to set up a new force to supplement Afghan soldiers and police. It’s not really Anbar Awakening 2.0, since it doesn’t involve insurgents switching sides. And don’t use the M-word, Pentagon officials say. “They would not be militias,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters Wednesday. ‘These would be government-formed, government-paid, government- uniformed local police units.’ Specifically, the new units will be paid by the Interior Ministry — or, rather, the foreign money that bankrolls the Afghanistan government will be disbursed to these new units through the ministry.”

“Except, Morell conceded, they wouldn’t be trained, as police units are. (“We don’t have enough trainers to do the fundamental job here,” Morrell further conceded.) In essence, up to 10,000 fighters — as an initial tranche, according to the New York Times — around the country will be rapidly deputized under the auspices of the Interior Ministry, at the behest of the NATO military command, and then relied upon to keep the peace in places with insufficient amounts of Afghan security forces. ‘A useful bridging mechanism,’ Morrell called the program, until the Afghan army and police can move in.”

So, suddenly, into the already toxic Afghan mix, will be added thousands of untrained, armed local defense forces “free to make it up as they go along.” Of course they will technically be government employees, beholden to Kabul for their paychecks and they will have to answer to the Interior Ministry in Kabul (whose Director resigned last month taking with him Interior’s reputation of being one of the only Kabul government departments that was anything like viable and well run).

The fatal flaw in this plan, as Ackerman cogently points out, is this:

“Only the potential for short-term contingencies to overtake long-term strategy is acute. It’s not like there’s some separate pool of potential recruits for this new “Local Police Force.” They’re the same Afghans that the government’s been trying to recruit for the army and the police. The fighters rallied to this new program are most likely to come from local power brokers, whose hold over remote parts of Afghanistan will be accordingly entrenched. Those power brokers won’t easily give up the source of that expanded power to army and police recruiters. And that means the “bridging mechanism” could easily turn the expansion of the Afghan security services — the U.S.’s ticket out of Afghanistan, according to the Obama administration’s overall strategy — a bridge to nowhere.”

Over time, I’ve grown sort of fond of our plucky general, Super Dave. I think that he’s very smart, especially when it comes to politics; moreover, I think he’s at least as smart as Spencer Ackerman and therefore the fairly glaring, obvious downside potential of the localized police force idea will not have escaped him. And that, I believe, is the beauty of Super Dave’s mind.

By now, most have us have had time to appreciate the awesome dimensions of our military and diplomatic failure in Afghanistan – our total ignorance of the region, our reluctance to leave long after al Qaeda was decimated, our adoption of the Taliban as a new enemy, our destabilization of Pakistan, our appalling choice of Hamid Karzai to head up a new government, etc, etc. More and more of us are clamoring to just “own” that failure and get the hell out before our economy totally craters. Super Dave wants that, too, I suspect; but he’d probably like to get out with his career intact and, especially with his COIN theory vindicated. So what could possibly happen in Afghanistan, next, that would create the space for a graceful exit?

I’m thinking that civil war, if not total anarchy, might be just the ticket. Think of it — emasculated warlords with freshly armed militias joining up with the provincial shadow governments to get rid of the Karzais and their Western patrons, once and for all. If that were to happen, COIN must necessarily be suspended because, by definition, COIN requires a strong central government for the population to gravitate toward. I imagine the “post-mortem” conversation would probably go something like this: “Perhaps COIN might have worked in Afghanistan if internal strife hadn’t toppled the Karzai government; but without a healthy central government, all bets were off.”

That’s when things get interesting for the US because we then have the choice of withdrawing while the Afghans have their civil war which, after all, is nothing to do with us and keeps them busy and distracted from other things like harboring al Qaeda (if they ever consciously did so). Or, we could decide to pick a side, stay on and engage in conventional warfare (probably regional) without any quibbling over who’s who. That would probably please the “bomb them back into the Stone Age” crowd.

That’s my idea, anyway. And if it’s Super Dave’s idea, too, well . . . more power to him. At this point, I’ll support just about any program that gets us out of Afghanistan in less than ten years.

[tags]Gen. Petraeus, Hamid Karzai, Gen. McChrystal, Afghanistan, Kandahar, Marjah, local militias, Afghan Ministry of Interior[/tags]

The dust may have settled relatively quickly, following The McChrystal Affair, but that is not to say that the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) is necessarily back on the tracks in Afghanistan. General Petraeus’ confirmation hearing didn’t disappoint (or surprise). Early on, Sen. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tipped his hand to one and all by making the point that it was not a question of “if” but “when” the Gen. would be confirmed, a point reiterated by several inquisitors to follow. The general atmosphere of the hearing was collegially good-natured and congratulatory; there were even a few poignant eulogies for “Stan the Man” McChrystal proving that a general can make a total ass of himself while utterly failing at his objectives and still reap kudos from Congress. In short, there was nothing in the proceedings to give a new commander the vapors . . .

So . . . that was nice of the Senators to make the General (and his wife Holly, over whose patriotism and sacrifice quite a fuss was made) feel right at home. Democrats played their part by serving up a few (fast-pitch) softball questions for which the General was well-prepared despite the fact that he could have said “the Earth is flat and I’m a huge fan of Hannibal Lecter” without fear of derailing his foregone confirmation. Gen. Petraeus was definitely “on-message” just the way the White House likes it . . .

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not, for a second, against confirming Petraeus and handing him a one-way ticket to Kandahar; he started this mess, he should have to own it. One almost has to feel a little sorry for the guy – he’s just coming off that near-career-death experience in Iraq, and was happily settling into CENTCOM headquarters in sunny Florida and — WHAM! déjà vu all over again. Petraeus knows damn well that COIN didn’t work in Iraq, and certainly won’t in Afghanistan, but last summer he stood there in the Oval Office, before God and Obama, and swore not only that it would work but that it would work in 18 months. When pressed, he also promised the President that he would not return, after the aforesaid 18 months had elapsed, hat in hand, and ask for more time/troops/money. Six months later, however, he was only willing to part with a “qualified yes” when asked if he still supported that earlier mission statement.

A few days ago, Fred Branfman wrote a very incisive post published on Huffington Post (that is short, to the point and well worth reading) pointing out that The McChrystal Affair is just as much an indictment of Petraeus (and Obama, I might add) as McChrystal:

“Petraeus is by his own testimony a close personal friend of his protégé, and he was primarily responsible for McChrystal having been appointed to head U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that he did not know how McChrystal felt about his civilian team members, or was unaware of their inability to work together. If the McChrystal cohort talked this way in front of a reporter, can you imagine how good buds Dave and Stan talk about a Holbrooke, Biden or Obama over a cold one with no one else around?”

“Petraeus’ failure to act before the scandal occurred means he failed as CentCom commander. One of his major responsibilities was obviously to assemble and deploy a smoothly functioning team to conduct military and political warfare in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater — one of the most sensitive arenas in which the U.S. has operated since the end of World War II.”

“Petraeus’ failure is matched, of course, by that of Obama and his top advisers. Neither Petraeus nor Obama should have needed a magazine profile in order to reorganize a team that was clearly broken.”

Branfman certainly managed to make me sit up straight for my first “Duh” moment of the day. The elegance of Branfman’s point is that it should be pretty apparent to a large cross-section of Americans to include: parents, teachers, and everyone who’s ever served in a military or civilian government post, read Catch-22, or attended any sort of corporate culture workshop. The McChrystal Affair did not occur in a vacuum, despite its colorful links to Nordic volcanic eruptions and/or Parisian layover beer benders. And who among us can deny the homespun wisdom informing the well-known American truism about gravitational effects on excrement? No matter how sophisticated we become, and no matter how many stars some of us have pinned to our camos, the sh*t comes from somewhere and it ain’t from downhill.

Just like Davy Crockett probably didn’t kill any “b’ar when he was only three” neither did Davy Petraeus waltz into Baghdad, set the gears of COIN in motion and save the day – but he’s stuck with the legend now because the Bush Administration badly needed something resembling a military victory that would make all of its war crimes somehow worthwhile (and forgettable) – think “ends” justifying “means.”

* * *

Inside the Beltway Visionary: 2005

Back in 2003, no one would have considered COIN a sensible strategy option for Iraq. It was to be a quick, straightforward invasion with regime change – a snap. The Bush/Cheney White House game plan for Iraq was to convince the recently terrorized world that 9/11 was only the beginning and that Saddam Hussein was sitting on vast stockpiles of wickedly diabolical WMDs with which he intended to turn The Free World into a wasteland. Besides, the people of Iraq didn’t seem to like Hussein all that much so they probably wouldn’t mind awfully if US SpecOps removed him from power. As a matter of fact, at one point early on, the Administration shared its Norman Rockwellian hallucination of how the invasion would be received in Baghdad. I remember that it was somewhat creepily reminiscent of VE Day in Paris, complete with showers of flower petals, and grateful Iraqis throwing kisses from balconies at their GI liberators rolling through Baghdad in Humvees.

Nobody would need to waste any time going through the motions of hunting for WMDs, either (everyone already knew they weren’t there); we could cut right to the chase and get down to OIL! A prescient Dick Cheney had already procured aerial mappings of Iraq’s oil fields to share his vision for the future of Iraqi Oil with his Top Secret Energy Commission. A key (and perhaps fatal) assumption was that once Hussein was removed and a “clean slate” was provided, the Iraqis (no dummies) would want to immediately set up a Western democracy with free advice and lots of US taxpayer dollars to make the right things happen.

Imagine the Administration’s surprise when things didn’t quite work out that way. The Iraqis were inexplicably fond of the notion of setting up their own government, in their own way, starting with settling old scores and launching aggressive ethnic cleansing campaigns. The New Iraq was definitely not shaping up to be the gratefully subservient proxy government that Bush/Cheney had dreamed of.

Now, if at the time, you were a historian rather than a tank-thinker, you might have fretted that a combination of recent events in Iraq – outside intervention, the precipitate creation of a power vacuum, a history of centuries of regional and sectarian conflict — might make Iraq ripe for a civil war. And, of course, your fretting would have been justified because that’s exactly what happened and, in short order millions of Iraqi citizens were murdered or maimed, forced to emigrate, internally displaced or imprisoned without charge and tortured. Very few are strewing rose petals or throwing kisses . . .

Enter Gen. Petraeus director and producer of a new-fangled type of warfare designed for just such tricky situations. It’s called Counterinsurgency (shortened to COIN for busy, or secretive people) and it’s actually a revival of an old strategy that’s never quite worked out well for military types since time began. COIN has featured prominently in well-known military disasters from Alexander the Great to Vietnam; it seems to be one of those perennially appealing, sounds-good-on-paper ideas that successive generations believe they might somehow pull off despite where others have failed. COIN has the added attraction of presenting well to post-Enlightenment audiences; in theory it is a “kinder, gentler war” that is less about murder and more about fulfilling foreign cultures’ desperate craving to be Americanized.

Dateline Baghdad, 7/4/2006: Winning hearts and minds . . .

COIN, as it has been reincarnated most recently, is warfare for busybodies – hubristic people who like to intervene in world affairs that are none of their business, for fun and profit. In its purest form, counterinsurgency theory is a polar opposite of what the Pentagon is selling these days. Counterinsurgency, as its very name suggests is all about internal domestic affairs; if a government perceives a serious threat from some segment of its own citizens, said government might choose to launch a counterinsurgency to isolate and marginalize the insurgent group, thus encouraging them to return to the herd peacefully.

Even in the Pentagon remake, COIN theory depends on the existence of a relatively stable central government and infrastructure that can effectively be shown to offer the general population more in the way of security, stability and services than the insurgent group attempting to overthrow the government. Thus, the general population becomes the government’s ally in effectively marginalizing and finally defeating insurgency.

So where, exactly, was the insurgency in Iraq that Gen. Petraeus is said to have so remarkably countered via COIN strategy? If the Iraqi people, themselves, had launched an offensive to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I suppose that faction might reasonably have been described as an insurgency. But that didn’t happen. If the Iraqi people take up arms while they are under attack or being occupied by a foreign military, that action is best described as “resistance” against invasion — a defensive, rather than an offensive, action. During the post-invasion chaos we have some people engaging in a sectarian civil war and some people resisting foreign occupation and lots of people being killed, injured or displaced but no real insurgency. One might conceivably label as insurgents a sliver of the population who seize the moment to push their own agenda as long as chaos reigns, but that would be semantically incorrect and hardly worth billions of dollars and thousands of lives to quash.

Still, there’s no denying the fact that once General Petraeus arrived on the scene a seriously out of control Iraq calmed down considerably shortly thereafter. Many observers, including (you can be sure) Gen. Petraeus, know that there was far more going on in Iraq, at the time, than a changing of the guard for the invasionary forces.

Before the famous “surge” was even announced the original US commanders in Iraq, George Casey and John Abizaid (remember them?) had realized some success by assassinating al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which they then followed up with an ingenious scheme to pay off Sunni militants to join the Anbar “Awakening.”

Meanwhile, the US military on the ground responded to the increasingly violent sectarian civil war taking place in the streets by relocating Sunnis and Shiites into separate neighborhoods making it more difficult for them to kill each other but, at the same time effectively aiding ethnic cleansing via segregation. Shortsighted and misguided as those tactics were, they eventually had a noticeable dampening effect on domestic violence.

Inexplicably, in the midst of all of this chaos, Muqtada al-Sadr unexpectedly ordered his radical Shiite Mahdi Army to stand down, probably at the request of an edgy Iran with problems of its own.

It was only then, that President Bush announced a surge of troops under a fresh commander with a new approach. As soon as those troops started to surge there was, predictably, a spike in violence that resulted in 1,000 additional troops deaths (25% of the war’s total). But eventually, the levels of violence decreased again due in large part to Iraqi exhaustion, the physical devastation of war and what amounted to an Iraqi diaspora that separated sectarian groups – not COIN strategy.

Ironically, President Bush might have been more instrumental in solidifying Iraqi peace than Gen. Petraeus, by virtue of the Status of Forces Agreement that he revised in 2008. That SOFA, as it is known, was the US promise, among other things, of a speedy withdrawal of its forces from Iraq starting with the US military presence in Iraqi cities, with an End of Combat provision to be completed by 2011. Perhaps the SOFA might not have had the same impact had it not been for the bloody surge but, as it happened, nothing gave the Iraqi people more hope or resolve for the future than the announcement that all US troops were getting out of their country soon; and the sometimes tense and relapsing peace has held up fairly well for two years as the multi-national force draws down.

Sometimes the stars just line up right and if you’ve had a long run of bad luck, and you’re politically astute – you’ll take it (and take credit it for it). That’s the story that the neocons, generals and think tanks are putting out (and sticking to) and the mainstream media has run with it so effectively that the Petraeus Legend is already writ large in the annals of US military history.

If only it could have ended there but, in a world of simultaneous wars, the general has “lived to fight another day” and has been called on, by a grateful nation, to “work his particular magic” one more time. Would that the poor man could but, barring some extraordinary realignment of his stars, I’d expect that Gen. Petraeus is due to fall on his sword in the not-too-distant future and see COIN theory consigned to its well-deserved place in the Museum of Spectacularly Awful and Costly Ideas.

[tags]Gen. Petraeus, Afghanistan, Iraq, Surge, counterinsurgency, COIN[/tags]

"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war." Gen. McChrystal

As reported by various media outlets this morning, President Obama is apparently suffering an executive snit over “some people’s” obsession with his promised 2011 deadline for starting troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. His bad mood is somewhat justified, I suppose, having spent the week canning The Runaway General and the weekend with the panic-stricken international victims of the New World Order’s fiscal misadventures. Not only was there the indoor commotion and clamor about the relatively miniscule (compared to the US, of course) national debts and deficits keeping the rest of the Free World awake at night, but outside, at the gates, were the vocal hordes of anti-capitalists turning the usually decorous streets of downtown Toronto into a three-ring ugly pageant. Not a great week by any standard . . .

Nevertheless, as one of the aforementioned “obsessives,” I must take issue with the President’s short temper over the withdrawal date. I did not, as some did at the time, take the President to task for taking his own sweet time to come up with this formula. While some were depicting Obama as weak on terror (whatever- TF that means?), or indecisive, or dithering, I remained steadfastly supportive in the camp that characterized Obama’s excruciatingly meticulous assessment as the reasoned, rational and conscientious deliberations of a judicious Commander-in-Chief. Until, of course, I heard the disappointing outcome which could have been just as easily arrived at if the President had, instead, put his head together with the Martial Arts Triumvirate (John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham) over a six-pack in the Rose Garden.

Evidently, the President likes to “control the message” but he also needs to understand that controlling the message in the Internet Age is less like actual “control” and more like herding cats. A perfect example is the McChrystal Affair: Obama had to know, when he went along with DoD’s McChrystal nomination to lead in Afghanistan, that pulling a SpecOps guy off of his assassination detail might result in some slightly unconventional doings coming out of ISAF HQ for a while.

As a matter of fact, McChrystal’s reputation preceded him, and had a few folks scratching their heads, at the time. First of all, Special Operations soldiers are used to operating on the fringe with minimal to no oversight and they know, going in, that whatever happens during a “special operation,” the record will be sealed and marked with a big “Classified” stamp forever after. Such people inhabit a parallel universe and most, I’d guess, consider themselves pretty much above the law because they are.

Clearly, that sense of “untouchability” prevailed during Michael Hastings’ month long sojourn in Team America locker-room. Media types who “broke the news” that McChrystal’s problem was that he acted as a “Lone Wolf” were missing the point – that’s why he was chosen in the first-place; and the journos that insisted that McChrystal was “hand-picked” by Obama to lead in Afghanistan are so “on message” that they might as well be stateside embeds.

My point in all of that is that when you are truly curious about the truth you have little choice but to consult the foreign press where being “on message” is of far less consequence. For example, so far no one outside of the British have made any mention of the trainwreck of a briefing that McChrystal delivered to the NATO Defence Ministers a few days before the Rolling Stone trainwreck – and probably had just as much, if not more, impact on Obama’s decision than a boys-will-be-boys expose in a Pop Culture mag. The NATO briefing was, in my opinion (and the opinions of a handful of furriners and “old school” DoD types) far more damaging to the Afghan War PR campaign than the Rolling Stone article, and came at the worst possible moment in time vis-à-vis an impending Congressional vote to approve additional defense funding for the already bad-news surge in Afghanistan.

* * *

I urge all those interested in such “outside opinions” to read all of the gory details of McChrystal’s Last Post as reported by Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady for this Sunday’s edition of The Independent. Despite the US media’s skepticism over the newsworthiness of reporting on McChrystal’s pessimistic confessional to the NATO Defence Ministers, I found it quite interesting; in fact, some might read it as McChrystal’s desperate plea to outside forces to prevail upon his own government to cut their losses and get out of Afghanistan. Pretty ham-handed politics, in retrospect, but probably the only way left that McChrystal could see to put pressure on Obama to give him more time; or, maybe, he simply wanted out without dishonor – something along the lines of “if the allies crap out on you, it’s not your fault that the war was lost.”

At any rate, here are a few snippets from The Independent article, to pique your interest:

“Sacked US General Stanley McChrystal issued a devastatingly critical assessment of the war against a ‘resilient and growing insurgency’ just days before being forced out.”

“Using confidential military documents, copies of which have been seen by the IoS, the ‘runaway general’ briefed defence ministers from NATO and the International security Assistance Force (ISAF) earlier this month, and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months. During his presentation, he raised serious concerns over levels of security, violence, and corruption within the Afghan administration.”

“But the ‘campaign overview’ left behind by General McChrystal after he was sacked by President Barack Obama last week warned that only a fraction of the areas key to long-term success are ‘secure’, governed with ‘full authority’, or enjoying ‘sustainable growth’. He warned of a critical shortage of ‘essential’ military trainers needed to build up Afghan forces – of which only a fraction is classed as ‘effective.’”

“He pinpointed an ‘ineffective or discredited’ Afghan government and a failure by Pakistan ‘to curb insurgent support’ as ‘critical risks’ to success. ‘Waning’ political support and a ‘divergence of coalition expectations and campaign timelines’ are among the key challenges faced, according to the general.”

“General McChrystal’s presentation to NATO defence ministers and ISAF representatives provided an uncompromising obstacle to Mr. Obama’s plan to bring troops home in time to give him a shot at a second term, according to senior military sources. The general was judged to be ‘off message’ in his warning to ministers not to expect quick results and that they were facing a ‘resilient and growing insurgency.’”

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, while various players are distracted by accounting exercises (i.e., Defense Budgets, political capital, etc) the maverick-y President Karzai is doing his damnedest to incite civil war via his backroom machinations with Pakistan’s ISI and the Haqqani Network:

“Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, and the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, are due to arrive in Kabul tomorrow for their third meeting with Karzai in recent months. Frosty relations between the two sides have thawed in recent months; about 10 days ago reports emerged from Pakistan that the ISI was offering to “deliver” the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan in the tribal belt.”

“But the very notion of Pakistani-sponsored talks has sparked consternation among Afghanistan’s ethnically fractured opposition, who fear the rapprochement with Islamabad will see them excluded from any future political settlement.”

“’None of the players believe in the current strategy,” opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah told the Guardian. “Karzai is going down the drain and taking the international community with him.’”

“If he thinks he can give [the Taliban] a few ministries and a few provinces, they will simply take those provinces and then force him out.”

“Abdullah said he was appalled that the Afghan president had recently referred to the Taliban with the affectionate “jan” suffix. ‘Talib-jan is how you would refer to your dearest young son – it would be considered too soft to use on a teenager.’”

“Three weeks ago Karzai’s intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, and his interior minister, Hanif Atmar, quit in protest at the new Pakistan policy. Both men are Tajiks; Saleh was previously a leading member of the Northern Alliance that helped topple the Taliban in 2001.”

I’m no strategic genius but I think that for the reasonably intelligent observer the writing is pretty much on the wall.

Obama wants something (anything) good to happen in Afghanistan before the 2012 election so that he can bring a token number of troops home, all the while being careful that the militarized Circle (around Iran) Be Unbroken.

Hamid Karzai wants to take advantage of the deep-pockets Western invaders for as long as he can, without ticking off his homeys too much, so that he and his tribe live through these tricky times long enough to be reunited with their war-swag and live like royalty in a more developed, more hospitable environment. According to the Wall Street Journal, approximately $3 billion a year (25% of Afghan GDP), some of it undoubtedly your tax dollars, are leaving Afghanistan. In pockets, boxes, suitcases and shrink-wrapped pallets cash flies out (literally) of Kabul on a daily basis – and that’s only the declared cash flow! Somebody’s going to have quite the retirement plan and I’m not talking about Social Security. Wonder how the Tea Party will react to that brand of socialism . . . ?

General Petraeus? I’d guess he’s desperately seeking Scotty to “beam him up” before he has to lie in that lumpy, flea-infested bed he made.

Last but not least, the American Public – the old Tea Party slogan about “wanting our country back” is sounding less flaky, every day. We’re not looking for much; just some jobs, some truth, some justice and maybe getting our boys and girls home safe from these godforsaken, ill-advised, expensive and abysmally mismanaged wars.

[tags]Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, Gen. Petraeus, President Obama, ISAF, NATO defense briefing, Rolling Stone, Pakistan, ISI, Haqqani Network[/tags]

"Vietghanistan" from Michael Moore's website

Quite a lot of print and airtime have been expended recently on “managing expectations” regarding our excellent adventure in Afghanistan. If any of you have experienced qualms about any item, or combination of items, on the following list, I’m fairly certain that the latest news cycle has done nothing at all to allay your fears or clear up your doubts. Here’s my personal list of still-unanswered questions regarding the US’ nine year military presence in Afghanistan; answers to some, preferably all of these questions would, I believe, greatly enhance my understanding, as a voter and taxpayer, of what the hell our leaders think they have accomplished/hope to accomplish by continuing along their merry, globally destabilizing way:

• Why have our military leaders changed strategy after nine years in Afghanistan?
• Why is our new counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan better than other strategies? What does COIN success look like? Did our previous strategy/-ies fail?
• How much have our total military expenditures in Afghanistan contributed to our overall objectives there?
• How well-trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics are our troops? How well outfitted are they for the same?
• How many successful counterinsurgency campaigns have been executed by the US military? By any world military power? How many of those successful campaigns were executed in eighteen months?
• Do Afghans want us to help them fight against the Taliban? How many Afghan civilians have we killed/maimed by “accident?”

* * *

That list of questions is by no means comprehensive but, rather, represents my current reality-based heavyweight questions specific to the US role in Afghanistan. The remainder of the list is somewhat more “existential:”

• What would happen to the US economy (ergo global economy) if there were a worldwide moratorium on “military and/or quasi-military incursions/interventions?”
• Once Afghanistan is “stabilized,” what then?
• Are we safer? Or are we in more danger than ever before?
• Are we about to become bankrupt? Financially? Morally? Both???

So. Those are my questions . . . and I’m willing to wait . . . but, if the Sunday Hot Air Fest is any indication, answers are not forthcoming any time soon.

Part of the breakdown in communications about our latest strategy in Afghanistan, I believe, stems from the very nature of Counterinsurgency (or COIN, as our acronym-loving DoD prefers to streamline it) which is that COIN is simply a glorified PR campaign, with bombs and bullets rather than 3-color brochures. To be successful at COIN is to successfully manage perceptions and expectations. Due to the circumstances of some of my past employment, this is very familiar ground for me – I could bore you silly (but won’t) with a comparison of the finer “nits and gnats” that inform the practices of public relations operatives and the agents of COIN.

In fact, COIN is so thoroughly imbued with the mystery and magic of Big Business that I was not at all surprised to find a vintage 2005 document entitled “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency” that had been whipped up by one Kalev I. Sepp, Ph.D., for counterinsurgency mavens at Military Review.

For whatever arcane reason (perhaps a mischievous sense of irony?), Dr. Sepp chose an epigraph for his Best Practices . . . paper taken from the wit and wisdom of Gen. Earle Wheeler. For those of us who lived through/paid attention to the Vietnam War Era, Wheeler’s name bangs a gong, to say the least. Wheeler was Lyndon B. Johnson’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff throughout most of the juicy parts of the Vietnam War, and a right old warlord he was. I’m still scratching my head over this quotation heading up an article on counterinsurgency but here it is, maybe you can make sense of it:

“It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.”—General Earle Wheeler, 1962

Dr. Sepp dances deftly around the fact that very few, if any, of the “counterinsurgency” efforts of the past century can be truthfully designated unqualified successes (especially among those that are dreamed up by outside forces (Us) for an indigenous population (Them) to sign up for). Lucky for us, as the good doctor points out, more can be learned from mistakes and failures than from success because few will argue, I’m sure, with my opinion that Counterinsurgencies resulting from outside intervention are historically abysmal failures both in the military and social senses (see US in Vietnam — and in any number of other third world locales; USSR in Afghanistan; Britain in US – 1776, etc., etc.).

Although delineating Best Practices in Counterinsurgency is, by its very nature, a dubious project, I have to trust to Dr. Sepp’s empirical purity in all of this and, since the subject matter is topical and close to hand, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see how our erstwhile Agents of COIN stack up against Dr. Sepp’s “best practices” model.

* * *

Of primary importance, per Sepp, is that the people of the insurgency-challenged nation, in our example Afghanistan, are the “center of gravity” of the counterinsurgency:

“Winning their hearts and minds must be the objective of the government’s efforts. Because this is a policy objective, it must be directed by the country’s political leaders.”

Uh, oh. Houston we have a problem . . . Dr. Sepp appears to be working off an assumption that counterinsurgencies are always “by, for and of the people” directly affected by insurgents in their midst, rather than by foreign instigators who come armed with their own agenda. Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Afghan people had actually been desperate to overthrow their government; that would have made them “insurgents,” against their own active government. If the US were to lend them a hand in achieving that end, while we happened to be in the neighborhood, some might call that “regime change” (an apt description, IMO).

Instead, what actually happened, as we know, is that the US decided to take its War on Terror on the road and by virtue of militarily deposing the acting Afghan (Taliban) government, the US fomented an Afghan insurgency where there previously was none. Who knew that the Taliban would try to regain control after being deposed by Righteous Americans? Everyone knows that deposed leaders are supposed to accept their “just deserts,” dealt out by the Forces for Good, and go off to become novelists or darkside celebrities elsewhere.

When the “newly liberated” but war-weary Afghan people showed little gratitude or organized interest in keeping the Taliban out of power permanently, the US found itself with a virtual “pig in a poke.” The Pentagon took “fifteen minutes” to depose the Taliban and nine years to try to persuade the Afghans to own the counterinsurgency and to keep the Taliban, Al Qaeda and anyone else on our shit list off of their turf.

From the get-go, this is already no classic “insurgency/counterinsurgency”scenario, nonetheless, we can play along and perhaps discover that all of the makings of a happy ending are in place, despite the eccentric origins of the US’ “counterinsurgency of convenience” in Afghanistan.

Ergo, here are the operational practices necessary for COIN success in Dr. Sepp’s estimable opinion:

Human Rights The security of the people must be assured as a basic need, along with food, water, shelter, health care, and a means of living. These are human rights, along with freedom of worship, access to education, and equal rights for women. The failure of counterinsurgencies and the root cause of the insurgencies themselves can often be traced to government disregard of these basic rights.

So. It would appear that, in order for counterinsurgency to succeed in Afghanistan, roughly 400 years worth of human rights reforms (that often run counter to indigenous religious and cultural tastes) must be enacted in the next eighteen months . . . i.e., “government-in-a-box?

Law enforcement Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security. Honest, trained, robust police forces responsible for security can gather intelligence at the community level. In turn, an incorrupt, functioning judiciary must support the police.

I have to trust that there is a reason that the Afghan population fears the Karzai government’s police force more than the Taliban (which has a habit of beheading its offenders). Also, a simple, fiscal fact is that Afghanistan cannot even begin to afford to train, equip, and maintain an “honest, trained, robust police force” not to mention an “incorrupt, functioning judiciary.”

Population control Insurgents rely on members of the population for concealment, sustenance, and recruits, so they must be isolated from the people by all means possible. Among the most effective means are such population-control measures as vehicle and personnel checkpoints and national identity cards.

Dr. Sepp doesn’t specifically mention it, but I suspect that he would agree that said “checkpoints” should not become an occasion of death or dismemberment to the “protected population,” if they are to reasonably contribute to the overall success of the counterinsurgency.

Political process Informational campaigns explain to the population what they can do to help their government make them secure from terrorist insurgents; encourage participation in the political process by voting in local and national elections; and convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting.

We might actually be able to give this item a C- (for effort), so far. Afghans did, indeed, recently go to the polls (for what it’s worth). On the other hand, Afghans still seem inclined to engage US troops to settle old neighborhood scores by branding their enemies with a “T” while running bomb parts for the Taliban.

Counterinsurgent warfare Allied military forces and advisory teams, organized to support police forces and fight insurgents, can bolster security until indigenous security forces are competent to perform these tasks without allied assistance.

In the U.S. Armed Forces, only the Special Forces (SF) are expressly organized and trained for counterinsurgent warfare and advising indigenous forces. (My emphasis)

Ahhhh, well, that answers one of my earlier questions but gives rise to others, I’m afraid:

So what is the role of the other 120,000 (non-Special Forces) deployed? And why do we always need more of them if they are not trained for the COIN strategy being used, in the first place?

And, if the success of counterinsurgency is so important then why are we allowing private contractors, who hire retired college campus security guards, to train the Afghan security forces when we have Special Forces, far better trained to carry out that supposedly “mission-critical” activity. Perhaps training illiterate police recruits isn’t “special” enough . . . ??

Securing borders Border crossings must be restricted to deny terrorist insurgents a sanctuary and to enhance national sovereignty.

Hmmmmmmm . . . . this one isn’t happening in eighteen years, let alone eighteen months. But, if the Afghans figure it out, maybe they’ll share their findings with Texas and Arizona . . .

Executive authority Emergency conditions dictate that a government needs a single, fully empowered executive to direct and coordinate counterinsurgency efforts. Power-sharing among political bodies, while appropriate and necessary in peacetime, presents wartime vulnerabilities and gaps in coordination that insurgents can exploit.

Tell that to the Warlords attending the Peace Jirga . . . or to the “Mayor of Kabul,” for that matter. Also notice, once again, that according to Best Practices, Karzai should actually be in charge, here; strictly by the book, it’s his job to counter an Afghan insurgency. Lately, he’s showing signs of “getting” that part, at least . . .

So that’s it, in a nutshell – Best Practices in Counterinsurgency. To round things out, Dr. Sepp also threw in a few “Counterinsurgency Don’ts.” Here are a few of the historic counterinsurgency mistakes that Sepp cites as tried-and-true prescriptions for COIN failure taken from real-life examples:

• Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them. Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image—with historically poor results. (My emphasis)
• Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy-of-force assignments to sparsely populated hinterlands.
• In the Republic of Vietnam, the Saigon Government’s leadership was unsettled. Leadership was unequally divided in the allied ranks between the U.S. Ambassador, the CIA Chief of Station, and the senior U.S. military commander.
• Impatience, masked as aggressiveness and “offensive-mindedness,” drove the Americans to apply counterinsurgency methods learned from conflicts in Greece and Malaya, but without taking into account the differences in the lands and people.
• The Americans ignored the French experience in Indochina, particularly the general ineffectiveness of large-unit operations.

Sound familiar? It doesn’t take a military genius to recognize a really awful strategy — heck, even some members of Congress are starting to gag on this one, which means it’s probably way past time to show them some love for their efforts to get us (and Afghanistan) out of this mess.

[tags]insurgency, counterinsurgency, COIN, Military Review, Kalev Sepp, PhD, Afghanistan, War on Terror[/tags]

“Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas.” ~Shoseki

If you are among the vast majority of Homo sapiens who ascribe to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and therefore believe that you are the unique result of millions of years of genetic mutation, adaptation and natural selection, you will probably agree that our success as a species is in large part due to our endowment with and constant refinement of our forbears most successful survival traits.

For example, it is no longer necessary for many of us to actually scavenge for food or, upon finding some, to quickly determine whether what we have found will make us stronger – or kill us. Nevertheless, we still embody that slow accretion of knowledge and discriminatory skill, encoded in our DNA, thanks to the success of our hunter/gatherer ancestors who “lived to forage another day” – and procreate. A more subtle inheritance from that era might reasonably be a primacy of autonomous thinkers – by that I mean something along these lines: if three hunter gatherers stumble upon the same mushroom patch and two of them partake while one abstains, and, if later, the two mushroom-eaters keel over, we can be pretty certain that the hungry one will have learned a valuable lesson about the “herd mentality.”

Whether we recognize it or not, our hunter/gatherer skills are still relevant and active in the more abstract realm of the “quest for Truth” (for lack of a less hackneyed phrase).

Welcome to the 21st Century

Recently, we have been bombarded by events that require close scrutiny and informed analysis if we are to survive and advance. The 9/11 Attacks, the Invasion of Iraq, collapsing world economies, the long slog in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and the general militarization of America, anti-immigration hysteria, Islamophobia, the Gulf Oil Disaster — to name a few — are recent complex developments that challenge our survival in real ways. These types of events are not unique in human history, and, as a species we have surmounted and survived worse; but a key factor in our ability to cope with such challenges, to parse them and pursue successful outcomes is knowing the Truth.

We are told that we live in the “Information Age” which implies that there are vast resources and readily available tools for virtually anyone on the planet with Internet access to learn about or contribute to a body of knowledge on every conceivable topic. But “information” is not always – or even often – true; unfortunately we rely on “information” to make decisions of great consequence about things that we know very little about.

We live in a very advanced and complex society that, in many cases, requires quite specialized training and knowledge to fully understand one small aspect of it. Our brains aren’t currently capable of grasping the entirety of our world so we must rely on each other in a distributive fashion. To revisit my earlier example, that means that we must rely on the fellow who watched his companions eat poisonous mushrooms and die to tell us which mushrooms we should avoid at all costs. That also means that we must put a lot of trust in our erstwhile survivor to give us accurate mushroom information because, if he happens to recall some old grudge or covets your well-made spear, he might conceivably tell you that the poisonous mushrooms are the very ones to eat.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, we humans still seem to carry some ancient, instinctive reverence for truth that leads us to probe and test information until we are satisfied that we have done all we can to arrive at it. We will abide many foibles in our fellow humans but lying still crosses an existential line into taboo. As parents, teachers, partners/spouses, employers and other authority figures we all eventually get around to sending the age-old message “I don’t care what else you do, just don’t lie to me” that we learned as children. We even employ some primitive, animal instincts to discern truth-telling reading “body language,” perspiration, voice characteristics, agitation and eye contact. Evidently, arriving at the truth has been a major contributor to our evolutionary success as a species and is firmly embedded in our DNA as a “keeper” survival skill.

* * *

Congruent with the Internet revolution in information access, the so-called “corporatization of America” has made great strides to the extent that the US Supreme Court has officially recognized corporations’ “rights” to influence US political campaigns with donations limited only by their corporate “buying power.” So, while we still have a representative democracy, it’s not always so easy to figure out who our elected officials actually represent.

Corporations, now firmly ensconced in the political cat-bird seat, bring along with them their own corporate culture and style of communication, otherwise known as PR – Public Relations. Those elected officials to whom corporations provide patronage, in their turn, are keen to embrace corporate customs to demonstrate how well they might fit into corporate culture once their tenure in government is over.

As anyone who has ever spent any time in the “belly of the PR beast” will tell you, PR is all about image, perception and spin in service of creating mass appeal. Mass appeal in turn can be arrived at from two opposite directions: natural “mass appeal” qualities can be persuasively played up such that the masses readily recognize a product or service as desirable and associate the messenger with the product; or, from the opposite direction, a desire for a specific product or service can be generated in the masses by the same masters of persuasion. The difference, of course, is in the starting point: one approach anticipates what the public wants/needs and supplies it (or alleges it does); the other starts with what the corporation wants/needs and gins up a market for it.

And all of this goes on in the background while American taxpayers struggle to try to make sense of governmental mixed messages, erratic policy-making and rapidly increasing distance from the lives and concerns of ordinary American citizens. We are drowning in a sea of half-truth and downright lies that is every bit as toxic and threatening to life as we know it as the nasty glop that is fouling the Gulf of Mexico.

* * *

What I find interesting, lately, is that nerves are starting to fray on both sides of the truth divide –evidently lying is almost as taxing as being lied to, in the long run.

A great example is the recent commotion caused by the New York Times’ investigative “scoop” revealing America’s discovery of vast mineral wealth lying under the rubble of Afghanistan. I already devoted a good amount of space to the particulars of that story and don’t need to dredge that up as the issue has received ample media play. I’m more interested in the update to the story of the author’s, and the Times’, reaction to the general media outcry that the story was a transparent piece of propaganda, planted in the Times, to distract from increasing public and Congressional uneasiness with the progress of the war in Afghanistan.

The blogosphere and some left-leaning media types immediately objected that the American public was being played for fools that would not see through such a sophomoric example of Pentagon PR. The chief beef was that this was old news in “breaking news” clothing. Most critics questioned the timing of the story, coming as it did at the end of a bad news cycle for the war, the Karzai Government, the Obama administration and the Gen. McChrystal’s Kandahar project. Oh yeah . . . and one day before Gen. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before Congress about the war.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote that the story “suggest[s] a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wrote that “the timing of the revelation is enough to raise some suspicions in my mind.” And Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell wrote that “there’s less to this scoop than meets the eye.”

A day later, the Times’ author, James Risen, mounted a fairly tasteless and condescending “defense” of his article in an interview with Yahoo’s John Cook, who characterized Risen as “increasingly hostile.” Evidently, Risen believes that the “best defense is a good offense” because the interview was primarily an attack on bloggers rather than a substantive defense of his article. According to Cook, Risen later phoned back to apologize for his bad behavior but not before stating that “Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas.”

As Jason Linkins reported on the Huffington Post, the published statement was Cook’s truncated version of Risen’s actual words which were that the aforementioned bloggers were “j**king off in their pajamas.”

Continuing in that vein, Risen said:

“The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people’s stories.” “Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don’t know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.”

As John Cook explained about that one:

“Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.”

Cook , in an effort to get back on point, asked for Risen’s reaction to claims that his story covered “old news.” Risen’s response:

“If it wasn’t news, then why didn’t anybody write about it?”

As Cook and many others pointed out, the story had been previously reported by McClatchy Newspapers and Agence France Presse and the central claim — that Afghanistan had a vast vein of valuable mineral deposits — was discussed publicly by Hamid Karzai just a month ago. Risen’s response to that was to insist that “no one picked up on it.”

The final question remaining is whether or not Risen’s story was a piece of pro-war propaganda planted by the Pentagon. Risen adamantly denies that the Pentagon “leaked” the story to him (despite ready quotes from Gen. Petraeus.) The “truth” about the sources that Risen volunteered in the interview, though, did little to allay suspicions about the intent of the article. Risen cited Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who was active in Afghanistan in the 1980s a source. Evidently Bearden is acting as a consultant to one Paul Brinkley who is a deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of the survey team that is currently appraising the Afghan Motherlode for the Pentagon.

The Bearden/Brinkley connection is quite a story unto itself; Steve Hynd of Newshoggers heard alarms going off in his head when he read of Risen citing Bearden as a source and his reporting on that angle is a must-read.

Leo Tolstoy once said that:

“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

Suffice it to say that this story is still in need of a good scrubbing

* * *

As I said earlier, we are swimming in a swamp of lies, from multiple sources and for multiple reasons. We are under constant assault by partisan think tanks and political pundits; military officers masquerading as policy analysts and media experts; “embedded” journalists reporting on what the military lets them see of our wars; political hacks with secret agendas like The Long War or a theocratic America, a news media that hammers us daily for months with frightening reports that America is seething with Anti-Incumbent Rage and Anarchic Fever Dreams, yet when primaries are held 98% of incumbents win (and those who don’t have bigger problems).

Lies, hyperbole and disinformation have become so endemic in our culture that they come marching at us naked, these days, much like the overstatements and false claims of advertisers and spinmeisters.

We are complicit in those lies, too; we know that advertisers are lying to us and we still give them our money. We know that politicians are lying to us and we still give them our votes and our money. We are not less evolved, we know quite well when we’re being lied to but many of us are too weary or jaded to care. As for the corporations and the government they’ve bought, lying is a non-issue, a lesser sin rationalized as expedient for the greater good. As Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine used to say: “We’re the Phone Company, we don’t have to care.”

[tags]truth, information age, New York Times, James Risen, Jason Linkins, John Cook, Steve Hynd, Lily Tomlin[/tags]

There is nothing in the political world quite as melodramatically theatrical as “America at War;” and since America has been “at war” for most of my long life, I’ve had quite a gutful of it. I understand that war news, by its very nature tends toward the melodramatic, especially the bits that are fed to the public who are expected to bankroll military adventures. The thing that I hate the most, though, is the condescending deviousness of war hawks who assume that the majority of taxpayers are not terribly bright pawns with short memories and next to no common sense.

The past week, in the US, provides a colorful real-time example of how very gullible our military and civilian leaders believe us to be (or, if you prefer, how bogged down in epic failure they are in Afghanistan). Ever since the fiasco known as the Marjah Offensive, with its comical “government-in-a-box” mission, the news out of Afghanistan has been unrelentingly awful. Just about every assumption behind our troops’ marching orders has been terribly flawed and delivered abysmal results; unfortunately, those mistakes are measured in the lives of Americans squandered on faulty premises and bad leadership.

By last week, all such bad news had reached a tipping point and some analysts were predicting that the situation in Afghanistan was “Iraq, 2006” all over again, and that public and political support for continuing the war would surely falter, if not collapse, soon.

We had all recently digested such news as:

• Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatening to defect to the Taliban;
• NATO support falling apart — the Dutch government collapsed over the issue of supplying troops, Germans were revolted over the notion the fight was to protect the free market, the British are sending up distress signals that costs of continuing are unsustainable for them, and the Poles demanded a withdrawal schedule a few days ago;
• More American troops committing suicide than being killed by their enemies;
• Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s admission that the US is killing a “shocking number” of innocent civilians in its efforts to “protect” them;
• Lack of any Afghan support for the Kandahar Offensive Operation Process; Karzai’s recent Peace Jirga turned into such a resounding mandate for an immediate cease-fire that Karzai had to leave most of the proceedings out of the official report that would go to his US handlers;
• President Karzai has announced his intention to release prisoners being held in Afghanistan if there is insufficient evidence (per Afghan law) to hold them (good for him) plus he has petitioned the UN to remove Mullah Omar from their terrorist “blacklist”;
• The Taliban has undergone a resurgence due in part, it turns out, to generous donations from the US; evidently a goodly portion of the shrink-wrapped pallets of US dollars that were meant to purchase Afghan “hearts and minds” wound up rearming the Taliban who are now carrying out audacious attacks on US military installations and cutting a murderous swathe through the ranks of local officials that they deem collaborators;
• Recent reports allege that the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, ISI, has been training and arming the Taliban in Pakistan. Pakistan, of course, denies this but, in his efforts to network with Pakistan, Karzai has been making decisions that seem to be pointedly directed at courting them;
• One of the most recent of such moves by Karzai was the removal/forced resignation of two cabinet ministers who were considered Western pawns by some (and valuable assets by others). One of those ministers was Amrullah Saleh who headed the Afghan Intelligence Agency (NDS) and was allegedly despised by Pakistan’s ISI.

Needless to say, things are not shaping up the way that the White House and the Pentagon dreamed they would, in Afghanistan; so it is, therefore, not terribly surprising that the White House had its feelings hurt when the New York Times published a critical report on our deteriorating position in Afghanistan. I read the Times report when it first came out, and, given the hubbub that ensued, I read it again several times afterward, to make sure I hadn’t missed something. At no point did I experience a “well, blow me down” moment. As a matter of fact, the article only served to make better sense of some “inconvenient truths” that have been emerging over the past six months or so.

Nevertheless, the report obviously hit an administration “nerve” because, within hours, Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, was leveling some pretty incendiary charges at the New York Times, calling the information inaccurate “if not fallacious.” By Sunday Rice had cooled down some and shared with the Fox News Sunday audience that:

“We don’t have any basis for seeing it as the New York Times portrays it.” We have every confidence that the U.S. and NATO, working with our Afghan partners, will defeat the Taliban. Hamid Karzai remains an important partner in the Afghan government.”

If those words truly represent Susan Rice’s viewpoint on our prospects of success in Afghanistan, that puts her in an ever-shrinking minority of neocon war boosters, old-guard military hacks and Tea Party Pollyannas – and someone might want to seriously reconsider her foreign policy cred. Speaking for the White House, David Axelrod steered clear of any such “blue skies” storyline stating that:

“As to this issue, understand that Mr. Saleh [formerly director of the Afghan intelligence service] was fired by president Karzai so that may help color some of his interpretations. And Mr. Karzai rejected his interpretation of this, at the end of the day, however we have always said the future of Afghanistan will involve political solutions, just as it did in Iraq, and ultimately if the Taliban is willing to lay down arms… that would be part of the solution. Meanwhile we are putting pressure on them everyday.”

What a difference a day makes! According to a report in The Nation a few days ago:

“Saleh has been a favourite of the CIA, even as he drew fire from the Pakistanis. The agency is said to have pressured Karzai to keep Saleh in the intelligence post last year after he won re-election. Saleh had openly expressed his support for Karzai’s political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who like Saleh is a Tajik and was mentored by the charismatic militia leader Ahmed Shah Masud. Indeed, Saleh is said to have a portrait of Masud displayed prominently on the wall of his office at the National Directorate of Security, as the Afghan spy service is known.”

In 24 hours, Amrullah Saleh was demoted from valuable US asset, well-positioned within the Afghan administration, to disgruntled employee, willing to lie to discredit his boss.

Dear New York Times: All is Forgiven

Can We Be of Service?

What with a looming double-dip recession, further erosion in Obama’s approval ratings, and a Secretary of Defense threatening to take a poleax to the Defense budget, things were not looking very promising for the Empire on Sunday night. But never fear, come Monday morning the Pentagon pulled a remarkable, game-changing rabbit out of its helmet and now everything is looking much, much better.

Ironically it was, once again, the New York Times bearing the glad tidings that dusty old, worthless Afghanistan, riddled with graft, corruption and drugs, with a crackpot hoodlum at the helm is sitting on a gold mine (literally) and has been elevated, overnight to international “player” and coveted prize.

This revelation was timely, to say the least, since the increasingly shrill criticism of US efforts, both at home and abroad, has been that it is decidedly not worth it and that the Afghans are decades, if not centuries, away from being able to manage their own affairs – one of our ostensible objectives. Just when all was looking inescapably grim, the discovery of untold, untapped mineral wealth provided Afghanistan with a ticket to the 21^st century – and a reason for the Pentagon to hang tough.

James Risen started his article for the Times with this breathless lead-in lest anyone miss the enormity (or the point) of his earth-shattering news:

“The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.”

“The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.”

One can almost hear cries of “Stop the Presses!” and Extra! Extra! Read all about it . . . except that some of it is “inaccurate if not downright fallacious. The United States did not “discover” the deposits — the Russians did; the $1 trillion dollar number is an educated guess, at best; and these are undeveloped resources in an undeveloped country so any actuaql impact on the Afghan economy probably won’t occur in our lifetime.

Blake Hounshell, of Foreign Policy, did some heavy-lifting to put the Pentagon’s Eureka! into perspective by plowing through the actual geological reports that provided source material for the Times article. According to Hounshell:

“The story goes on to outline Afghanistan’s apparently vast underground resources, which include large copper and iron reserves as well as hitherto undiscovered reserves of lithium and other rare minerals.”

“Read a little more carefully, though, and you realize that there’s less to this scoop than meets the eye. For one thing, the findings on which the story was based are online and have been since 2007, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. More information is available on the Afghan mining ministry’s website, including a report by the British Geological Survey (and there’s more here). You can also take a look at the USGS’s documentation of the airborne part of the survey here, including the full set of aerial photographs.”

“Nowhere have I found that $1 trillion figure mentioned, which Risen suggests was generated by a Pentagon task force seeking to help the Afghan government develop its resources (looking at the chart accompanying the article, though, it appears to be a straightforward tabulation of the total reserve figures for each mineral times current the current market price). According to Risen, that task force has begun prepping the mining ministry to start soliciting bids for mineral rights in the fall.”

As it turns out the original, original surveys were conducted by Russian occupation forces who obviously decided that neither the minerals nor Afghanistan were worth it, because they left the surveys with the Afghans who, distracted by other things, have been sitting on them for decades. Evidently, some Afghan under-secretary-of-something-or-other thought the Americans might take the bait and sure enough, the Americans came with their high-tech geological gizmos that measure the mineral veins and – if we are to believe Risen—spit out an appraisal real-time. Evidently the topic came up during Karzai’s most recent face-to-face with Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, in May; when Karzai delivered his own back-of-the-envelope valuation of the Afghan mineral deposits claiming that the value is more like $3 trillion. Whatever . . .

Risen admits that it could take years to develop a mining industry, but he also guesses that the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

Continuing on in the “Happy Days Are Here Again” vein, none other than Gen. David Petraeus weighed in with this:

“There is stunning potential here. There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

Risen goes on to speculate that:

“The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.”

And cites Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines as stating that:

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy.”

The Pep Rally continues with similar comments like:

“The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.”

And we all know how hard it is to “astonish” American geologists . . .

The Pentagon (probably with Human Terrain reports in hand) evidently leaked an internal memo to Risen that asserts that:

“ . . . Afghanistan could become ‘the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’ a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.”

Way to get those social media types on board . . .

Eventually, though, Risen has to get to the real point and the poor man can’t be over-subtle given the Empire’s low opinion of the average taxpayer’s mental acuity, so here’s the red meat:

“American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.”

“So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.”

“Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.”

“Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts.”

And who better to sort out such “endless fights” and safeguard the infant Afghan democracy? And who’s already on the job? Well, it might take a long time but, by golly, we have to keep this treasure chest out of the hands of the Taliban – or we’re toast.

And if that isn’t compelling enough for you, there’s more, the really, REALLY scary part:

“American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.”

There’s even something for the “Greenies:

“Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. The big question is, ‘can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?’”

That’s rich . . .

* * *

Despite the “Breaking News” feel to all of this, there is a background story that is somewhat less sensational. In January, 2010 the Wall Street Journal carried a somewhat different story on the Afghan Gold Rush from Matthew Rosenberg of their London bureau:

“Afghanistan plans to delay awarding concessions for a major iron ore deposit and sizeable oil and gas reserves as part of a broader effort to stamp out corruption, the country’s finance minister said.”

“Of particular concern, said Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal in an interview Tuesday, is a major iron ore deposit in central Afghanistan that last year attracted bids from smaller Chinese and Indian companies. “We’ve put a hold onto the bidding process; it will have to be re-bid,” he said.”

“Putting the Afghan economy in order is one of the major issues to be addressed at a conference Thursday in London on Afghanistan’s future. Foreign ministers from 56 countries along with representatives from the United Nations and other international organizations involved in stabilizing Afghanistan are to attend, and European diplomats have in recent days said they are keen to hear Mr. Zakhilwal’s economic plans for the coming years.”

“Mining could be a major economic contributor. But the Mines Ministry has long been considered among Afghanistan’s most corrupt government departments, and Western officials have repeatedly expressed reservations about the Afghan government awarding concessions for the country’s major mineral deposits, fearful that corrupt officials would hand contracts to bidders who pay the biggest bribes — not who are best suited to actually do the work.”

“Mr. Zakhilwal said those concerns are shared by many inside the Afghan government, too. ‘I was among those who have been opposed to opening up new bids,’ he said. ‘It was not just the issue of corruption – but that is a real issue. We also need to do a review of how contracts are awarded, what lessons we’ve learned, what kind of transparency is needed to make the next best step.’”

“Still, he said there was no evidence of corruption in the awarding of the one major concession given out in recent years, a copper mine being set up by two Chinese firms, China Metallurgical Group and Jiangxi Copper Group.”

“That project attracted bids from all over the world, and there have been persistent reports of bribes being paid to secure it. Mr. Zakhilwal termed those reports “rumors” and held up the deal – under which the companies agreed to build schools, clinics, markets, mosques and a power plant — as a model for how Afghanistan could award future concessions.”

Memo to Pentagon: it would appear that the Afghans think that they are in charge of the Mother Lode. It would also appear that the Chinese are actively buying up development rights in Afghanistan and, so far, no mushroom clouds. So, if you want to stay in Afghanistan forever that’s your business, just find somebody else to pay for it.

Sincerely,

A Taxpayer