President Obama’s official timeline for surging our military presence in Afghanistan still has fourteen months to run; in that timeframe, there is (in some quarters) an expectation that the US and NATO will manage to quell increasing insurgent attacks, convince Afghan government officials that corruption doesn’t pay, plant the framework of a 21^st century democracy (i.e., “Government-in-a-box) — while simultaneously training tens of thousands of illiterate drug addicts to serve as guardians of the peace in the National Police Force – the “mission critical” key to success in Afghanistan, we are told. So far, the insurgent’s “Shadow Government,” alive and well throughout Afghanistan, has “Government-in-a-box” beat all to hell according to this recent report:

“The Taliban-led insurgency’s “operational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding,” said the report, adding the “strength and ability of (insurgent-run) shadow governance to discredit the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government is increasing.”

Complicating that already tall order for the next 14 months, is the apparent need for one last face-saving summer offensive on the Taliban’s “spiritual home” turf in Kandahar – the military equivalent of “territorial marking” — so that we can get the hell out of Afghanistan without being called “losers.” General McChrystal has already telegraphed his impending assault and added that this will be “no D-Day or H-hour” — believable enough if the muddled precursor Marjah “offensive” is any indication. The Kandahar Offensive, of course is the public battle that provides distraction from the secret “special operations” program of targeted assassinations and “things that go bump in the night” that have the civilian population of Afghanistan quite effectively terrorized (and blaming the Coalition forces for their state of terror).

Surely, as far as President Karzai (and his brother Wali) are concerned, the offensive in Kandahar is unnecessary and politically unpopular. No one in Kandahar is feeling particularly beset by the Taliban, whom they describe as their “Afghan brothers.” Flying solo, Karzai has already launched a fairly sensible-sounding endgame of diplomatic meetings with Taliban leaders that has drawn in Afghanistan’s neighbors, in region – Pakistan, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia — even Russia is said to have dropped in and out. NATO is signaling its weariness with America’s version of the War on Terror; only the US seems out-of-the-loop on winding down, like staggering guests who don’t realize when “the party’s over.”

Who’s Zooming Who?

One of the persistent complaints about our strategy in Afghanistan has been that we don’t seem to have one. No one is very clear on our mission or what victory might look like. Others are getting ever clearer on the need to end it, whatever “it” is. To that end, Hamid Karzai is scheduled to visit the White House, next month and, as Ahmed Rashid has written in the Washington Post, it’s pretty much “crunch time” for our Nobel Laureate President to decide whether he’ll come down on the side of continued war or a regionally-brokered peace in Afghanistan. Here’s a snip from Rashid’s article:

“According to U.S. and Afghan officials, Karzai’s first question when he arrives will be whether Washington supports his efforts at reconciliation with the senior Taliban leadership. In January, the United States and NATO agreed to reintegration — bringing in Taliban foot soldiers and low-level commanders — but Washington balked at full reconciliation, saying it wants to see the Taliban weakened militarily over the next six to 12 months before considering talks with its leaders.”

“Karzai’s representatives, however, have spent the past 12 months holding talks about talks with senior Taliban representatives in several Arab Gulf states. Taliban leaders have made clear that they want to talk directly to the United States, and Karzai knows his discussions with the Taliban cannot go further without public U.S. support and a commitment to engage. The Afghans want a clear answer from Washington that they will lead any future negotiations.”

The position that “Washington balked at full reconciliation, saying it wants to see the Taliban weakened militarily over the next six to 12 months before considering talks with its leaders” smacks of a bout of magical thinking on the part of the Administration. The US military has had close to ten years to a) find Osama bin Laden b) eliminate Al Qaeda and (c) break the back of the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, is, of course, still at large; Al Qaeda has been routed in Afghanistan only to resurface in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, etc; and, as of, six months ago, in October, it was reported that the our nine years of efforts have only resulted in a resurgent Taliban that is growing exponentially and nearing military strength. Here’s a bit from that report:

“WASHINGTON – A recent U.S. intelligence assessment has raised the estimated number of full-time Taliban-led insurgents fighting in Afghanistan to at least 25,000, underscoring how the crisis has worsened even as the U.S. and its allies have beefed up their military forces, a U.S. official said Thursday.”

“The U.S. official, who requested anonymity because the assessment is classified, said the estimate represented an increase of at least 5,000 fighters, or 25 percent, over what an estimate found last year.”

“’The rise can be attributed to, among other things, a sense that the central government in Kabul isn’t delivering (on services), increased local support for insurgent groups, and the perception that the Taliban and others are gaining a firmer foothold and expanding their capabilities,’ the U.S. official said.”

And then there’s this article from March, 2010 handily blaming NATO for the Taliban resurgence:

“‘The Taliban has reaped a recruiting bonanza the past two years, capitalizing on NATO’s stagnant posture in southern Afghanistan by increasing fighter ranks by 35 percent,’ U.S. officials say.”

“The increase is one reason NATO forces, in an ongoing offensive, are meeting strong resistance as they fight town by town to gain control of the Taliban stronghold in the city of Kandahar and in Marjah in neighboring Helmand province.”

“It also shows the enemy’s resilience in an eight-year insurgency. In the face of air strikes and NATO raids that kill scores of Taliban at a time, the former rulers of Afghanistan still have been able to pad their ranks.”

And, finally, we have this “straight from the horse’s mouth”:

“The Taliban commander, who uses the pseudonym Mubeen, told the Associated Press that if military pressure on the insurgents becomes too great, ‘we will just leave and come back after’ the foreign forces leave.’”

“Despite nightly raids by NATO and Afghan troops, Mubeen said his movements have not been restricted. He was interviewed last week in the center of Kandahar, seated with his legs crossed on a cushion in a room. His only concession to security was to lock the door.”

“He made no attempt to hide his face and said he felt comfortable because of widespread support among Kandahar’s 500,000 residents, who, like the Taliban, are mostly Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic community.”

“’Because of the American attitude to the people, they are sympathetic to us,’ Mubeen said. ‘Every day we are getting more support. We are not strangers…’”

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, all of this suggests to me that, perhaps, we have been dead wrong about everything Afghan and should reconsider our approach; and I’m not talking about switching from traditional combat to Gen. McChrystal’s odd concoction of public and clandestine “black ops” warfare tricked out as “counterinsurgency.” These Middle East adventures have been propaganda campaigns and it’s pretty much time to send a message to Congress and the Pentagon that the American people are not as stupid, naïve and gullible as they are banking on.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . .

Our military is currently engaged in two separate endeavors in the Middle East that they are ill-equipped to take on as part of their mission – one is PR and the other is nation-building. Bungling these aspects of the conflict do us no good at all; in fact, it’s likely that they do permanent damage to America’s diplomatic stature in the world. Our military is nothing if not persistent, however, so the nonsense goes on until someone has the presence of mind to order them to stop.

Consider some of the more recent SNAFUs and ask yourself if these nonsensical events wouldn’t get you quickly fired if you tried to pull them in your “real-world” job:

The Marjah Offensive – by now many of us (who care to know) discovered that the much-touted Marjah Offensive was a world class Snow Job, not to mention an embarrassing non-event that made Coalition forces look ridiculous. Much is made of the illiteracy of the Afghan population but those illiterates saw through the Marjah Offensive and had a good laugh at the Coalition’s expense. From the distortion of the unincorporated villages of the Marjah district into a bustling city of 80,000 and a hub of Taliban support to the appointment of the ex-con, expatriate governor who hasn’t set foot in Afghanistan for 15 years and who’s afraid to leave home unless he’s in an Osprey, Marjah was an unmitigated pack of lame lies aimed at whipping up some enthusiasm for the War in Afghanistan in a world grown weary of it.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald did a great job of summing up the Marjah propaganda strategy and telling us what to expect ahead of the Kandahar Offensive:

“The Independent declared on February 9, 2010, that General McChrystal wants the Marjah offensive to “be one of the most significant in the country since the fall of the Taliban in 2001″ and, of Obama’s war strategy, said that “Marjah looks like being its first major — and possibly decisive — test.” The BBC quoted a NATO official who proclaimed that Marjah “was ‘probably the definitive operation’ of the counter-insurgency strategy” and “this operation could potentially define the tipping point, the crucial momentum aspect in the counter-insurgency.” Time helpfully informed us that “U.S. officials believe it will mark a turning point in the war.”

“Now that that ‘make-or-break decisive test’ has failed (or, at best, has produced very muddled outcomes), did the Government and media follow through and declare the war effort broken and the strategy a failure? No; they just pretend it never happened and declare the next, latest, glorious Battle the real ‘make-or-break decisive test’ — until that one fails and the next one is portrayed that way, in an endless tidal wave of war propaganda intended to justify our staying for as long as we want, no matter how pointless and counter-productive it is.”

Sure enough, The New York Times rolled out the “trailer” for the Kandahar Offensive this week, breathlessly pronouncing it:

“The looming battle for the spiritual home of the Taliban . . . shaping up as the pivotal test of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, including how much the United States can count on the country’s leaders and military for support, and whether a possible increase in civilian casualties from heavy fighting will compromise a strategy that depends on winning over the Afghan people.”

Notice that the Times is already anticipating an “increase in civilian casualties from heavy fighting” that could complicate “winning over the Afghan people.” Of course, those who care to dig out details on where we are in our battle “to win over the Afghan people” will know that the Kandahari’s have already spoken and the only possible way for us to “win over” the 90% of Kandahari’s who despise us is to stay away from their city.

Another fact that could easily slip past us is the mention of Gen. McChrystal’s strategy of keeping American troops outside of Kandahar and send the Afghan Army in to do the fighting as a test of their ability to be effective counterinsurgents. That should yield interesting results . . .

The Morning After

OK, so we declare a “decisive, pivotal, turning point of a win” in Kandahar – and then what? According to Jason Ditz at AntiWar.com the Pentagon just released an ominous report to Congress explaining how it might be disastrous to turn over a “liberated” Afghanistan to the hand-picked, but nonetheless, evil and corrupt (if not drug-addled downright crazy) Hamid Karzai. Here’s that:

“The Pentagon has issued a new report to Congress about the ongoing war in Afghanistan, warning that the Taliban is increasing the size of their insurgency even as support for President Hamid Karzai remains sparse in the most important regions.”

“In fact of the 121 districts cited as ‘key’ to winning the war in the report, only 29 of those districts had populations seen as even sympathizing with the Karzai government.”

“The report pointed to the enormous levels of corruption in the Karzai government as a major problem fueling this lack of credibility, and warned further that the political will to reform was ‘doubtful.’”

Funny how the same problems are cropping up in Iraq, too? War is over, democratic government has been installed and yet . . . insurgent attacks are on the rise, and the government can’t get out of it’s own way. Could it be that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan actually want the US (or at least their treasury) to leave before they’ve sucked a lot more US dollars out of them. And could it be that the Pentagon is only too happy to report that the State Department picked a bad “puppet” to install as head of state in Afghanistan and now the military will have to hang around to ensure peace for the couple of years it’ll take to effect regime change?

Along those lines, The Washington Post published an interesting report, this morning, on recent US manipulations of the political scene in Kandahar. Having failed to budge Wali Karzai out of his position of control in Kandahar, the US has decided to try an end-run around him by supporting the prodigiously unimportant Governor of Kandahar, Tooryalai Wesa, another expatriate “outsider” like the newly installed Governor of Marjah. The Post describes Wesa as “a mild-mannered academic who spent more than a decade in Canada and is considered by many Afghans to be ineffectual.”

The American thinking behind the sudden infatuation with Wesa is described this way:

“In the hope of pushing power brokers such as Karzai to the sidelines, American officials are trying to infuse Wesa and his government with more clout and credibility. They see better governance as a central part of a U.S.-led effort that has brought thousands of troops to the region for a summer offensive against the Taliban.”

“But the government headed by Wesa has severe problems of its own. It remains understaffed, is viewed by many as corrupt and does not reflect the province’s tribal mix. Karzai and other allegedly corrupt political bosses who dominate Kandahar show no sign of giving way.”

“’Wesa is a weak governor,’ said Rahmatullah Raufi, a former general and Kandahar governor.

Nevertheless, the US knows best and is busily indoctrinating Governor Wesa in anticipation of turning Kandahar over to him after our “pivotal” win there this summer.

“To bolster Wesa’s beleaguered office, U.S. officials plan to hire about two dozen Afghan staff members, to be split with the mayor. American helicopters ferry Wesa to meetings, where U.S. officials take notes on his progress. They hope that Wesa’s attempts at grass-roots organizing, combined with an infusion of funds into the province, can earn some support from a skeptical public.”

My money says Wesa will be dead sooner rather than later. As Rahmatullah Raufi, former general and Kandahar governor put it: “If Ahmed Wali Karzai wants him to die, he will die. If he says, ‘Live,’ he’ll live.”

The Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Most of this public relations carnival can at least be quasi-rationalised, but some just gets recycled until it’s totally meaningless. Like the saga of Hakimullah Mehsud, current leader of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who has been “assassinated” and confirmed dead seven times – since last August.

“According to a senior member of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency Hakimullah, who was “confirmed” killed in January and then assumed to be gravely wounded, and who was “confirmed” to have died of his injuries in February, is alive and “basically ok.’”

And of course there was the recent high-fiving in Baghdad over the alleged assassination of two legendary leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq by a joint US – Iraqi force. That news might have been more earthshaking if it had not included the name of “Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of the group’s umbrella organization, the Islamic State of Iraq.

Here’s al-Baghdadi’s resume:

March 9, 2007 — the Interior Ministry of Iraq claimed that al-Baghdadi was captured in Baghdad on, which claim was later recanted

May 3, 2007 — the Iraqi Interior Ministry said that al-Baghdadi was killed by American and Iraqi forces north of Baghdad

July, 2007 — the U.S. military reported that al-Baghdadi never actually existed. A detainee identified as Khaled al-Mashhadani, a self-proclaimed intermediary to Osama bin Laden, claimed that al-Baghdadi was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group, and that statements attributed to al-Baghdadi were actually read by an Iraqi actor.

Autumn, 2008 – US military officials reported that although the previous al-Baghdadi was fictional, Al Qaeda had filled the “Baghdadi vacancy” with an actual Al Qaeda leader.

April 23, 2009, Agence France-Presse reported that al-Baghdadi was arrested by the Iraqi military, and on April 28 the Iraqi government produced photos to prove it to skeptics. The claim was denied by the Islamic State in Iraq which according to SITE Institute released an apparently genuine recording of al-Baghdadi denying the government’s recent claims. However, the Iraqi government refuted this claim and insisted that the man captured was indeed Baghdadi.

Which brings us to April, 2010 in which the previously killed/captured al-Baghdadi somehow got away from his Iraqi captors, last year, and wound up in a safe-house in Tikrit where he was, once again, apprehended and killed.

Pardon my skepticism but I think that there is more truth in this statement from The Washington Post account than in any of the foregoing:

“The two top leaders of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq were slain in a U.S. airstrike over the weekend, a decisive tactical victory for American and Iraqi forces and one that provides Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with additional political leverage at a crucial time.”

“Maliki stands to gain from the slaying of the men — Masri was perhaps the most wanted person in Iraq — at a time that is critical to his political future. He has made restoring security and weaning Iraq from dependence on the U.S. military centerpieces of his bid to keep his job once a new parliament is seated. Maliki’s bloc, which came in second in the elections, securing 89 seats, must woo other coalitions in order to secure the 163 votes needed to appoint a new prime minister.”

How timely. Of course the announcement was met with skepticism in Iraq — Maliki’s government has in the past falsely reported the death and the capture of Baghdadi, most recently last spring. It never retracted the claim back then, making the most recent announcement a sort of back-handed admission that the previous story was total bunk. Oh well . . .

Now, however, enjoying the last word, the US has confirmed via DNA analysis (please, gimme a break) that the story is true and Gen. Ray Odierno and Vice-President Biden quickly did a little victory dance in the end zone.

I really only have one question remaining and that is “Do our leaders really believe that the American people are stupid enough to be taken in by all of this inane and inexpert propaganda?” But, come to think of it, they probably care less if we “buy” it, as long as we’re willing to keep paying for it . . .

[tags]propaganda, Gen. McChrystal, Gen Odierno, Vice-President Biden, Marjah Offensive, Kandahar Offensive[/tags]

In the wake of the 2007 scandal regarding deplorable conditions at the supposedly renowned Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Army promised to do better by its veterans and established a program they call Warrior Transition Units (WTU). On paper, WTUs were meant to provide a therapeutic, supportive environment where injured soldiers could recuperate and return to duty or gently process out of the Army. There are currently about 7,200 soldiers at 32 transition units across the Army, with about 465 soldiers at Fort Carson’s unit. Unfortunately, the word from traumatized veterans accepted into the program is that going back to Iraq would be preferable. Needless to say, that’s a pretty powerful statement coming from Iraq veteran.

The New York Times recently interviewed Specialist Michael Crawford who served as a sniper in Iraq and came home a suicidal wreck after suffering several concussions during IED explosions and witnessing several platoon mates burn to death. Crawford’s mother recognized her son’s life-threatening distress and, together, they did what it took to get Crawford into the WTU at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs.

Once he was admitted into Fort Carson’s WTU, Crawford’s situation quickly spiraled downward until the Crawford’s worst fears were realized: Michael attempted suicide. (At least four soldiers in the Fort Carson unit have committed suicide since 2007, the most of any transition unit as of February, according to the Army).

Crawford’s treatment plan in the WTU consisted of daily handouts of medications for anxiety, nightmares, depression and headaches that made him feel listless and disoriented; and a weekly session with a nurse case manager. In addition, patients are expected to keep up a semblance of military rigor despite the fact that they are heavily drugged. The noncommissioned officers in charge of the units run them like boot camp, haranguing and disciplining patients when they arrive late to formation or violate rules.

“These guys are still soldiers, and we want to treat them like soldiers,” said Lt. Col. Andrew L. Grantham, commander of the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Carson. But many soldiers at Fort Carson complained that discipline and insensitive treatment by cadre members made wounded soldiers feel as if they were viewed as fakers or weaklings. In many cases, the noncommissioned officers have made it clear that they do not believe the psychological symptoms reported by the unit’s soldiers are real or particularly serious.

This recent report about a Brig. General, at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, who ordered his troops not to commit suicide, demonstrates why it may be “Mission Impossible” for the military to come up with an effective, consistent approach to mental health issues:

“FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Thousands of soldiers, their bald eagle shoulder patches lined up row upon row across the grassy field, stood at rigid attention to hear a stern message from their commander.”

“Brig. Gen. Stephen Townsend addressed the 101st Airborne Division with military brusqueness: Suicides at the post had spiked after soldiers started returning home from war, and this was unacceptable.”

“’It’s bad for soldiers, it’s bad for families, bad for your units, bad for this division and our Army and our country and it’s got to stop now,’ he insisted. ‘Suicides on Fort Campbell have to stop now.’”

Some might put down Michael Crawford’s experience in the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Carson as an isolated incident involving an admittedly disturbed man, but The Times reporters that covered his story didn’t stop there, they also conducted:

“ . . . interviews with more than a dozen soldiers and health care professionals from Fort Carson’s transition unit, along with reports from other posts, [which] suggest that the units are far from being restful sanctuaries. For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers. Because of their wounds, soldiers in Warrior Transition Units are particularly vulnerable to depression and addiction, but many soldiers from Fort Carson’s unit say their treatment there has made their suffering worse.”

“Some soldiers in the unit, and their families, described long hours alone in their rooms, or in homes off the base, aimlessly drinking or playing video games.”

As Spec. Crawford put it, “It’s just a very dark place.” Compounding the problem is the ever-lengthening “wait time” for a medical discharge. The services are being especially careful with discharges because of the ramifications of long-term care or disability payments that might have to be provided by the Veteran’s Administration.

In Crawford’s case, he:

“ . . . has been waiting more than a year for his medical discharge. As his anxiety and depression have worsened, so have his problems in the unit. His rank was recently reduced to private in punishment for overstaying leave and using marijuana.”

“But things are looking up, his mother believes: he will be able to stay with her in Michigan while awaiting his discharge. His mother, Sally Darrow, has already seen one son commit suicide. She believes that Michael would become the second if he had to return to Fort Carson and the transition unit.”

“’At home, with family and schoolmates, he’s dealing with things better,’ Ms. Darrow said. ‘He’s not safe there.’”

The “Suck It Up” Therapy

Several reports last year exposed military foot-dragging on medical discharge as well as committing to diagnoses of PTSD. Salon ran a report of a soldier who inadvertently taped a conversation between him and his Army therapist in which the therapist admitted that he and his colleagues were under tremendous pressure to NOT render a diagnosis of PTSD. The soldier, Sgt. X, had been given a tape recorder, by his wife, to tape the session because one of Sgt. X’s symptoms is a serious memory problem and she was unexpectedly unable to accompany her husband to his appointment. She simply wanted to have a record of the session that she could not attend as usual.

During that session, when Sgt. X repeatedly pressed his doctor, a Dr. McNinch, to explain why he didn’t believe that Sgt. X was suffering from PTSD brought on by his service in Iraq, this was his doctor’s unusually candid reply caught on tape:

“‘OK,’ McNinch told Sgt. X. ‘I will tell you something confidentially that I would have to deny if it were ever public. Not only myself, but all the clinicians up here are being pressured to not diagnose PTSD and diagnose anxiety disorder NOS [instead].’ McNinch told him that Army medical boards were “kick[ing] back” his diagnoses of PTSD, saying soldiers had not seen enough trauma to have ’serious PTSD issues.’”

“‘Unfortunately,’ McNinch told Sgt. X, ‘yours has not been the only case … I and other [doctors] are under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD. It’s not fair. I think it’s a horrible way to treat soldiers, but unfortunately, you know, now the V.A. is jumping on board, saying, ‘Well, these people don’t have PTSD,’ and stuff like that.’”

Of Course, Heads Must Roll

Call it a coincidence but, on the heels of the New York Times piece came the news, on Sunday, that Noel Koch, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Wounded Warrior Care and Transition policy had been relieved of that position. Koch said that he was asked to step down by Clifford Stanley, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel.

According to Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked Stanley to do a full review of the Pentagon’s personnel and readiness office. “He was given wide latitude to make needed changes so that our men and women in uniform are better served,” said Morrell. “What you’re seeing is that the overhaul of that vitally important office is under way.”

For his part, Koch said he believes the decision was unjust and that he resigned “under duress” after Stanley told him he had no confidence in him. The Pentagon had no comment on that statement.

Problem Not Responding to Appropriations

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is “just baffled” by the fact that millions of dollars and revamped veteran’s programs have not stemmed the ever-increasing tide of military suicides. Just this morning, this report ran in Army Times:

“Troubling new data show there are (sic) an average of 950 suicide attempts each month by veterans who are receiving some type of treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department. Seven percent of the attempts are successful, and 11 percent of those who don’t succeed on the first attempt try again within nine months. The numbers, which come at a time when VA is strengthening its suicide prevention programs, show about 18 veteran suicides a day, about five by veterans who are receiving VA care.”

Something is definitely NOT working here despite whatever tweaks to programs have been tried. There are now more veterans killing themselves than are killed in battle.

The military tend to dance around the obvious “suspects” of multiple deployments and abbreviated dwell time (time spent at home between deployments); basically, because they are strapped for volunteer troops and have to deploy and redeploy to keep “boots on the ground” in multiple war zones. And whereas the Pentagon has a virtual blank check for analyzing weapons systems and planning the Long War out to 2050 and fun stuff like that, it doesn’t seem to have the time, money or inclination to do a deep dive into the suicidal troops problem.

Fortunately for the troops, someone in Washington, Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) does give a tinker’s dam and proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill for a study into the military suicide boom.

As reported in Air Force Times in July of last year, Sen. Benjamin Cardin, (D-MD) sponsored an

“By voice vote, the Senate approved a Cardin-sponsored amendment to the 2010 defense authorization bill that would order an independent study by the National Institute of Mental Health on the potential relationship between suicide or suicide attempts and the use of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and other behavior-modifying prescription drugs.”

Aha! Now there’s an interesting premise; especially given reports that the military is handing out psychotropic drugs like candy to those in combat zones as well as those returning with PTSD. In addition, many of those drugs have the well-documented side effect of increasing suicidal thoughts in teen-agers and young adults, up to 24 years of age. Sen. Cardin might be on to something here.

Sure enough, according to an article in TIME, the historic level of suicide in the military just happens to be running concurrent with another “first” in military history:

“For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.”

“The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.”

The rationale for all this doping?

“Using drugs to cope with battlefield traumas is not discussed much outside the Army, but inside the service it has been the subject of debate for years. “No magic pill can erase the image of a best friend’s shattered body or assuage the guilt from having traded duty with him that day,” says Combat Stress Injury, a 2006 medical book edited by Charles Figley and William Nash that details how troops can be helped by such drugs. “Medication can, however, alleviate some debilitating and nearly intolerable symptoms of combat and operational stress injuries” and “help restore personnel to full functioning capacity.”

“Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the “dwell time” at home before they go back to war — it’s possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. ‘This is what happens when you try to fight a long war with an army that wasn’t designed for a long war,’ says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration.”

“Nearly 40% of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 took psychotropic drugs — overwhelmingly, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft. While the Army cites failed relationships as the primary cause, some outside experts sense a link between suicides and prescription-drug use — though there is also no way of knowing how many suicide attempts the antidepressants may have prevented by improving a soldier’s spirits. ‘The high percentage of U.S. soldiers attempting suicide after taking SSRIs should raise serious concerns,’ says Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. ‘And there’s no question they’re using them to prop people up in difficult circumstances.’”

From the “Irony of Ironies” Department: military recruiters turn away prospective enlistees that are currently taking a prescription for anti-depressants. In order to be reconsidered for military service, they must be off of the drug for one year and have a doctor certify that they are functioning normally without anti-depressant drugs.

Adding a Degree of Difficulty

Suicide is one danger here but it’s easy to imagine others when combat troops are drugged. Here’s how one veteran put it:

“LeJeune, who spent 15 months in Iraq before returning home in May 2004, says many more troops need help — pharmaceutical or otherwise — but don’t get it because of fears that it will hurt their chance for promotion. ‘They don’t want to destroy their career or make everybody go in a convoy to pick up your prescription,’ says LeJeune, now 34 and living in Utah. ‘In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication. In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly.’ LeJeune says the medications — combined with the war’s other stressors — created unfit soldiers. ‘There were more than a few convoys going out in a total daze.’”

Now, I know, from personal experience, that drugs like Zoloft and similar SSRI anti-depressants require rigorous consistency on the part of the patient and regular follow-up by the prescribing physician. Doses need to be carefully titrated, over time, to the ideal dose and take upward of two months to produce a therapeutic result. It can be disastrous to discontinue such anti-depressants abruptly; patients must be carefully weaned from them. All in all, this class of anti-depressant is not a great candidate for a highly unstable environment where supply will almost certainly be sporadic and where many patients are young, naïve and stressed and likely to use drugs in un-prescribed ways.

Looking at all of that, I can’t avoid wondering if some of our troops odd behavior, (to include some collateral damage) that has been reported in Iraq and Afghanistan might not have some connection to the haphazard drugging of soldiers compounding the death and destruction that our troops are inflicting on themselves and their families and loved ones. One thing is fairly certain from my own Vietnam generation, these mental health problems don’t go away by themselves in the short-term or the very long-term for the veterans, their families, loved ones, friends and communities. Now is the time to deal with it, if it’s not already too late . . .

[tags]military suicide rate, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, Ambien, Zoloft, Clonazepam, Veteran’s Administration, PTSD, Pentagon, Noel Koch, Michael Crawford[/tags]

The city of Kandahar, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan is shaping up to be a “do or die” mission to prove, or disprove, history’s lessons about waging war in Afghanistan. If you’re a person inclined to bet on the outcome of World Affairs, odds of Coalition Forces pulling off anything even remotely resembling a decisive victory in Kandahar, this summer are about 1000 to 1.

Some of the difficulty, of course, lies in the definition of “victory” in Kandahar. If you are a fan of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose current fetish for counterinsurgency (or COIN, in military acronym-speak), you know, by now, that the General who doesn’t shy away from the media, defines his mission as securing the population as opposed to killing the enemy. Success, to date, on that mission? – not so much. To be fair, COIN is a new concept that has US troops’ heads spinning. COIN Rules of Engagement scare the crap out of conventional ground forces who have milliseconds to determine which Afghans are civilians; not a simple task in a country with the world’s highest weapons per capita ratio; or where local justice often involves false tips on suspected terrorists to settle local scores. Not to mention that, by several accounts, the ROE’s change frequently creating confusion which, in a war zone, can lead to high anxiety and trigger-happy behavior that, in the end, is highly counterproductive.

Countless publicized “mistakes” resulting in civilian deaths have done little to garner popular support for Coalition forces who, according to recent surveys conducted by the US in Kandahar City, are far more feared in Kandahar than the local police or the Taliban. Popular opinion among Kandaharis is overwhelmingly against military incursion in Kandahar and overwhelmingly for peace talks with the Taliban whom Kandaharis describe as their Afghan brothers.

So as time runs short, what’s a COIN General to do to quickly win over 90% of an unsupportive population? After all, public support is one of the main pillars of counterinsurgency theory. McChrystal’s “big idea” recently is to give Kandaharis something that they “really, really want.” Electricity . . .

Right now, in Kandahar, city residents have about six hours of electricity out of twenty-four – on the days that they are lucky enough to have it at all. As in many underdeveloped parts of the world, electricity is not supplied at night which translates into big night-time security issues. Most Kandaharis lock themselves in for the night and hope for the best. Businesses have great difficulty operating regularly with a sporadic supply of electricity which results in widespread unemployment. So it’s pretty much a no-brainer that if Kandahari’s were suddenly to find themselves in a city with adequate, reliable electric service, they might be quite impressed, indeed. They might be so impressed, by their government’s new efficiency (and uncharacteristic altruism) that they might just change their minds about supporting the government and its Coalition Forces. And we could claim victory and get the hell out, on schedule . . .

As I said, earlier, this is not a brainiac moment for the General. Fifty years ago, the US decided to bring the twentieth century to Afghanistan in the form of the Kijaki hydroelectric dam in Northern Afghanistan, which, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran pointed out in the Washington Post, “ . . . has been a symbol of unfulfilled American ambition in Afghanistan from almost the day it was inaugurated half a century ago.” (For the whole ridiculous history of the Kijaki Dam fiasco, Chandrasekaran’s entire article is a must-read, if for no other reason that it sheds light on Afghan skepticism over anything that the US is trying to sell them.) Needless to say, Kijaki is currently supplying very little electricity in Afghanistan so improvements would be most welcome to the inhabitants of Kandahar. As one Kandahari merchant put it: “We keep praying for some light at night.”

A Diplomat and A Soldier Walk Into a Bar . . .

Now, even the General isn’t crazy enough to think that the Kijaki dam and the infrastructure that sort of supports it could be repaired, upgraded and productive in the month he has left to win 90% of the “hearts and minds” of Kandahar and mold them into fervent grassroots supporters of COIN. But still, he knows he’s on to something with the electricity angle; he just needs some bold, immediate, easy-to-do miracle that will light up Kandahar – something on the level of the Electric City that has been built at the Coalition base on the grounds of the Kandahar airport – a 100 Megawatt Tower of Power supporting an oasis of air-conditioned housing for 25,000 troops who spend their leisure time:

“At . . . Kandahar Airfield’s famous Boardwalk, a square kilometer of fast-food franchises, cafes, electronics stores, basketball and volleyball courts and — courtesy of the Canadians — a hockey rink. The Boardwalk acts as a magnet for the 25,000 personnel on base who every evening head there to sip coffees, play basketball or hockey and watch rock concerts. For some, the ambience is more beach than bunker.”

“No Afghans — other than those with special security clearance — can access the entertainment. Even if any local could just walk in off the street, they would balk at the $5 lattes and scantily clad servicewomen and female contractors crowding the Boardwalk or diving into the sand during volleyball games.”

“I was expecting to arrive in a warzone but instead here I am wearing sunglasses in the sun and eating a baguette,” said Dimitra Kokkali, a NATO contractor newly arrived from Brussels. “On my first night I surprised my family by calling them from an outdoor rock concert.”

Clearly doable, with a little Yankee ingenuity . . . man of action that he is, though, the General isn’t overly interested in the long term, which has put him at loggerheads with his by-now-familiar in-country nemesis Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. According to a Washington Post article, McChrystal’s plan involves:

“spending $200 million over the next few months to buy more generators and millions of gallons of diesel fuel. Although they acknowledge that the project will be costly and inefficient, they say President Obama’s pledge to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011 has increased pressure to demonstrate rapid results in their counterinsurgency efforts, even if it means embracing less-than-ideal solutions to provide basic public services.”

Which just goes to show that sometimes “when the going gets tough . . . the tough get hare-brained.” It also tends to support my belief that Gen. McChrystal doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Afghanistan after (if) he can successfully extricate himself from the “Graveyard of Empires,” with career intact.

Eikenberry’s main objection to McChrystal’s plan is that “the Afghan government will not be able to afford the fuel to sustain the generators. Mindful of several troubled development programs over the past eight years, they want the United States to focus on initiatives that Afghans can maintain over the long term.”

“Proposals to buy generators and diesel fuel for Kandahar would be expensive, unsustainable and unlikely to have the counterinsurgency impact desired,” Eikenberry wrote in a cable to the State Department in Washington this month.

Which is a diplomat’s way of saying that this is a totally bone-headed, shortsighted plan, exactly like way too many that preceded it and failed miserably.

“Instead of buying fuel, Eikenberry and other embassy personnel want the electric utility in Kandahar to do a better job of collecting fees and to use the money to buy fuel for the generators it already has, which would increase supply but not eliminate the shortage. USAID is offering help through its Afghanistan Clean Energy Program, a $100 million effort to promote “green” power in the war zone. The agency plans to install solar-powered streetlights in the city this year. It is also paying for repairs to some of the existing generators, but it will not buy diesel for them.”

But then Eikenberry has the luxury of time to pursue sane solutions. McChrystal – not so much.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Gen. McChrystal but I don’t think he’s a stupid man – nowhere near as stupid as this idea might lead one to believe. I think he’s a desperate, narcissistic military careerist who got his shot at being an historic war-time strategist but is running out of time. Eikenberry will likely be there, in Afghanistan, mopping up, long after the Coalition has moved on to Iran or some other yet-to-be-militarized zone in the Middle East.

And it’s One, Two, Three What Are We Fighting For?

If one were to read an interesting little 5-page paper entitled “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency” produced by the one Kalev I. Sepp, in 2005, one might come to the conclusion that Gen. McChrystal is in a world of COIN trouble in Afghanistan. Now I recognize that Gen. McChrystal has a certain level of unquestionable expertise in these matters; however, so does Dr. Sepp who is an assistant professor at the Department of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. And who received a B.A. from The Citadel, an M.M.A.S. from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. While on active duty, he served in various command and staff positions in the continental United States, Latin America, Korea, and Germany. He recently worked on the staff of the Multinational Force-Iraq in Baghdad. Sepp is also co-author of “Weapon of Choice: Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan,” an official U.S. Army study of the first 6 months of that war.

If one has been following the evolution of Gen. McChrystal’s though on the well-publicized (well-telegraphed) Kandahar Offensive it is fairly easy to see that, although the General’s talking points demonstrate a fine grasp of the COIN Field manual, any indicators that he is on the right track are thinning out daily.

Americans can be such Pollyanna’s when it comes to foreign cultures, I’m sure that the General believed it was possible to “shura his way to success” in Kandahar. That didn’t happen, witness last week’s Shura debacle in which McChrystal and Karzai were heckled, harangued and told, in no uncertain terms, by Kandahari elders that their COIN idea was a no-go.

Then there was the US-Army commissioned survey of popular support for a COIN Offensive in Kandahar which amply demonstrated that “Kandaharis favor negotiations with the Taliban over continued fighting by a margin of 19 to 1. And four of five respondents said most members of the Taliban would stop fighting if given jobs.

[The study was conducted in December by Massachusetts-based Glevum Associates.]

Not to mention that counterinsurgency requires a major time commitment (e.g., “Rome wasn’t built in a day . . . ” After nine years of dithering in Afghanistan, time is running out.

Throw in the uptick in collateral damage and you have the makings of a “perfect storm” for utter COIN Fail in Kandahar. It’s not even as if there are no alternatives – this doesn’t have to be done, COIN doesn’t have to be lab-tested on the taxpayers’ dime.

As Michael Cohen so aptly put it on Democracy Arsenal:

“In short, all the warning signs about operations in Kandahar are blinking red. We have a civilian population that fears NATO intervention and is broadly sympathetic with the Taliban; we have a US military untrained in the ways of counter-insurgency and chafing at restrictive ROEs; we have an Afghan government that is hardly supportive of the mission and with Karzai’s drug-dealing brother in charge of Kandahar not terribly interested in good governance and ending corruption; and of course we have a vicious insurgent force more than happy to up the ante by murdering innocent civilians and using mosques as execution chambers.”

“This all seems like a very odd way to follow-through on the goal of protecting Afghan civilians or even extending the legitimacy of the Karzai government. Indeed, one might imagine that a uniformly opposed escalation in Kandahar that results in civilian deaths and only strengthens a disliked and corrupt local government is not going to be met with universal appreciation by Kandaharis. But increasingly it seems that the fetishization of COIN in the US military – and not facts on the ground – is what is driving strategy in Afghanistan.”

[tags]Kandahar, Kijaki Dam, Gen. McChrystal, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Kandahar Airport, the boardwalk, COIN, counterinsurgency[/tags]

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” Montaigne

I remember a day when the “Silly Season” in America was a brief period of a few months, roughly congruent with Congress’ summer recess. It earned its name due to the fact that newspapers, starved for newsworthy events, trotted out bizarre, sensational stories in an attempt to hold onto readers (and advertising revenue) until reality was back in session.

These days, we seem to be living through a protracted “Silly Season,” with no end in sight, which says something inescapably disturbing about our government, our media and/or ourselves as a nation. We seem to have lost any thirst or affinity for the truth; lies, hypocrisy and silly mythologizing have become so endemic that we don’t even seem to care about it, any longer. There isn’t even a need to be artful about lying, any more; the lines between fact and fiction are so blurred that no one is really taken to task no matter how laughably outrageous their fabrications are. We expect to be lied to; we are as shocked to uncover something smelling remotely like the truth, as prior generations were to uncover liars, cheats, quacks and mountebanks, in their midst, to be run out of town at gunpoint.

Some believe that this situation is attributable, in part at least, to mental fatigue brought on by the information overload and cognitive dissonance of 21^st century life. I’m not saying that lying and manipulation at the highest levels of government are something new (see McCarthy Hearings, Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Watergate, etc.) but I do believe that our reaction to the exposure of such costly and colossal lies that directly impact each American life has changed a lot. We no longer effectively call out liars because we are swimming in lies; from PR blitzes and false advertising to Sarah Palin turning American History into fractured fairy tales supporting her personal Onward Christian Soldiers mythology.

Although a lot more raw data is available to every Tom, Dick and Harriet with an Internet connection, to make of what they will; and many more global comparative perspectives can be found easily, on any topic, we haven’t yet learned to harness the Internet’s full transformative potential on substantive social policy issues. Though many believe the salvation of the truth lies in “citizen reporting” and “crowd sourcing,” so far, in my view, the Internet has served as a segregating factor dividing “mainstream media” (theoretically the province of more rigorous and professional reportage) from the more populist venues where “anything goes.” Some will argue that “anything goes” has thoroughly infected mainstream media (to its detriment) but when talking credibility and influence, the mainstream media still (barely) has the upper hand.

The Internet, at the moment, has become something of a modern “Amen Corner” providing a very democratic (yet segregated) venue for critical thought from all levels of the intellectual food chain. Unfortunately, that very democratic and global character serves to diminish some of the force of dissent that used to shape our society – for better or worse — by dissipating some of the energy that has driven “feet in the street” popular dissent and social reform in the past. There’s something seductive about the anonymity of Internet transactions that can, I’m afraid, lull some into believing that they “have taken action” by writing an anonymous rant on a subject, when they wouldn’t begin to countenance the notion of actual “in your face” activism in their communities. One heartening Internet development is that it has put activist organizations in closer contact with grassroots donors, which seems to be slowly changing the landscape in the world of influence peddling. Grassroots donors give smaller donations but there are a lot of them out there.

Also, the Internet is a great leveler of passions. Everyone in an Internet forum or chat room is “passionate” about something. It’s easy to be passionate on the Internet, one needs merely to put on the caps lock and rock and roll to become an outspoken proponent of anything from missile defense systems to home wine-making, with very little emotional or personal time investment. Then, too, having access to information on natural disasters, war and social breakdowns around the globe can easily lull us into believing that the lying and manipulation that we suffer locally is really “no big thing” by comparison.

After the recent release of the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video, many analysts expressed surprise that there was not a more widespread public gut reaction of outrage to those events; and minimal, if any, interest in the story on the part of the mainstream media. I’m afraid that the answer might be, simply, that we have become far too accustomed to little figures on a video screen being vaporized. On the same day that we learned of the deaths of the Reuters reporters in Afghanistan, we might also have read of a genocidal rampage in Sudan, or the death of a child bride in Pakistan who bled to death following her pre-nuptial genital mutilation. Evidently our human minds can handle only so much atrocity before protective mechanisms kick in, making knowledge of further atrocities considerably less atrocious.

We have also become quite comfortable with the notion of some of us being “above, or outside, the law” always for very good reasons, of course, usually having some connection to national security. Last August, Sharon Begley wrote a great (brief) piece for Newsweek entitled “Lies of Mass Destruction.” It appears that Begley, like me and millions of other Americans are somewhat “gob-smacked” at what appears to be a national epidemic of, at least gullibility, if not downright stupidity. We ask ourselves, again and again, how could the citizens of one of the most advanced countries on Earth possibly believe some of the utter rubbish and easily exposed lies that we are inundated with daily – enough so to form a national movement, the Tea Party, to proselytize and promote information that Tea Partiers can’t possibly be unsophisticated enough to believe?

The answers Begley uncovered are interesting and, unfortunately, quite believable. Here’s what she had to say (in part):

“’Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning,’ says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. ‘Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,’ he says, ‘people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.’ And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). ‘For the most part,’ says Hoffman, ‘people completely ignore contrary information’ and are able to ‘develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.’”

Begley then goes on to cite and link to a paper released by Hoffman last September, in the journal Sociological Inquiry:

“ . . . some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it ‘made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq . . . [T]he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11,’ they write.”

“’We refer to this as ‘inferred justification,’ says Hoffman. ‘Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). For these voters,’ says Hoffman, ‘the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.’”

“For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.”

We’re Number 1! Right?

One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that the political and corporate powers-that-be in America understand this piece of sociology and exploit it, daily, to get what they want – from each other, as well as the taxpayers who bankroll their “big ideas.” Once we accept how our belief systems operate, it frees us up to fully appreciate the magnitude of the lies that we are bombarded with – from the small, laughable ones to the big, fat lies that shape global destiny.

Here’s an example, from Bruce Kushnick, one of the “pack” of watchdogs at NeimanWatchdog.org. The lie is big and bold, falls into the American Exceptionalism category, is easily (as the reporter demonstrates) fact-checked and refuted, and is just so dumb that, as Kushnick points out, “it’s embarrassing.” Here goes:

“This is embarrassing. On April 6, Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon, said America is number 1 in broadband, or words to that effect. In Hong Kong, companies are now offering 1 gigabit speeds – 1,000 mbps – and at lower prices than the U.S.’s current broadband. America’s average speed is 5 mbps downloading and only 1 mbps uploading. So Hong Kong is 200 times faster in downloading, and a thousand times faster in uploading speed. But, we’re number 1, right?”

“Worse, we already paid about $320 billion for a fiber optic service that America never got. Verizon’s entire FiOS TV deployment is only in a few million homes; that’s it. AT&T’s U-Verse should be called reverse because it is based on the old copper wiring and will never reach high speeds.”

The comparison with Hong Kong, by the way, is quite apt; according to Arstechnica:

“Hong Kong and the U.S. are almost identical when it comes to GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity. Hong Kong is one of the densest spots on earth. One wouldn’t expect to see this level of price and competition across a country as broad and sprawling as the U.S., but one would expect it to be possible somewhere. Sadly, even something like 100 Mbps is hard to come by in most U.S. cities; 1Gbps is unknown, except to tiny specialty operators, even in a place like New York City.”

But We’re Definitely Number 1 in Health Care, Right?

This one is a little more worrisome . . . During the interminable health care reform debates we learned that many, in the US, believe that we have “the best durned health care system in the WORLD, bar none.” Remember? People were marching and carrying guns to protest anyone who wanted to tinker with it, in any way. Here’s the truth, about one small aspect of that disabling perception from California Watch:

As the world improves, pregnancy-related deaths rise in U.S.

“ . . . The fact remains that a lot of mothers have died in this country who probably would have been fine if they had lived in Italy (which has the lowest rate, 3.9 per 100,000), Sweden, or Albania.”

“This new information also provides a correction for the story on maternal deaths California Watch published in February: We said (based on the U.N. estimates) that California’s rate was higher than that of Kuwait or Bosnia. This study estimates that Kuwait’s maternal mortality rate is significantly higher (26.1 per 100,000), though Bosnia (at 11.8 per 100,000) still has California beat.”

“The U.S. doesn’t rank so well in any health outcome, so we’re pretty sure that finding is robust,” Murray said. “We are ranked around 40th for young and middle-aged mortality too. The thing about maternal mortality is it’s totally preventable – there’s no excuse for these rates.”

“These findings offer an opportunity to researchers to learn from the success of countries like Egypt, where the rate dropped 8 percent per year. What was Egypt doing right? It also reaffirms the great medical mystery of our time: What is the U.S. doing wrong?”

That last paragraph, of course, is key: “What was Egypt doing right?” Finding out, of course, would require Number 1 to get off its high horse and admit that we need to learn something from Egypt (for God’s sake). Isn’t that Islamic medicine? The answer to the second question in that last paragraph, “What is the U.S. doing wrong?” is, of course, in many influential spheres “Nothing. We have the best durned health care that money can buy.” Great, if you have money . . .

If the Economy Has Recovered, Why Am I Unemployed?

In a different realm, we have the happily “recovered” economy, we’re looking for Wall Street to hit 11,000. Unfortunately, the housing and employment markets are not participating . . . from PR Watch, there is this report:

“Foreclosure filings were at historic highs in March — 367,056 — an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, and the highest monthly total since 2005, according to RealtyTrac. Almost two years after the onset of the financial crisis with unemployment at historic highs, nothing is being done to put a stop to this on-going tragedy.”

“This month, CMD (Center for Media and Democracy) took a closer look at the housing issue. Our assessment also shows that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have disbursed $1.6 trillion in an effort to prop up the mortgage investment market through purchases of mortgage-backed securities and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt. The majority of this money was from the Federal Reserve, and was not subject to Congressional debate or approval.”

“Yet, at the same time, the U.S. Treasury Department has spent a small fraction of this amount, $90 million, on the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). HAMP is the only Congressionally-authorized program that is actively spending money and designed to prevent foreclosures.”

I guess “economic recovery” only applies to some people.

Just Pull Over Anyone Who Looks Illegal

Then there’s the argument that we need stricter immigration laws and armed vigilantes patrolling our Mexican border because the influx of illegal aliens is destroying our economy and introducing a frightening criminal element. Just this past Sunday, John McCain’s produced a fine piece of senatorial fearmongery in defense of Arizona’s passage of new legislation that basically establishes a “police state” there in which anyone can be stopped, without cause and required to produce their “papers.”

McCain, appearing on the O’Reilly Factor program tossed out a bevy of unsubstantiated, scary remarks:

“When asked by host Bill O’Reilly if he was comfortable with the possibility of racial profiling, McCain said he would be “very sorry” if it happened, but suggested it’s justified because of “the people whose homes and property are being violated. It’s the drive-by that — the drivers of cars with illegals in it that are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.”

“McCain added: “Look, our border is not secured. Our citizens are not safe.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16skilled.html?ref=us

So. Are we to believe elder statesman McCain, erstwhile resident of Arizona and duly elected Senator of that good state? or this recent report from The New York Times:

“According to a new analysis of census data, more than half of the working immigrants in this metropolitan area (St. Louis, MO) hold higher-paying white-collar jobs — as professionals, technicians or administrators — rather than lower-paying blue-collar and service jobs.”

[NOTE: The figures on jobs and earnings of immigrants in American cities are based on an analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute of census data for the 25 largest metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2008. The data from 2008 are the most current in-depth census statistics on immigrants’ places of residence and earnings; they also include the first year of the severe recession. The analysis includes legal and illegal immigrants and naturalized citizens. [My emphasis]

“Among American cities, St. Louis is not an exception, the data show. In 14 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York and San Francisco, more immigrants are employed in white-collar occupations than in lower-wage work like construction, manufacturing or cleaning.”

“The data belie a common perception in the nation’s hard-fought debate over immigration — articulated by lawmakers, pundits and advocates on all sides of the issue — that the surge in immigration in the last two decades has overwhelmed the United States with low-wage foreign laborers.”

“Over all, the analysis showed, the 25 million immigrants who live in the country’s largest metropolitan areas (about two-thirds of all immigrants in the country) are nearly evenly distributed across the job and income spectrum.”

“Cities with thriving immigrant populations — with high-earning and lower-wage workers — tended to be those that prospered the most. ‘Economic growth in urban areas has been clearly connected with an increase in immigrants’ share of the local labor force,’ Mr. Kallick said.”

Tax Cut Snake Oil

And finally, how could any good discussion of lying in America omit that “Whopper with Cheese” – lowering the deficit with tax cuts?

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00452

For this one, I turn again to NeimanWatchdog.org and Martin Lobel who presents a no-nonsense explication of this particular boner:

“Tax cuts are expenditures which increase the deficit. That simple fact, which is taught in every econ 101 course, seems to have eluded many Republicans, Tea Party members and the news media.”

“Tax expenditures, aka tax subsidies, special interest provisions, exemptions, deductions, credits, deferral of tax liability and preferential tax rates, mean the government collects less money that could be used to lower tax rates or provide for more accountable government spending. Although some tax expenditures can be justified on a cost benefit analysis, most cannot. Tax expenditures are not subject to the annual scrutiny appropriated funds receive and, even if they were, it would be very difficult to do a cost benefit analysis because of the lack of transparency and open ended nature of most tax expenditures. It’s like signing a blank check for services, but without the ability to determine whether you are getting any services or what they’re worth.”

“Tax expenditures cost the federal government over $1 trillion last year and the figure keeps growing faster than both mandatory and discretionary spending. That’s real money, even by government standards. Yet, we see almost all Republican and some Democratic legislators calling for more tax cuts (tax expenditures) while railing against appropriated expenditures. Why? Could it be that tax expenditures are worth more for the wealthy, who fund campaigns, than for middle or lower income taxpayers who are in the lower brackets and who have seen their income decline while the rich’s have increased?”

“When was the last time you saw an article pointing out the hypocrisy of a politician calling for tax cuts and cuts in expenditures? As long as the media fail in their responsibility, we will have an increasing number of people seduced by false promises that by cutting taxes and appropriated funds we can cut the deficit.”

But we ARE Number 1, aren’t we?

[tags]American Exceptionalism, Number 1, health care, immigration, John McCain, Sociological Inquiry, Sharon Begley, Steven Hoffman, lies, gullibility, mainstream media[/tags]

The past week must have been an extra busy one for the military brains entrusted with imposing Democracy and a greater appreciation for Western values on the population of Afghanistan. Granted, the path to Empire never runs smooth but, lately, American Counterinsurgency seems to be suffering from a severe, unrelieved bout of hiccoughs.

As we all know, by now – because Gen. McChrystal has told us so – counterinsurgency (or COIN) is definitely the way to go in Afghanistan. So far, COIN seems to be a fairly popular choice for the nine-year-old war, which has become distinctly unpopular in many quarters. COIN, unlike wholesale slaughter and vengeance, posits an eventual net-gain for the vanquished. They get to be invaded, humiliated, killed, disappeared and economically crippled while the evil in their midst is rooted out by superior forces; but, after all of that is over, they become the recipients of lavish aid and help in building a newer, more enlightened society that will better fit into the New World Order. And, as long as they behave, they will have friends in high places.

COIN is a great choice for a military that finds itself snarled in an endless slog that cannot be “won” by employing traditional warfare. In addition, COIN is a relatively new concept, for Americans, who don’t know exactly what a “COIN Victory” looks like. In other words, in a COIN war, there comes a time when the situation may still look “all f**ked up” to the uninitiated, but it is, in fact, the planned phase where the natives take over and “do or die” with boatloads of cash instead of boatloads of troops (see Iraq, 2010).

In the realm of Public Relations, COIN is a winner because it has a “kinder, gentler” feel to it. The people to be “liberated” will still be killed and maimed at alarming rates but it is better understood, by all, that those unfortunate victims are the spitting image of the enemy so “shit happens.” Besides, in COIN, military commanders make public apologies for such mistakes – a truly gentlemanly way to go.

Then too, COIN is altruistic and takes into consideration how the indigenous population live, what they want, what they care about, and honors their customs and religious beliefs. No, really . . . that’s straight out of the manual.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal: Patron Saint of Coin

The patron saint of COIN, is, of course, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama’s main man in the military, hand-picked to liberate Afghanistan’s poor, tired, huddled masses longing to be free… Just this week, the General took a brief respite from the trenches to speak at a military academy in Gay Paree. According to USA Today report, McChrystal was in Paris on a European swing aimed in part to thank NATO allies for their roles in Afghanistan. McChrystal will spend four days in Paris then on to Berlin.

Beyond the “touchy-feely” aspects of COIN that our media tend to promote, however, there is, as always, a darker side to counterinsurgency theory. Counterinsurgency, after all, was devised to deal with a sneaky guerilla enemy who doesn’t play by the rules; ergo, one can reasonably be expected to eschew the “rules of conventional warfare” in order to be effective against insurgents. Counter-insurgency is normally conducted as a combination of conventional military operations and other means, such as propaganda, psy-ops, and assassinations – none of which are particularly palatable to polite society, but necessary, nonetheless.

Counterinsurgency is a bold position for Gen. McChrystal to take (although he may have very limited alternatives, at this point) because, as B. H. Liddell Hart and military historian Martin van Creveld points out, the majority of counter-insurgency efforts by major powers in the last century have been spectacularly unsuccessful. The US military’s major experience in conducting counterinsurgency consists of the Vietnam War which would certainly rank near the top of Hart’s and Creveld’s lists of spectacularly unsuccessful counter-insurgency efforts.

So it is that Gen. McChrystal finds himself in the unenviable position of having to COIN his way out of Afghanistan with his career and honor intact. At least he has the support of his Commander-in-Chief, if not all others. A few days ago, President Obama, in an interview with Australian television ahead of an Asian visit, made the somewhat remarkable statement that “things in Afghanistan are getting better, not worse, and his plans to start withdrawing U.S. forces next year are on track.” Right . . .

The list of things that are getting demonstrably worse in Afghanistan, recently, is so long that it would take a pretty extraordinary list of gains to offset it to the point where a rational person could describe the net effect as positive. In an attempt at fairness, I’ve tried to make a list of positive developments in Afghanistan recently and the only one I could come up with is that the snow is beginning to melt. That despite the fact that mainstream media locks on to even a whiff of success there and bangs the drum loudly.

On the other hand, in just the past week, these events have taken place:

• Military withdrew (finally) from Korengal Valley. As Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post put it:

“The Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan was a transit route and occasional haven for insurgents, so U.S. commanders decided to drive out the enemy and turn the local villagers into allies. That was in 2005. By this week, after five years of intense combat that cost 42 American lives, U.S. troops had fought their way halfway down the steep-sided, heavily forested valley — which is just six miles long.”

“ That’s five years and 42 lives for three miles of terrain.”

The much ballyhooed Marjah Offensive, ( February’s disinformation package and dress rehearsal for this summer’s Kandahar Offensive) appears to have landed the population of Marjah in a scary limbo that can’t, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a success. Asia Times, this week, reported on current conditions on the ground in Marjah:

“People in Marjah . . . say 40 civilians were killed in Operation Moshtarak . . . In the worst incident confirmed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 12 civilians died when two rockets struck a house.”

“People do not visit from other places like before and many of the shopkeepers of Marjah say they have been forced to close for lack of business. One local trader, Sharifollah, selling fruit and vegetables at an important road intersection, said, ‘People do not come to buy their groceries during the day as they are afraid of the foreigners.’”

“The intersection is full of dust during the day and our roads have been destroyed by tanks. During the night, people do not come out because they are afraid of the Taliban … Only government officials buy anything from us.”

“One elder in Marjah, Hajji Moalem, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting by phone that during the day foreign and Afghan troops are in control but at night the Taliban emerge. ‘So how are the people supposed to live?’ he said.”

“The people of Marjah had expected rapid reconstruction work after the fighting ended, but have been disappointed that little has happened. Locals also say that promised compensation for losses from Operation Moshtarak has not been forthcoming.”

Basically, Marjah was a dot on the map comprised of scattered farmhouses. Kandahar is the second largest city in Afghanistan with a population of about 100,000. It’s hard to imagine things going considerably better there. Obviously the Afghans know that and are trying hard to put the brakes on that offensive.

• Back in March, Gen. McChrystal announced the strategy behind the Kandahar Offensive as:

“…do the political groundwork, so that when it’s time to do the military operation, the significant part of the population is pulling us in and supporting us, so that we’re not only doing what they want, but we’re operating in a way that they’re comfortable with.”

At a March 29th briefing in Kabul, another unnamed senior US military spokesman told reporters that one of the elements of the strategy for gaining control over the Taliban stronghold is to “shura our way to success” — referring to the Islamic concept of consultative bodies. In those conferences with local tribal elders, the officials said, “The people have to ask for the operation… We’re going to have to have a situation where they invite us in.”

Unfortunately, in April with only a month and a half to go, the population of Kandahar is saying not only “No” but “Hell, No.”

A Street in Kandahar

Earlier this month, McChrystal, as promised, travelled with President Karzai to a shura in Kandahar, evidently he was expecting the red-carpet treatment that all liberators should receive. Instead, he and Karzai were heckled and harangued and told that there was no popular support for a military offensive to oust the Taliban in Kandahar.

Now, if Gen. McChrystal consults his COIN Manual, he will find that that lack of popular support does not bode well for his upcoming operation. Just to solidify the locals resolve, the shura was followed by yet another “incident” in Kandahar, itself, in which US troops fired on a passenger bus killing at least four civilians and injuring 18.

Gen. McChrystal, every inch a leader, has since clarified that local tribal elders in Kandahar could “shape the conditions” under which the influx of foreign troops operated during the operation, but would not determine whether or where NATO troops would be deployed in and around the city.

Meanwhile, according to Gareth Porter of the LA Times, Special Forces deployed in Afghanistan have doubled this year; and, according to US Today article, this week:

“Deaths of Afghan civilians by NATO troops have more than doubled this year, NATO statistics show, jeopardizing a U.S. campaign to win over the local population by protecting them against insurgent attacks.”

“NATO troops accidentally killed 72 civilians in the first three months of 2010, up from 29 in the same period in 2009, according to figures the International Security Assistance Force gave USA TODAY. The numbers were released after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, issued measures to protect ordinary Afghans.”

Think there’s any connection?

[tags]Kandahar, President Karzai, shura, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, COIN, counterinsurgency, Taliban[/tags]

Urban Combat Simulator

I’ve taken some time to think about recent news coming out of the Middle East and have come to the inescapable conclusion that US Foreign Policy and the US military adventures that enforce it are a train wreck of epic proportions. Furthermore, it’s become nearly impossible to discern the “chicken” from the proverbial “egg.” What is pretty clear, though, is that this monster is an automaton fueled by American taxpayers and, as long as we, as a nation, wrap ourselves in the American flag, and smugly refuse to accept the utter hash that we have made of the Middle East the worse this mess will become.

Unfortunately for all of us, the thousands of miles and oceans that separate us from the scene of our crimes will not protect us from the blowback that we will be forced to live with for generations, even if we were to end it all, tomorrow. Just as the blithe open-pit burning of 21^st century “Better Living Through Chemistry” trash, in Fallujah, is beginning to produce three-headed Iraqi fetuses; so too, is the US military’s relentless program to create a world-class human killing machine “paying off;” churning out tens of thousands of American boys and girls that are so utterly disturbed that they have serious trouble living with themselves, let alone reintegrating with their families, friends and communities in the “real world” post-deployment.

We have been warned, throughout the week, that the monstrous behavior that was exposed in WikiLeak’s (DoD-authenticated) Apache helicopter flight record, that WikiLeak’s dubbed “Collateral Murder,” was no “isolated” incident – that the military action that it reveals is fairly mundane for the Middle Eastern War zones. Furthermore, that estimation is not the product of leftist anti-war zealots’ fevered imaginings, it is borne out by bravely candid US military members who have served in those theaters.

Here is a sampling of chilling eyewitness accounts recently compiled by Dahr Jamail of truthout.org who covered the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland:

“I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”

“During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot. The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry ‘drop weapons’, or by my third tour, ‘drop shovels’. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.”

Or this testimony from Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who told of taking orders over the radio:

“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…. One of the snipers replied back, ‘Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?’ The lieutenant colonel responded, ‘You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.’ After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.”

Or this from Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman:

“ . . . who told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take “trophy” photos of bodies.

“An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by. This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.”

These men were there, in the thick of it, with their fingers on the trigger. Not so, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who took a pot shot at WikiLeaks for their Collateral Murder tape saying:

“ . . . that the videos were akin to looking at war through a narrow lens and said that millions who have viewed it on YouTube and elsewhere could not understand what was going on before or after the airstrikes incidents.

“That is the problem with these videos. You are looking at the war through a soda straw and you have no context or perspective.”

“U.S. officials have said that the journalists were walking with or near people who were armed and in the proximity of a firefight.”

Unfortunately, by now, most sane people in Iraq are armed (or accompanied by someone who is) so carrying a weapon is no longer a reliable way to identify bad guys. I’m not military but my expectation would be that if the group on the street, in the film, were insurgents, they would not be blithely strolling down the middle of the street with an Apache gunship hovering overhead. Just a guess . . .

If this is “war through a soda straw” please spare me the wide angle view.

How Do We Get There from Here?

So how do nice young boys and girls from the relative lap of luxury that is America become homicidal sociopaths, so easily? A lot of evidence suggests that the answer lies in training and indoctrination with a little chemical help thrown in.

Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque covered the military’s “dirty little secret” DARPA back in 2006. Here’s a snippet of that:

“Pentagon dark lord Donald Rumsfeld is shoveling billions of tax dollars into the research furnaces of federal laboratories and private universities across the land in the wide-ranging effort to spawn “super soldiers,” fired by drugs and electromagnetic “brain zaps” to fight without ceasing for days on end. The work is being directed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).”

“The DARPA ‘war fighter enhancement’ programs — an acceleration of bipartisan bio-tinkering that’s been going on for years — will involve injecting young men and women with hormonal, neurological and genetic concoctions; implanting microchips and electrodes in their bodies to control their internal organs and brain functions; and plying them with drugs that deaden some of their normal human tendencies: the need for sleep, the fear of death, the reluctance to kill their fellow human beings.”

“The research is ‘very aggressive and wide open,’ says Admiral Stephen Baker of the Center for Defense Information. Indeed, the U.S. Special Operations Command envisions the creation of ‘iron bodied and iron willed personnel’ who can ‘resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation’ while relying on ‘ergogenic substances’ to ‘manage’ the ‘environmental and mentally induced stress’ of the battlefield. Their bodies juiced, their brains swaddled in Prozacian haze, the enhanced warfighters can churn relentlessly, remorselessly toward dominion.”

Pretty sci-fi stuff, except that this isn’t fiction . . .

Penny Coleman has reported on the military’s proposed use of propanalol – the so called ‘mourning after pill’ that, theoretically, diminishes the likelihood of PTSD in soldiers by numbing them to the psychological pain of taking part in morally repugnant activities – like murder – which don’t come naturally to human beings. As a matter of fact, here at home, we lock up people who have a lack of aversion to harming others and categorize them as socio- or psychopaths.

Penny Coleman has first-hand experience with PTSD because she is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

“Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. ‘Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli,’ says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, ‘and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely — and understandably — suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.’”

“By military standards, operant conditioning has been highly effective. It’s enabled American soldiers to kill more often and more efficiently, and that ability continues to exact a terrible toll on those we have designated as the ‘enemy.’ But the toll on the troops themselves is also tragic. Even when troops struggle honorably with the difference between a protected person and a permissible target (and I believe that the vast majority do so struggle, though the distinction is one I find both ethically and humanely problematic) in war ‘shit happens.’ When soldiers are witness to overwhelming horror, or because of a reflexive accident, an illegitimate order, or because multiple deployments have thoroughly distorted their perceptions, or simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time — those are the moments that will continue to haunt them, the memories they will not be able to forgive or forget, and the stuff of posttraumatic stress injuries.”

But here is one of the most shocking revelations that Coleman brings to the discussion:

“And it’s not just the inherent conscientious objector our military finds inconvenient: current U.S. military training also includes a component to desensitize male soldiers to the sounds of women being raped, so the enemy cannot use the cries of their fellow soldiers to leverage information. I think it not unreasonable to connect such desensitization techniques to the rates of domestic violence in the military, which are, according to the DoD, five times those in the civilian population. Is anyone really surprised that men who have been specifically trained to ignore the pain and fear of women have a difficult time coming home to their wives and families? And clearly they do. There were 2,374 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in 2005, a 40 percent increase over 2004. But that figure represents only reported cases, and, as Air Force Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, commander of DoD’s Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response pointed out, ‘Studies indicate that only 5 percent of sexual assaults are reported.’”

MSgt. Marshall Bradshaw, Army National Guard Suicide Prevention Program

Given all of this, it’s not surprising to learn that:

“Last year, mental illnesses accounted for 35 percent of the $22 billion spent on disability payments to veterans who served in the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and “global war on terror” eras, according to a Tribune analysis.”

“Compensating veterans with psychological scars has helped fuel a 76 percent surge in service-related disability costs since 2003, the Tribune found, burdening an already overwhelmed system and underscoring the reality that the biggest costs of war are not often immediate or visible.”

“Studies suggest costs will continue to soar. The percentage of military evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan that were attributed to mental disorders has increased sharply in the last four years, a recent Defense Department study shows. Another survey of about 100,000 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans found that 31 percent had been diagnosed with mental health or psychosocial problems.”

Two days ago, Bruce Levine reported on one of the military’s cock-eyed responses to the escalating problem of mental illness among deployed troops:

“One in six service members is now taking at least one psychiatric drug, according to the Navy Times, with many soldiers taking ‘drug cocktail’ combinations. Soldiers and military health care providers told the Military Times that psychiatric drugs are ‘being prescribed, consumed, shared and traded in combat zones.’”

“The Navy Times reporters Andrew Tilghman and Brendan McGarry also noted that there has been a large increase in military suicides. From 2001 to 2009, the Army’s official suicide rate increased from 9 per 100,000 soldiers to 23 per 100,000. During that same period, the Marine Corps suicide rate increased from 16.7 per 100,000 soldiers to 24 per 100,000.”

“A Military Times investigation of records obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) revealed that the DLA spent $1.1 billion on psychiatric and pain medications from 2001 to 2009, and that there was a 76 percent increase in psychiatric drugs. DLA records show:

• Antipsychotic drugs spiked most dramatically — orders jumping by more than 200 percent.
• Orders for anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills such as Valium and Ambien increased 170 percent.
• Orders for antiepileptic drugs (also known as anticonvulsants) such as Depakote, routinely used as psychiatric medications, increased 70 percent.
• 40 percent increase in antidepressants.

After citing those statistics, author Levine asks “just how insane is it to prescribe psychiatric drugs to deployed troops?” Then answers his own question with data:

“The Food and Drug Administration now requires that antidepressants must be labeled with a warning about increased risk of “suicidality” (which includes suicidal thoughts as well as attempts). This “black-box” warning is a result of research concluding that antidepressants double the risk of suicidality in depressed children, teenagers, and young adults as compared to equally depressed young people who are not taking antidepressants. Given meta-analyses (that I cite in Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic) which show that antidepressants are often no more effective than placebos, the potential risks of giving these drugs to soldiers in a war zone clearly outweigh any potential benefits.”

“Many of these psychiatric drugs prescribed to service members can also impair motor skills, reduce reaction times, and generally make one more sluggish — or what soldiers call “stupid.” So in addition to antidepressants potentially resulting in increased suicidality, other psychiatric drugs can make deployed soldiers feel less capable of protecting themselves and their buddies.”

I think all of us, who have not yet been indoctrinated or desensitized to human suffering need to get up on our hind legs and put an end to this – unless of course, we don’t mind taking the risk that tens of thousands of people who have been trained to be human killing machines might have the same difficulty discerning just plain folks in their home towns, that they have picking out innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or that allowing our family members and friends to go off to serve in the military is tantamount to delivering a death sentence to those who cannot live with themselves after the military “conditions” and “deploys” them. Or that we must get used to a shadow population of thousands of edgy veterans who are unable to sleep, unable to dream, unable to work and unable to love for the rest of their lives . . .

Here’s a little quiz (below) for the “armchair generals” among us who may have become a tad disillusioned by the way that our US military appears to be conducting itself over this first decade of The Long War. Here we go, but before you get started here’s a tip: Because this is war we’re talking about, there are no right, wrong or good answers – just questions.

1.) It is easy to identify enemy insurgents in Afghanistan. If you see the following behaviors chances are you’ve spotted an insurgent: a) anyone who acts nervous at checkpoints b) anyone digging a hole c) anyone who doesn’t instantly follow orders screamed in English d) anyone carrying something large, roughly the size and shape of an AK-47 or Grenade launcher e.g, camera equipment e) people who grab their guns when you break down their door in the middle of the night.

2.) The best intelligence sources on where insurgents can be found include: a) any Afghan willing to talk to you b) air-surveillance spotting of people with trucks/vans c) local drug lords d) little kids.

3.) The best way to minimize collateral damage is: a) stop killing people b) clean up the evidence when victims are obviously civilians c) deny it – the Taliban human shield defense works, well d) if all else fails – lie; say the bodies had already been murdered by someone local e.g., honor killings (if victims are female) or “tribal justice” if victims are male.

4.) The best ways to win “hearts and minds” are: a) leave the country b) run around shirtless with a “mock” headdress and shades like a Medal of Honor avatar c) build things like cutting edge water treatment plants that are too complex for the locals to operate d) burn your high-tech trash in open fires to leave your mark on future generations.

5.) The best in-country partners for a counterinsurgency are: a) local CIA assets b) ex-cons c) local arms smugglers d) popular, clueless charlatans.

Well. That’s enough for now, you get the idea . . .

Still Crazy After All These Years

Whatever the doctrine or mission or strategy that landed US forces in Afghanistan it’s increasingly hard to come up with a good rationale for staying, let alone surging . . . perhaps it’s battle fatigue; or the growing effect of an influx of Black Water-y commandos and their 21^st Century Art of Warfare program; or maybe it’s just plain old ignorance, bungling and mismanagement – more than likely it’s a combination of the three. Whatever the cause, there are legions of dead Iraqis and Afghanis to attest to the fact that “shit happens” in War and a no-win situation only gets more dismal when you throw more resources at it.

Back in the beginning of the century, I don’t think that anyone, no less anyone in the Bush administration, could have foreseen the absolute travesty and international humiliation that these wars would wreak on participant nations. Unfortunately, the rest of the world seems to be awakening and tiring of their supporting role quicker than we’d like. After all, it’s one thing to be Emperor and quite another to be a “friend of the Empire,” at the end of the day. Also, unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly evident that perhaps the American collective consciousness doesn’t really have the stomach or the inherent ruthlessness to be global conquistadors. It’s difficult to shape a population reared on a public image of honesty, integrity and generosity into a lean, mean permanent war machine. I’m not saying it can’t be done – just that it takes longer and more concerted effort to root out the innate common decency that has no place in a global domination program. In my opinion that’s why we’re doing such a crappy job of it and why it’s become necessary to contract so much of the job out to sociopathic gunslingers that cause more problems than they solve.

The Truth Will Set You Free

The Pentagon does its best to sanitize perceptions on the homefront; the mainstream media are now aligned within the military-industrial corporate structure to do their job of passing along the Pentagon’s “story” by embedding their carefully vetted stenographers reporters directly with the military. But who could have predicted, back in 2000, the pervasiveness of the Internet in American daily life and the democratization of access to the truth that has incontrovertibly exposed much of the hypocrisy and outright lying that is necessary to maintain popular compliance with and financial support for imperial adventures.

It’s a fact that there are governments and military-political players who would love nothing more than to pull the plug on the Internet because it complicates their lives and agenda so effectively. Constituents have short memories but the Internet is forever. We see hypocrisy exposed daily, in the simplest of terms, when those players contradict their own previously tendered facts or positions. We are so unused to dealing with our suspicions in such an immediate and direct fashion that there has been an unprecedented global field-day of truth-telling over the last few years. Many seem dedicated to exposing the truth for the sheer joy of doing it and, of course, such behavior must be stopped to protect our carefully crafted, largely mythic social institutions. Some of “the powers that be” go as far as to posit that average folks can’t handle or don’t recognize the truth because they don’t grasp the complexities behind it.

A good example of how this Battle of Truth plays out is the case of WikiLeaks, an Australian website, run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that gathers intelligence on all manner of things, especially governmental and corporate corruption, from anonymous sources and whistleblowers around the world.

Some measure of the veracity and authenticity of what WikiLeaks publishes can be gauged by the response and tactics of exposed parties.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (a Constitutional scholar, attorney and writer) has been covering developments on the War on WikiLeaks for a while now and I recommend reading all his articles on the subject, in their entirety, at Salon. Meanwhile here are a few choice clippings to make the point:

“All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government. As The New York Times put it last week:

“To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.” In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report — obtained and posted by WikiLeaks — devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled “Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?”, ways it would seek to destroy the organization.”

“As the Pentagon report put it: “the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe” have all sought to block access to or otherwise impede the operations of WikiLeaks, and the U.S. Government now joins that illustrious list of transparency-loving countries in targeting them.”

“ . . . the bulk of the Pentagon report focuses on documents which embarrass the U.S. Government: information which, as they put it, ‘could be manipulated to provide biased news reports or be used for conducting propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, perception management, or influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors.’ In other words, the Pentagon is furious that this exposing of its secrets might enable others to engage in exactly the type of “perception management” which the aforementioned CIA Report proposes the U.S. do with regard to the citizenry of our allied countries.”

Then on April 5^th, WikiLeaks outdid itself and published a 15-minute video that appears to be an official flight record film of an incident that occurred in Iraq in 2007 in which two Reuters employees were killed by US fire. The US pilots mistook the reporters’ camera gear as weapons and gunned down their entire party. When a van arrived to assist/remove an injured man, the van and its occupants (which included two children) were fired upon. Later, when the pilots realized that the US ground forces on the scene were carrying injured children out of the van they remarked it was the parents’ fault for bringing them there. You can view the video here but I warn you that this film is not for everyone – it is gruesome, shameful and disillusioning – so if you are sensitive to those things, you might give it a pass.

Reuters, the news agency that employed two of the victims, has been trying to obtain this video through a FOIA request for two years, but has met with a military runaround. At one point, it looked like the Pentagon would release the film to support their version of events but then backed off (probably when they reviewed it and realized they’d be incriminating themselves by releasing it). What the videotape clearly demonstrates is that military officials made outright false statements about what happened here and were clearly engaged in a cover-up.

As Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin reported:

“None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.”

“Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.”

“In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.”

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.”

“A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: ‘Come on, let us shoot!’”

“Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.”

Back in 2007, the military’s official version of the incident ran in the The New York Times the following day under the headline “2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias.” The article starts out with a lie – a big, bold one – easily refuted by anyone who had seen the video. The photograph heading the NYT article was a picture of the mangled van carrying a caption saying “Two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters were killed in Baghdad on Thursday. Their van, above, was hit near the scene of a firefight.”

The article then elaborates on that subtle fabrication stating:

“ Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.”

“The two Reuters staff members, both of them Iraqis, were killed when troops on an American helicopter shot into the area where the two had just gotten out of their car, said witnesses who spoke to an Agence France-Presse photographer who arrived at the scene shortly after their bodies were taken away.”

Clearly, untrue, the Reuters reporters were lying dead, on the street, some minutes before the van arrived and tried to help a dying man . . . watch the video.

The Times went on to say:

“The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.”

“’There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,’ said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.”

Actually, as the video illustrates, there is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a non-hostile force . . .

When Julian Assange, Editor of WikiLeaks introduced the video to The National Press Club, Monday morning, he made this remark:

“ . . . the helicopter crew approached its job as if it were a video game, not something involving human lives. Their desire was simply to kill. Their desire was to get high scores on that computer game.”

That certainly was the feeling that struck me the first time I saw the film. In an attempt at objectivity, I’ve watched it several times since, from various perspectives, but I find that I can’t rid myself of the sense of having witnessed a multiple murder.

I also have to agree, wholeheartedly, with blogger M.S. at The Economist’s “Democracy in America” blog who says:

“For me, there are two essential points here. The first is that we have this video because two of the people who were killed were Reuters employees. How many other civilians were killed in similar circumstances whose names we will never know, because they had no powerful Western employers to publicise their deaths and file FOIA requests?”

“The second essential point is the moment at 15:29 of the Wikileaks video, when someone, a pilot, gunner, or controller, says, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” Another voice answers, “That’s right.” No. Nothing could be more wrong. When you see children being evacuated from a van you’ve just destroyed, the thought running through your mind should be: What did I just shoot at? Who was in that van? Acknowledging the possibility that you have just killed a party of civilians for no good reason is, of course, terrifying. That is why the soldiers leap to find an excuse to evade the guilt, to blame the parents for their children’s deaths. And the military is more than happy to help them find an excuse. (In the after-action interviews, one soldier mentions a report, corroborated nowhere else, that a dark van had been dropping off militants in the area. The military interviewer replies: “That’s good information.” Good for what? Good for exonerating the military, of course.) Because, if soldiers were to accept the guilt for catastrophes like this one, they might be unable to continue to perform the mission at all.”

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/about/

That point is given credence by the record, at Iraq Body Count, of over 100,000 documented civilian casualties in Iraq since the War in Iraq began. A war that, itself, was predicated upon a lie. . .

UPDATE:  Huffington Post just reported the following:

“Military officials said they believed the video was authentic, but that they had to compare the images and audio with their own video before confirming it publicly.

“When pressed Tuesday on why the military had not released the video when other documents related to the investigation were made public, officials said they were still looking for it and weren’t entirely sure where it was.”

Hmmmmmmmmm . . .

[tags]WikiLeaks, Pentagon, CIA, cover-up, misinformation, disinformation, collateral damage, Glenn Greenwald, Dan Froomkin[/tags]

Here in the Northeastern United States Spring has arrived, bringing with it the primal derangements and high spirits historically associated with the season – unmufflered motorcycles, chest-beating, spontaneous Tarzan cries and stuff like that there. Evidently, roughly the same phenom is occurring in far-off Afghanistan, as well; witness the recent admission, by Gen. McChrystal, to the murder of “way too many” innocent civilians and President Karzai’s recent rant about “meddling foreigners” (I’m expecting another Karzai-Ahmadinejad pow-wow any moment now).

Karzai was most likely reacting to President Obama’s unexpected drop-in last week. Obama was “special –opped” into Bagram, in the dead of night, ostensibly to rally the troops for more murder and mayhem in Kandahar but also, according to reports, to deliver a good old American ass-chewing to “our man in Kabul.” Evidently, Obama is underwhelmed by Karzai’s efforts to clean up his corner of the world in preparation for its long awaited democracy transplant. As all good Americans know, Democracy cannot flourish in a corrupt environment – right?

Rationally, that would put Karzai on the line for one of the most epic turnarounds in human history, to include the public execution of many of his relatives and members of parliament. Karzai is 50, so chances are slim he’ll accomplish that mission in his lifetime; nevertheless, Obama would like to see him making more of an effort. For his part, I expect that Karzai’s primary focus is on “stayin’ alive.” Since the beginning of his US sponsorship, Karzai has been the subject of five newsworthy assassination attempts and probably numerous less spectacular attempts. Those attempts were not your lone sniper events, either; most involved rocket attacks, grenades and various other measures designed to take out a city block.

Karzai has always been reluctant to fly solo in his current position. When Obama stated his desire to get out of Afghanistan by 2011, Karzai countered that Obama’s timeline was off by about 15 years. Karzai knows better than anyone that if Coalition forces withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban will re-establish their government tout de suite. A year later (or closer to withdrawal, if you believe in that sort of thing), with that sword hanging over his head, Karzai has decided he better start talkin’ some trash against the US or he’s going to wind up the subject of some serious insurgent fatwa. To that end, Karzai took to the airwaves, this week, to express his concern over foreign meddling – a popular topic among Middle East purists, these days.

Karzai accused the West and the United Nations of wanting a “puppet government” and of seeking to make him “psychologically smaller and smaller.”

“They want me to be an illegitimate president,” he announced. “And they want the parliament to be illegitimate.”

He also blamed others for election fraud that, by all accounts, was orchestrated by his regime: “No doubt there was massive fraud. That was not done by the Afghans. The foreigners did that.”

In diplomatic circles this is known as ‘playing both sides against the middle’. Whereas the US should know better, by now, about the various pitfalls of installing and propping up such worthless puppets, Karzai, himself, might do well to read up on what happens when the puppet-masters lose patience. Or, better yet, what the local population is capable of doing to rid themselves of such buffoons.

Of course, Robert Gibbs sallied forth to express the administration’s “dismay” over Karzai’s accusations, calling Karzai’s words “genuinely troubling.” In addition, Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, quickly met with Karzai “to clarify what he meant by these remarks.” Could it be that the Obama Administration was caught off guard, here; and Obama, like Kennedy before him, is out of sync with national security state powers-that-be who are busily conducting their own “foreign policy”?

Right now, Karzai, (if he’s smart) will figure out a way to make his personal US network ties indispensible to the Taliban which will surely take back the government in Kabul at their earliest convenience. Upon their return, however, they will now receive US backing in return for their promise to shun al Qaeda — which explains the burgeoning local interest in capturing ex-pat Taliban members to ensure a place at the settlement table – ala Pakistan’s detention of Baradar and their refusal to extradite him to Afghanistan.

Stateside

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Americans are swallowing their daily dose of foreign policy propaganda so that they don’t lose patience, too soon, with our latest experiment in regime change. Most Americans have already bought into the notion that Afghan governmental stability = enhanced US National Security = victory over al Qaeda. As Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, so succinctly put it:

“The uncomfortable truth is that without indefinite foreign protection, the Government of Afghanistan would probably fall to the Afghan Taliban. But Americans should not equate the fall of that regime with “losing” to al Qaeda. Violent, Islamist extremist groups indigenous to this region threaten the Afghan government, not the American government. Because these radical groups lack the ambition — let alone the capacity — to threaten the sovereignty or physical security of the United States, they do not merit the strategic obsession that they currently receive. Washington’s continued fixation on groups that threaten Afghanistan, rather than America, presents a bigger threat to genuine American interests than those groups themselves can pose, especially since there is little assurance that 100,000 foreign troops can capture and kill more insurgents than their presence helps to recruit.”

“Rather than propping up a failed state, U.S. leaders should focus on countering the al Qaeda threat still clinging to life in this region. Technological advances over the past decade allow us to monitor places without having 100,000 boots on the ground. Furthermore, the blueprint for an effective counterterrorism approach is the initial U.S.-led invasion in 2001, when small Special Forces teams, working in conjunction with local militias, assembled quickly and struck effectively and cheaply at “real” enemies.”

“In short, Americans should reject the misguided belief that terrorists can only flourish in failed states like Afghanistan. After all, India, a major U.S. ally far more stable than Afghanistan, is fighting several internal insurgencies. Likewise, the very al Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11 not only found sanctuary in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, but also in politically free and economically prosperous countries like Germany, Spain, and the United States.”

America has a long and tawdry history of justifying its foreign adventures with a full array of fairly irrational strategic, economic, and ideological considerations. Strategically, we must not allow geographically important regions from falling under the sway of regimes that are either anti-US, or simply entirely self-interested. Otherwise, a shift in the balance of global military power could jeopardize American security. Economically, the US likes to maintain access to vital supplies of raw materials and keep markets open for American products and investments – the Free Market demands it. Finally, the United States must thwart communist terrorist expansion in the Third World Middle East to ensure that America and its democratic allies do not become islands in a global sea of hostile, totalitarian Islamist dictatorships.

These arguments can be (and have been) easily dressed up in American jingo-ism to rubber stamp some very dubious US foreign policy undertakings. Who hasn’t heard a particular regime described as a “keystone” or “force for stability” or “key to vital US strategic interests” in the region: think Shah of Iran in the Persian Gulf, Mobutu Sese Seko in Central Africa, and any number of South American despots. Reading the history, one would have to surmise that, actually, the entire globe (and parts of the Solar System) are of vital US strategic interest.

In actual fact, US “strategic interests” usually zero in on good sites for bases or forward staging areas for the American military. For example, the Reagan administration defended support of the Marcos dictatorship to protect its installations at Clark Field and Subic Bay, complicating the defense of other Far Eastern allies.

Do we really have strategic interests, vital or otherwise, in squalid little spots thousands of miles from the US? Does a firmly ensconced Karzai government in Kabul really somehow enhance our own security? How is it that we’ve come to believe that a handful of small, militarily insignificant nations – like Iraq and Afghanistan — governed by unpopular and unstable regimes, somehow keep Americans safe against the threat of terrorism. Actually, it is more rational to believe that such foreign adventures seriously compromise our national security by draining U.S. financial resources, stretching defense forces dangerously thin and psychologically boosting recruitment to the very terrorist groups that we are fighting. Whatever – our approach might stink as foreign policy but it keeps the military-industrial business booming.

As Noam Chomsky pointed out in his article “Dictators R Us,” Thomas Jefferson was not fooled by Napoleon’s antics:

“We believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.”

Wonder what Jefferson would make of our current foreign policy . . . ?

[tags]Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan, Kabul, Taliban, al Qaeda, puppet government[/tags]