American Decline and the Promise of Pax Scandinaviana

Founders' Porch goes scholarly...

An American "Hyper-power" resists decline at the
 Olympic Qualifier in Antigua, Guatemala in May 2012.

Over a decade ago Kenneth Waltz noted that “American leaders seem to believe that America’s pre-eminent position will last indefinitely.” President Barack Obama has proved no exception: in his 2012 State of the Union address he argued, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Robert Kagan concurs, noting that “great powers rarely decline suddenly,” that the recent economic meltdown is but a cyclical bust, that the US military “would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle,” and that competitors like China have far to go to match American military, economic, and cultural power. In fact, argues Tufts China expert Michael Beckley, far from decline, American power relative to China is even greater than it was at the beginning of the auspicious post-Cold War era.

Yet despite their rightful aversion to American decline, all three overlook an ominous reality upon which most international relations scholars and economists – from American primacy sympathizer Richard Haas to realist Richard Betts to globalist Joseph Stiglitz– find agreement: an America $16 trillion in debt, staggering back from costly “head-to-head battles” in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and bracing itself for the rise of nonpolar threats of a globalized world and the IMF-predicted 2016 Chinese economic eclipse, is surely in decline.

Blessed be the Blasphemers

Even when their skanky Christmas carols unleash violence... (Published at The Columbia Communique)

When the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a holy bounty on novelist Salman Rushdie’s head in 1989 for the crime of writing a novel, the Frenchman John le Carre was one of only a few prominent Westerners (including Yousef “Baby, it’s a wild world,” Islam) to publicly sympathize with the Ayatollah. So some years later when le Carre had to defend one of his own writings from anti-Semitism accusations, the late Christopher Hitchens said le Carre was like “a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.”

If that is so, then perhaps Rushdie, who called the in-hiding director of a Life-of-Muhammad YouTube parody “disgusting” while in the same breath promoting a recently released memoir on his own days in hiding, is himself like a man who, having taken the liberty to relieve himself in the various hats and cupboards and wallets of international brothers and sisters for free speech (whether or not they shared Rushdie’s flare for characters who get shot in the genitals while taking dumps or get magical erections when politicians hum), makes haste to miss the outstretched hats all-together and aim straight for their heads.

“He's done something malicious, and that's a very different thing from writing a serious novel, you know,” said Rushdie. It’s even different from writing a serious song, for that matter: there’s a big difference, for example, between the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens singing his halal “Father and Son” duet – “I know, I have to go away” – and, say, Bette Midler singing a maliciously seductive and un-Islamic skanky Christmas classic: “I really can’t stay (Baby it’s cold outside), I’ve got to go away.” That was al Qaeda Godfather Sayid Qutb’s grievance, anyhow, after hearing Judy Garland's version at a Colorado Christmas party in 1949: “Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips,” as unserious Americans indulged in “the rhythms of this seductive song.”

Perhaps, then, it was with a guilty conscience that Midler tweeted, “Where are the idiots who made the video and put it on YouTube? When do we meet them? They should be charged with murder.” Never mind the actual murderers, Americans can sleep safely knowing that our military reacted swiftly by deploying the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to personally telephone a supporter of the trailer and request he withdraw his support. Of course, it’s now clear that if government officials had exercised the same restraint in “jumping to conclusions” as they had when Major Nidal Hassan yelled “Allah Akhbar” and shot down 29 Americans at Fort Hood, they would have never blamed one of the most sophisticated attacks on a US diplomatic mission in history on a supporter of an unserious YouTube trailer. But just to be sure, with Christmas sneaking up, it’s never too late to start dissuading supporters of Midler’s cheeky carol.

Because that’s where we arrive when we walk back the thresholds of provocation of religion. “The issue is one of genuine respect,” writes one Columbia student (Communique, “Video of a Dying Ambassador,” 10/25/2012). Time was when Columbia students demanded that religion respect us. Can this really be our limit of advance, 250 years after Voltaire’s malicious and disrespectful Candide? As the student concludes: “So the next time individuals in the West publically insult Islam’s most sacred prophet, what message will we take from the reaction?”… Pardon me, but is that a threat?

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” said President Obama in his UN speech last month. Why? What makes religious guys more worthy of immunity to slander than the guy who made the YouTube trailer? In other words, the future does not belong to you, Pussy Riot. Have you seen their unserious, malicious, anonymous, slip-shod, anti-religion “punk prayer” YouTube video, filmed at a Cathedral named for Jesus himself? The girls – whose past orgy-protests were disgusting in an actual, orgy kind-of-way – were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for their film. “It is simply impossible to imagine a more inane film—a handful of talentless mannequins hurdled in front of curiously incompetent cameras,” said Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi – except that was in reference to the Muhammad film. When it comes to any other prophet, the struggle carries on.

As the US Embassy in Cairo put it from under the shadow of an al Qaeda flag: “[The Embassy] condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Indeed, Ebenezer Qutb would be pleased to know that the US government condemns holiday cheer too, to the extent that it enrages Muslims. Because as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan recently put it, “The rising number of attacks on U.S. troops by Afghan police and soldiers may be due in part to the stress on Afghan forces from fasting during the just-concluded Muslim holy month of Ramadan.”

So back to the question: what message will we take from the next reaction to religious heresy? The better question, perhaps, is what message will the religious take from our reaction to their reaction? What message will they take when American presidents praise “the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy,” as if blasphemy were a vice?

Blessed be the blasphemers: for little else stands between Midler’s brimming elf-hat and us.

“Go ahead, make my day”

Clint Eastwood’s “un-conventional” convention speech works. His analogy via performance is sublime.

For those of you who didn’t see, Mr. Eastwood-- willing to adopt the role of charming, yet bitter old man--spoke and performed before an audience at the RNC political convention last night. His take was a refreshing display of simplicity in a political world where the grand and complex is favored.

But the particular part that has drawn out so many opinions was Eastwood’s conversation with an imaginary President Obama sitting in an empty chair. I’ve heard detractors and doubters from both ends of the political spectrum express confusion, loathing, and a general attitude of looking down their nose at Eastwood’s unusual performance. Shallow thought might lead you to doubt his seriousness or even his sanity. But I ask you to consider it as though I believe it should: a pointed satire.

We have an imaginary President.

To consider the last three-and-a-half years a successful presidency is to suspend reality. Frankly, you’d have a pretty vivid imagination. Further, Obama seems to be a legend in his own mind. He’s created a make-believe narrative in which spending money we don’t have, amassing debts that cannot be re-paid, and imposing the will of the Federal state over the freedom of individuals are all things to be praised and celebrated. He further urges voters to willfully neglect the facts of his failures and forget his broken promises.  To consider Obama a President of any worthwhile success, one must use all of their imagination in inventing reasons to like the job he’s done. He’s an amateur; an imaginary president at best.

And the boss’s chair is empty.

The office of the president demands many things; chief among them is leadership. Obama’s fondness of buying votes with the public treasure, submitting laughable budgets to Congress, and spouting divisive rhetoric comprise an unrivaled record of incompetent leadership. And now, in this American hour of angst and distress, we need leadership most. It seems that Americans have the sense that nobody’s minding the store. And they’re right. Their Commander-in-Chief was busy making healthcare a bureaucratic nightmare, killing U.S. citizens with drone strikes, and hosting Hollywood fundraisers while Rome is burning.

I loved Eastwood’s take on Obama’s empty-chair, imaginary presidency. An election between such a clear disappointment and a man who can’t seem to fail in his pursuits shouldn’t be this close. Maybe for more years of amateur hour at the White House will really wake people up. So vote for Obama, go ahead and make my day.

The Kiss of Failure?

How US failures in Iraq doom US strategy in Syria... (Published at The Kurdistan Tribune)

Smells like corruption...
F.P. goes undercover to photograph this Kirkuk oilfield

As the Syrian regime turns increasingly to air strikes in order to perfect its strategy of terrifying its population into submission, time is running out for the US to devise a strategy of its own. Unfortunately, any US strategy for Syria will be the victim of blowback from its policy of keeping Iraq at arm’s length in recent years, whether regarding its failure to influence Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to see through the security mission, or to stand by the Kurds. Ironically, if the Syrian regime does eventually fall, these failures will only become more pronounced as Iran shifts focus from Damascus to Baghdad.

Up to now, political expedience has characterized the US position on the Syrian revolution, resulting in the United Nations taking the lead by inflicting “meaningful dialogue” on the Syrian regime. Last week the UN released a report announcing that the regime did indeed commit a war crime when it killed 100 civilians over two months ago. Yet war crimes have piled up since then, and will persist as the UN prepares a September report identifying the war criminals. With its observer mission ending last weekend in failure, the UN has now resorted to replacing Kofi Annan with Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi as mission chief. In other words, the UN has replaced the man who threw away a fax warning of imminent genocide in Rwanda with the man who leads the push for peace talks with the Taliban (“if you grow your beard, keep your woman at home, you’ll be all right,” he has said).

The Obama administration’s warning this week that Syria’s use of chemical weapons would be a “red-line” that could trigger US intervention suggests a possible turn toward US leadership in Annan’s wake. That is a positive step, particularly considering that Annan’s former chief of staff infamously ignored Saddam’s chemical attacks in Iranian Kurdistan due to his mission’s limited “terms of reference.” Yet given that Saddam killed 5,000 people in one day in Halabja with chemical weapons, the administration’s drawing of the line at genocide leaves much strategizing to be desired.

Unfortunately, blowback from mistakes in Iraq in recent years limits the strategizing. Since 2009, the US has stood by as Prime Minister Maliki has converted his Dawa party into what some Iraq experts liken to a “Shiite Baath party.” Maliki, a “civil servant” whose net worth according to some Iraqi journalists is $36 million, has ambidextrously taken on the roles of Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and Minister of the Interior all at once, simplifying enforcement of his policy against aiding Syrian rebels. Yet just this week, despite speculation that Maliki is assisting Iranian arms flows to the Syrian army via Iraq, the US’ top military officer kept things cordial during his meeting with Maliki: “I don’t intend to ask him specifically about whether they are taking any active role in the Syrian situation.”

Sulaymaniyah's finest watermelons.

Strangely, the same US officials who criticized the Bush administration for its de-Baathification policy in 2003 looked away in 2010 as Maliki’s party declared 500 candidates ineligible for election due to alleged Baathist associations. Last year Maliki fired a hundred undesirable university faculty members, and he continues to round up former low level Baathists for alleged conspiracies, all as the US remains silent. Meanwhile, oil may abound in Iraq, but those outside the favored political circles make do with the 2 hour per day electricity grid. This is the pluralistic model the US has to show to the victorious Syrian revolutionaries when the post-Assad possibility of retribution against Allawites and Christian minorities closes in.

A former CIA case officer suggested last month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “To Topple Assad, Unleash the CIA,” that the US mobilize the Iraqi Kurds against Assad. But just which Iraqi Kurds would we use? The Kurds of the PKK, whom we help kill through our military assistance to Turkey? Or perhaps the rank-and-file Kurds of the Pesh Merga, for whom US support of Kurdistan’s corrupt political parties has paid few dividends. Indeed, the ongoing clash over oil revenues between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Baghdad holds little significance for average Iraqi Kurds, it merely being a question of money going to equally corrupt Dawa or PUK/PDK officials.

If the US replaced its deference to Baghdad with a policy that supported, say, the KRG’s Turkish pipeline ambitions on the condition of transparency reforms, perhaps the US would have greater reason to expect favors returned in Syrian Kurdistan. Yet the US remains hands-off as thugs like PUK boss Omar Fattah profit off of donations to chemical attack memorials and order opposition journalists beaten. Indeed, when Kurds hear of American officials in Kurdistan, it is usually in regards to the shady dealings of former officials lured into the cesspool: former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, for example, holds a lobbying office in Erbil while serving on the Board of an oil firm operating in Kurdistan. And US Army Col. (ret.) Harry Schute (one of the first post-Saddam American commanders in Iraqi Kurdistan) married a 21 year-old Kurdish woman, according to Hawlati News, and now dons Kurdish dress as he advises the corrupt security apparatus that many ordinary Kurds fear. 

Me with Pesh Merga reservists (i.e. any Kurd)

Furthermore, the Kurds, who have reason to doubt American earnestness on preventing chemical attacks, are perhaps more interested in US red-lines regarding post-Assad rebel access to chemical weapons. Even with a Kurd presiding over the Syrian National Council, Arab-Kurd relations remain uneasy, with one meeting in Cairo last month ending in fistfights. The US troop withdrawal from Iraq last December endangered Kurds in multi-ethnic cities such as Mosul and Kirkuk (since then sectarian violence has only risen, with 200 Iraqis killed in the past three weeks). Why should Syrian Kurds trust us to see the job through in Syria? Indeed, as al Qaeda’s terror and Iranian imperialism speed up in Iraq, surge architect and Romney foreign policy advisor Fred Kagan’s prediction that, “The decision to abandon Iraq entirely will stand as one of the monumental strategic follies of the 21st century,” looks increasingly true. 

US strategy in Syria will plod ahead with “nonlethal assistance,” though most rebels wonder where even that is. American aid, a Syrian activist told the Washington Post this week, “is all virtual.” Unfortunately what is not virtual is a chemical weapons stash amassed with the aid of Western firms left unsanctioned by the 1980s realist consensus. Nor, unfortunately, is the rising violence in Iraq virtual. Last year an administration official said in reference to sectarianism in Syria, “Nobody wants another Iraq.” Ironically, because US officials have not wanted to deal with Iraq, Iraq is what a post-Assad Syria may just get.

Waiting for their man

For war-weary Central Americans, a drug deal never took so long... (Published at The Daily Caller)

Guatemalans esperando un milagro. (Founders' Porch)

The Obama administration’s foreign policy is often criticized for its perceived post-American internationalism, but US drug policy suggests that the all-American realism of days past lives on.  Consider the perspective, for example, of Special UN envoy Kofi Annan. Last week he cleared up any confusion about the international community’s efforts to orally persuade Syria’s dictatorship to stop being a dictatorship, explaining, “The evidence shows that we have not succeeded.” Yet meanwhile, over a year after Annan called on the US to consider drug legalizations in a Global Commission on Drug Policy Report, evidence such as lectures by the US drug czar to Central American leaders shows that when it comes to the War on Drugs, the international community has been no less unsuccessful in changing the mind of the leader of the international community itself.

"Making drugs more available,” US drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said last year, “will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe.” This Panglossian optimism must puzzle people in Central America, where there are less and less communities to “keep” safe. Indeed, the homicide rates per 100,000 people have risen over the last decade in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to 41, 66, and 82 (the world’s highest) respectively, with the US “healthy” indeed at less than 5. The discovery of 49 bodies on a Mexican highway one morning last May is only one of the more recent reminders of the viciousness of this best of all possible drug wars, most of those bodies going unidentified because of “the lack of heads, hands, and feet.” Just last weekend exasperated protestors marched against the drug-fueled insecurity and impunity in Guatemala, “a good place to commit murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it,” as one UN official has described this drug-corridor state.

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart put it more bluntly last month in congressional testimony when she called the “antidrug mission” an “essential element to the national health and security of the U.S. and interests abroad.” Certainly it is an essential element to the DEA’s budgetary health, but the interests of our Latin American allies seem not to have made the cut. For their part, a generation of pro-legalization leaders has finally found their voice: The presidents of both Colombia and Costa Rica have floated legalization in recent months, and Guatemala’s newly elected President Otto Perez Molina openly supports legalization, even at the cost of significant political capital. Yet when he spoke out boldly against the Drug War at Latin America’s World Economic Forum last April, he found his once like-minded counter-parts from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua had jumped ship, a consequence (Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo speculates) of US pressure. With Mexico’s newly-elected president on the fence, this is one time when US leadership from behind would be preferable.

History, however, has taught Central Americans to be cautious of US leadership. Guatemalans remember that in 1954, our regional “interests” meant installing a dictatorship, setting the stage for decades of atrocities which a 1999 international commission would walk back to US meddling. Yet ironically, the violence of this era, during which the US illegally blocked regional weapons shipments, is a fraction of today’s violence, to which the US actually injects weapons with its either corrupt or embarrassingly incompetent ATF programs.

They weep for legalization. (Founders' Porch)

Rather than seize the opportunity to reset this history, the US has doubled-down, and not just on drugs: not content with lecturing Arizona on how to handle Drug War insecurity, the US is threatening commercial penalties against Guatemala unless it rewrites its very constitution to expand worker protections.  This would seem to contradict the premise behind USDA programs, such as McGovern-Dole, which provide monthly food rations for Guatemalan families (often those which cannot afford the compliance costs of joining the co-ops that serve Americans’ fine taste for the organic) who send their working children to school: Guatemala does not face a values crisis, goes the thinking, but an economic one. Yet the prevailing premise of US policy in the region is summed up by Kerlikowske’s axiom: “criminals won’t disappear if we legalize drugs.”

One wonders if a nation $15.8 trillion in debt has the luxury to be funding strategically contradictory programs.  Does USDA sync with DEA? Maybe not, but DEA certainly talks with SOD and CNTOC, and sometimes cross-checks with ATF, and fuses with OCDDETF, which syncs with SICA. Though even then, as Fast and Furious has shown, Mexico gets left in the dark, and every border killing leaves US agents terrified of a bureaucratic miscommunication a la George Tenet after 9/11: “I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

For an administration so wary of blowback when it comes to standing by Iranian protestors or merely green-lighting a Turkish humanitarian corridor in Syria, it might think twice about the consequences of a perceived imperial drug policy. When the masses begin chanting “Fuera DEA,” the inescapable irony will be that self-interested realism was never in US interest at all. Political interests are another story, which makes New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s risky statement in support of reforming drug policy earlier this week particularly welcome. Perhaps this is a road best paved by the politically buffered, such as former presidents. But Central America’s leaders are ready now, and we ought not keep them waiting.

Vacation Kurdistan

My hosts and I at Zakho's hippest internet cafe.

A trip to the world’s most  in-the-way  getaway...

If I stood up in a café in Mosul, Iraq, and shouted “I am American!” about how much time might I have? “Five seconds,” says 25 year-old Ali, politely suppressing a smile. It is a crisp morning on the frosty Kurdish steppe and we are on a bus heading north into Turkey from Iraq.  Ali has a cool seen-it-all demeanor, but he can’t keep his eyes off of the passing crystal pastures and occasional rustic military base. He apologetically asks to trade for my window seat. Today, you see, is the first day of his life outside of Iraq.

That Ali’s first trip out of Iraq coincided with my first trip to Iraq makes us appreciate our few similarities. We are the same age, for example. We both like Eminem. We dislike al Qaeda. Yet you begin to appreciate our vaster differences when you consider what each of us was doing exactly nine years prior: Ali was pledging allegiance to a poster of His Excellency No. 1 Chairman Saddam Hussein, wondering whether his feigned ebullience would satisfy a Baathist teacher fishing for excuses to snitch to the Mukhbarat on any undermining of national sentiment. I, conversely, was with friends in St. Paul, Minnesota counter-protesting one of the world’s many concurrent “Peace Rallies” with basketball game chants of  “free-I-ra-aq (ba-ba—ba-ba-ba) to peacenik jeers of “fuck you.” Ian McEwan would later memorialize the London peace rally of that same 15^th of February, 2003, in his 24-hour novel “Saturday,” so “bothered” he had been “that so many people seemed so thrilled to be there.” Indeed, while I was hearing for the first time such self-gratifying simplifications as “no blood for oil” and “Bush is a war-monger,” I was guilty myself of adventurizing a cause with satisfying naivette: this was a time, for example, when Abu Ghraib, IED, and Mission Accomplished had not yet assumed their macabre connotations.

Nine years later I’m concluding a vacation to one of the places in Iraq that really did greet the US Army with flowers as liberators; and Ali is nervously anticipating the logistics of his plan to earn remittances renovating apartments in Istanbul. Was the war in Iraq worth it? “50-50,” he says matter-of-factly. Not as high as you’d hope to hear from a liberated Shia. But not bad, considering the reasons for the war require a nine-year memory of things better forgotten, and the reasons against it require waiting a day or two until the next crowd of diners blows up.

What exactly did we liberate in Iraq? What did the thousands of Americans who died in Iraq accomplish? To imagine how Saddam would have handled the Arab Spring is to begin to get an idea. And to spend a few days in northern Iraq with Kurds is to get one with even less strain on the imagination. Yet ironically, while most people think the war that secured Chinese oil interests in Iraq was about securing American oil interests in Iraq, few think the war that secured semi-autonomy for the world’s largest stateless minority was about securing semi-autonomy for that minority, the Kurds.

Whether the unsung cause of a free, secular, pluralistic, democratic Iraqi Kurdistan merited a single American life is another question. But there’s a moral evasiveness in opting for arms’ length realism, particularly when we backdate Colin Powell’s “you break it you own it” to the decades in which Kurdistan’s fate was up to Kissinger, the CIA, and “our kind of guy,” Saddam. It’s no wonder Kurds shifted their hopes for a state to Turkish soil in the 1980s. But there the cynicism of pre “Bush Doctrine” US policy was to prove borderless.

Fortunately, where solidarity is concerned Kurdistan’s slightly absurd self-description as a tourist hot-spot offers a convenient opportunity. Yet expressing your international fraternalism in Kurdistan with your tourism dollars is easier said than done: Americans will have trouble getting Kurds to accept full payment for anything, so appreciative they are of the US intervention against Saddam. But whatever the price of your Kurdish kidney beans or boiled peanuts, the geopolitics and culture clashes unique to a Kurdish vacation ensure something for everyone in the family: a close-up on US power as a force for good (and, alas, evil), on nationalism v. internationalism, on capitalism v. tradition, on insurgency v. counterinsurgency. Solidarity is worth this vacation deal – a getaway that will get you away from very little.

“To be born again, first you have to die,” sang Salman Rushdie’s Gibreel Fareeshta. And likewise to get to Iraqi Kurdistan by land, first you have to go through one of a selection of unsavory regions, such as Syria, Iran, or Sunni Triangle Iraq. I opted for Turkey, thus de facto enrolling myself as a civilian consideration of an increasingly deadly phase of the Turkish Army’s counterinsurgency against Kurdish Nationalist rebels in the southeast, though enjoying the peculiar arrangement of being endeared by both sides – feds and rebels – as a silly American. Indeed, even the Turkish Airlines agent at the Istanbul airport was amused when I asked for a ticket to Dyarbakir, the southeastern city with the largest Kurdish population whose occasional firefights are a national preoccupation (though a drizzle compared to the chaotic 1980s when the Kurdish resistance held sway).

But first, I had half-a-day to evaluate Istanbul: the city of West and East, of Christian emperors and Muslim sultanates, of imperial decline and, if you believe today’s Turks, a glorious near return to founding father Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s dream of regional hegemony.  Alas, this last premonition must be unavoidable for anyone hailing from a city where even the back-alleys are wrinkled with Neo-baroque mystique, as if the pale-faced, dark-eyed youths getting on and off the snow-covered 1920s trams winding between the bubbly majesty of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque were all extras in some Turkish soap opera.

It didn’t take long before one such extra overheard me asking for directions and eagerly requested an elderly English-speaking Turk to translate a question to me. “He wants to know what you, an American, think of Turkey,” the old man said, intonating that he himself was above such self-doubts (the type who, when asking where you’re from, finds it an affront to his accent-recognition if you answer “America” without specifying the city). Sensing balloons of nationalistic pride in the balance, I cited the splendor of the Ottoman Empire and the “modernizing” influence of Turkey in the Middle East. “Yes, thank you,” he beamed.

But having parted with Istanbul and found my seat on the flight to Diyarbakir next to a beautiful Turkish girl about my age, I began to appreciate the qualifications of Turkey’s modernization. On one hand, I was certainly not in Kandahar anymore, conversing a bit flirtatiously with an uncovered, eyed-shadowed Muslim girl who could remember the last time she had drunk Raki much more readily than the last time she had been in a mosque. On the other, she thoroughly debunked any allusions I had about her country’s political liberalism. Erdogan? “Arrests anyone that goes against him. Journalists, generals, politicians – even the lawyers that defend them.” And what of the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party)? “They are our Taliban.”

Diyarbakir brought yet more juxtaposition. The airport’s dank bathroom was perfumed with pot, which was promptly offered to me by a diplomatic young man on my bus to nearby Mardin. But this care-freeness contrasted with the familiar Turkish Army troop carrier tanks sprinkled along Diyarbakir’s outskirts. I had seen them before in Kabul, where I had wondered what Afghans – to whom all NATO forces are “Americans” – must have thought of an outsider tank stamped with the red crescent of Turkey’s Islamic flag. A most effective counter IED, perhaps.

Why all the tanks? We should know – we supplied them. US sales of jets planes, tanks, and guns to Turkey took off at the onset of the PKK counterinsurgency in 1984, eager as we were to satisfy a crucial Cold War ally. Of course, it doesn’t require a Soviet bogeyman to justify a fight against Marxist PKK death squads. But no matter how despicable one finds, for example, the now-imprisoned PKK ringleader Abdullah Ocalac, “the Pol Pot of Kurdish politics” as Kurdophile Christopher Hitchens put it, Turkey’s ethnic cleansing and destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages during the Clinton years with US weapons was a crime in which America was complicit (in the end, Clinton’s realpolitique was not quite enough to convince the Turks to allow a northern front in 2003, to the glee of the Sunni insurgency). One wonders what our threshold for geo-political flexibility must be when it comes to Turkey, from our bizarre anti-opium policy in Afghanistan to our acceptance of Turkey’s unapologetic massacre of 35 Kurdish civilians last January with American equipment, just a month after Congress approved the sale of new attack helicopters to Ankarra.

And yet: it is, in fact, this same Turkish military to which Turks turn when secular republicanism is most threatened. Confused? So are the Turks, judging by the coups-upon-coups (1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997). Fortunately the 1971 coup brought clarity to such procedures, being the world’s first streamlined coup, “The Coup by Memo.” The coups typically came with mass detentions and Lincolnesque justifications: break the constitution to save the constitution. As the Kamalist rebel in Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow puts it when accused of torturing Islamist madrassa students, “No one who’s even slightly Westernised can breathe freely in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them…When we go the way of Iran, do you really think anyone is going to remember how a porridge-hearted liberal like you shed a few tears for the boys from the religious high school?”

Arriving in Mardin and abruptly hastened onto a moonlit street-corner by the gruff bus driver, I ruck-marched my way uphill from the New City toward the hostels of the Old City. Perched above plains speckled with the green glow of minaret lights, the cavernous residential adobes of Old Mardin seem about two blocks wide and a mile high. Fortunately a gang of 14 year-olds observed me huffing and eagerly offered their complimentary broken-English hostel-finding services. I demurred when they pointed to one of the famous castle hotels. “Anything cheaper?” They didn’t understand. “Rahees,” I said in Arabic. “Ah, oojuz!” they said. Between my crap Arabic and Dari (which shares the Turkish word for “thanks,” for example), their crap English, and their second-language Turkish (they spoke Kurdish first, having been born after the Kurdish language ban ended in 1991), we probably shared a complete vocabulary, if only we knew how to splice it. “You know Turkish?” one asked. I recited “tashakoor” (thanks), “tuz” (salt…slang for “bite me” in Arabic due to Arab traders dismissing Ottoman tax collectors by claiming their entire covered cargo was “tuz,” the one tax-free commodity) and “ka” (snow). I knew ka from Pamuk’s book. “You like Orhan Pamuk?” I asked. “No, he is traitor. Not even live in Turkey.”  

As if on a time sensitive VIP movement, they rushed me through the Old City’s windy stone-step allies, chirping “oojuz, oojuz!”  We passed a statue of Ataturk, and they began manically saluting. “He is great man!” Indeed, the great chauvinist caricaturized as “Resident World Controller” Mustapha Mond in Huxley’s Brave New World maintains his omnipresence via statues, posters, and street names all over Turkey for having salvaged the lost empire. With their minds now on politics, one asked me “You like Bush?” I said yes, as I always do abroad (whether to an al-Qaeda loving Syrian in Beirut or bearded youths in Ramallah), but expecting a positive reaction for once, as these were Kurds. “We like Obama! He is a black man!” I didn’t quite follow the logic. At last they delivered me to my ideal $10 hostel, and I bid them thanks and joined in a salute to Ataturk.   

As my hamstrings cramped up ten minutes into a jog “up” Mardin the next morning, I stopped to stretch out when I realized I was not alone. Ten little wide-eyed faces were peering down on me from a ridge, imploring me to come play basketball. As I emerged onto the overcrowded courtyard, you would have thought I was Ataturk himself. Fifty little kids went ecstatic yelling all at once “hello Mister how are you where you from what you do you are married?” I began planning a hasty exit strategy, but now there were calls to dunk on the 7-foot hoop. I clumsily complied, and it is barely exaggerating to say that girls fainted.  Boys were tearing through notebooks to secure paper for my signature. Paper ran out so limbs were supplied. A girl shoved a piece of cardboard at my pencil. Signing rapidly, I asked the boys which basketball stars they liked. “Michael Jordan!” “Allen Iverson!” I pointed at a shy, sickly boy and said “Kevin Garnett?” and he staggered backwards in dazed ecstasy.  “Ok I gotta go!” I said. Where, where? “To Iraq!” Wooow. But when will you return? “Someday hopefully…goodbye!” And thus I fled for safe-haven in Iraq.

Getting into Iraqi Kurdistan is quite easy for Americans who don’t fit the suicide-bomber profile. From a bus station on the Turkish side of the border I waited with a few good-humored, giddy Iraqi Kurds who broke into a shoulder-locked Kurdish jig at one point. At last, with the sun now set, we left the station, left Turkey, and entered Iraqi Kurdistan’s immigration control building – one of those cold, hollow, stone buildings in which, if you’re not on top of a propane heater, you might as well be outside.  We were the only ones waiting, and a guard brought us cigarettes and sugary tea from a table flanked by massive posters of national president Jalal Talabani and regional president Masoud Barzani – the Ataturk of Iraqi Kurdistan. I was summoned to an empty inner-office. A confessional window behind my seat opened and a cigarette-smoking man with resigned eyes studied my face. Like some grizzled investigator who had extracted all the necessary confessions from his long-hunted fugitive and now just wanted a man-to-man, he asked, “So. Why do you want to go to Iraq?” For tourism, I said. Without looking up from my passport he asked, “Why did you go to Dubai?” For a layover on business travel, I said. He put out his cigarette and handed me my passport, Coalition of the Willing members not needing to obtain a visa (a gracious gesture suspiciously absent in Afghanistan). “Enjoy Kurdistan,” he said.

The fact that Iraqi Kurdistan is drastically safer than the rest of the country is hard to intuit when you’re actually there, driving on a dark road 60 miles from Mosul, with death-squad execution headlines swirling through your mind. But the earnest service taxi driver did his best to put my mind at ease, vowing that there are no Arabs in Zakho, the ancient town near the border where I’d be staying. He was set on me enjoying my stay, and when my first hotel selection proved overbooked, he waited and brought me to another, refusing the full fare.

My hotel was located at a motley round-about. Across was a 6-story abandoned building. To the right, a juice bar storefront in the shape of a giant apple. To the left, what remained of a Christian liquor store burned down after a mullah’s jihad sermon just months earlier. And in the middle, a soldier at his post. It was late, so I woke up the staffer in the smoky wood-paneled lobby. Joseph, an Armenian who spoke neither English nor Arabic and who looked not unlike the portraits lining the room of a melodramatic Chuck Norris-like Barzani gazing into the Kurdish meadows, took me to my room. I was satisfied and bid him good night. But something was troubling Joseph. He shut my room’s door behind us, breathed a bit heavily, and then…signed me the cross. “Christian?” he asked. I would have loved to delve into the nuances of my Spinozist pantheism, but for the sake of the poor persecuted wretch I said yes. Yet this caused him a bulge-eyed expression of disbelief: he held up his crucifix necklace, as if to emphasize a bare minimum flare requirement. “Oh, sorry,” I said, awkwardly returning his sign of the cross. Joseph tisk-tisked his crucifix at me once more and waved good night.

The omnipresent Kurdish flag.

Lonely Planet does not overstate this city’s case: “Zakho is pleasant but there is little of interest for tourists.” Yet interest in tourists abounded, whether because I was the only tourist, or because I was the only one they had ever seen with the audacity to jog the town, scandalously accentuating his gaunt height with under-armor.  As I ran past giggling kids, over the beautifully ancient yet precariously sideless Delal Bridge, and up into the river bluffs, I realized that if my sole exercise goal had been to run until there were no Kurdish flags in sight, I would likely die.  The sun-crested red, white, and green is everywhere: walls, car windows, clothes, arms, every other store’s logo, and (most unavoidably) a garrison flag blowing above the city square. And now, thanks to a street-merchant who gave me a flag patch which he refused to sell, it can also be found on my very backpack.

I spent the day wandering the markets and talking with Kurds in cafes.  35 year-old Karzan had me for a CIA spook, but was eager to talk and answer any question about Kurdistan. For being members of the largest stateless minority, and victims of multiple ethnic cleansings, it’s amazing how little Kurds such as Karzan expected me to know or care about their plight – a far cry from the Palestinian pre-school I had once visited, its walls covered with finger-paints of sad-faced clouds crying tears of bombs onto dismembered x-eyed Palestinian children. Without a hint of self-pity or jingoism Karzan delved into Kurdish history and politics, concluding that for all the bad the future was bright.

It emerged that though Karzan was no friend of the PKK, he was certain that if he tried crossing into Turkey he’d be detained. If the fate of Turkey’s largest Kurdish-language newspaper Azadiya Welat is any indication – six editors have fled or been jailed since its 2006 start – Turkey has mastered the art of totalitarian due process described so poignantly in Arthur Koestler’s Soviet show trial novel Darkness at Noon, where no crime is self-evident: “Perhaps he had laid a wreath on the wrong grave…” No comrade could be sure of his innocence when the commissars were free “to dot the i’s.” Indeed, even within the borders of the great modernizing NATO ally and EU-candidate Turkey, to be accused of writing one of the banned Kurdish letters x, w, or q is enough.  Forget Saddam: to have given Kurds an alternative from this is not nothing.

That night I went to an internet café – a social mainstay for Zakho youths. I chatted with six of them over tea and obligatory cigarettes, channeling everything through Warhin, the sole English speaker among them. They wanted to see my facebook profile, so I pulled up my feed, which included someone’s Valentine’s Day post. Warhin rendered the council’s Islamic verdict: “This is a foolish holiday.” Yes, I said. As I flipped through my photos I got a generally warm reaction of “wow, this is America?” They were not quite as impressed by the several photos including alcoholic beverages (though eager to “friend” me nonetheless). This reminded me to ask them what they thought of the “youths” who had destroyed Zakho’s liquor stores month earlier, as I had earlier talked to a young Christian running his parents’ pizza store who had confided that he was still afraid. The boys pulled up a youtube video of the chaos: lots of “allahu akbar” and smoke and camera shaking. “Idiots,” said Warhin. They were all embarrassed, but as usual in the Middle East, they also suspected a conspiracy.

Exiting Iraq, as they say, is difficult. All seemed to be going well when I arrived at the cross-border taxi station. But the taxi needed three, and I was alone.  I tried joining a threesome in another taxi, but obscure common law precedents and corollaries were recited. The whole lot reaked of monopolistic collusion and trickery. After an hour our foursome was complete: a Baghdad woman, her grandmother, and a Turk. Having tightly squeezed in our cargo, we were notified of a taxi reassignment. The only consolation was that our new taxi driver was a young slick-haired, squirrely, earnest boy named Abo. Between sprinting our passports in and out of the office and tripping on curbs he enjoyed moments of calm in the driver’s seat marked by turning up the Kurdish music radio and ensuring that the photos of himself and a generic Hallmark baby above the rearview mirror stayed well-taped. After several comedic moments when everyone was ready except the person sent to look for the person who hadn’t been ready, we set off for Turkey.

But to our disgust, the entire bridge to Turkey was full of cars. We would wait for nearly two hours to go half a mile. Abo passed the time throwing his candy wrappers into the polluted river, probably to wind up in some Syrian revolutionary’s mouth as he smuggled in weapons from Turkey downstream. Indeed, with the revolution in full-force, the long border wait was likely a result of special attention to the Syrian refugee problem. The Turks had offered to stave off the problem a month earlier by establishing a humanitarian corridor inside Syria, but the US said no. One can believe that the Syrian uprising had nothing to do with the 2005 Lebanese intifada. And one can believe that the 2005 intifada had nothing to do with our intervention in Iraq. But can anyone look at this region and argue that disallowing intervention is any less imperial than ordering it?

At last I was back in Turkey, and soon enough on that bus with Ali. I thought of Gen. Petraeus’ cryptic riddle during the 2007 surge years of the war in Iraq: “tell me how this ends.” 50-50 didn’t seem a good enough ending. But then again, it never does end.  Perhaps good endings lie in the appreciation of the chance for new beginnings, the hope that the status quo is never the end. If that’s true, then Ali and Karzan are off to a good start. As for Americans, both kinds of February 15^th revolutionaries might admit that an explanation of starts and endings in Kurdistan is easier chanted than understood.  And as guardians of the oldest revolution of one of the youngest nations, they might consider visiting one of the oldest nations with a revolution only just begun.   

USA v. The World in Guatemala

The Cold War heats up...

When Rob and I weren't planting anti-organic peas alongside poor Civil War veteran campesinos during our recent month in Guatemala (or, more commonly, sorting through tens of thousands of American-donated pencils), we had the opportunity to cheer on the local soccer team (officially called the Antigua Avocados, but known derisively by their enemies as the "Green Bellies") as well as the USA's 2012 Olympic weightlifting team. The former won resoundingly in its season finale, as was relayed live to tens of Antiguans via the radio play-by-play of our host brother. The latter struggled against a more totalitarian opponent, with weight-lifting traditionally known to be a sport dominated by fascists and communists who can think of no better way to moisten the eyes of the fatherland than a good snatch. Nevertheless, Team USA qualified for a berth in London alongside the mini strongmen of Russia, China, Iran, and Turkmenistan (the Cubans and Venezuelans proving that price controls on protein can have unintended consequences).

Here is our motivating video compilation of the competitions, including my own efforts to get in top shape according to the rigorous pull-up methodology of a sweet little slave-driving Guatemalan girl, and Rob's efforts to add finesse to his power lifting frame with hitherto unpublished house dance moves. Set to a song fitting for Lake Atitlan's mile high elevation, "Guate, Guate, Guate" (as the perky commuter bus hustlers squak) ya esta servido.

His high premiumness Viscount Verrilli stands, but does not deliver

On the final day of Supreme Court oral arguments regarding Obamacare, Chief Justice Roberts interrupted Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, the poor man drafted to defend the indefensible, to note, “You have another 15 minutes.” At which point Verrilli glumly remarked, “Lucky me.”

Ah, cheer up. No one ever made him out to be some tall and suave model gentleman-and-scholar, some fountain of manliness with a charmingly paradoxical soft side, some Lucretius J.D., some glowing trumpet of reason who cuts community ratings in half simply by passing through a country-side village in an electric car, some epitomic conjunction of man and art.

Well, not entirely anyway. NPR did tweet last Friday that Verrilli was a “gentleman and a scholar,” and went on to profile basic traits relevant to his role in articulating the constitutionality of the federal government’s unprecedented attempt to force Americans to buy stuff, such as how he “stands tall and calm in the Supreme Court chamber, his salt and pepper mustache the only thing about him that bristles.” And how “his deep, baritone voice suggests to the justices that he is the essence of reasonableness.” And how he is “a genuinely beloved figure, the kind of professional younger lawyers seek to emulate.” The profile ended with one final pragmatic, bare essentials question still on the minds of all civic-minded NPR listeners: “What makes him cry?”

Nevertheless, if there was any hope-and-changiness to go around in the case's run-up, perhaps it was less about the under-sold Verrilli and more about the general excitement of at last validating the brave new Mrs. Fix-it paradigm of the 21^st century. The atmosphere on the opening day was “electric,” said Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's Obamacare-advocating legal analyst.

But if optimism is a disease, consider the left-wing media cured. And consider Verrilli quarantined. Whereas NPR boasted on Friday of Verrilli that “only the occasional, needless throat-clearing betrays any nerves at all,” Mother Jones columnist Adam Serwer had concluded by Wednesday that Verrilli’s throat-clearing had jeopardized the entire Obamacare project: “He coughed, he cleared his throat, he took a drink of water. And that was before he even finished the first part of his argument.” Or in other words: Verrilli, you're such a pre-existing condition.

By the time the decision is released in June, NPR will likely have revised the history of Verrilli’s “flameout” (as Serwer called it) to match the narrative of an earnest man with none of the qualities of a lawyer cut down by the bigotry and ignorance of the Supreme Court. But for now, the oral arguments provide an unedited and fascinating glimpse into the mind of the Supreme Court on perhaps the most important question facing the United States today: what are the constitutional limits on federal power? 
                                                                                                                                                                              Most revealing were the questions and monologues (as caricatured in the accompanying pics) of the liberal Justices. From Justice Kagan’s “It’s just a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people’s healthcare,” to Justice Sotomayor’s jab at the excess of the “one percent,” to Justice Ginsburg’s frank “this penalty is designed to affect conduct,” to Justice Breyer’s answer to his own question of whether the government can require the purchase of cell phones: “Wouldn’t the answer be, yes, of course, they could.” But Verrilli himself revealed the most when he triumphantly declared that Obamacare is so expensive that of course the mandate is OK…indeed, actuarially necessary.  Read the transcripts and weep. And weep too for Verrilli, who, by virtue of his optimism disease, will raise your community rating by approximately 4.2% if he ever escapes his quarantine.

Islam's Sensitive Side

A future Pesh Merga commander in Iraqi Kurdistan
(Photo by Founders' Porch.)

Founders' Porch reports  from the Former Axis of Evil

Army sergeant majors like to joke about expensive military-issued “sensitive items” being worth more than soldiers themselves.  But that humor might not translate in Afghanistan, judging by the collective reaction to 1) the US Army’s accidental burning of the nation’s top “sensitive item,” and 2) the stalking and murder of sleeping families by a US Army soldier in Kandahar.  The former event had the Afghan people in near revolutionary furor, leaving 40 dead (including American soldiers killed by trusted Afghan trainees). The latter provoked the relatively mild protests that years of unintentional civilian killings have made grimly familiar. “How can you compare the dishonoring of the Holy Quran with the martyrdom of innocent civilians?” asked one prominent mullah. “The whole goal of our life is religion.” Or As NPR’s headline understated it: “For Afghans, Two Outrages, Two Different Reactions.”

And for Americans? To deploy Defense Secretary Leon Panetta himself this week was perhaps the only way to distinguish this apology from our Quran-burning reaction.  And before that there was the empathetic reaction of NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative Mark Sedwill to the García-Marquezesque community organized beheading of infidel civilians in their Mazar UN domicile last spring: “This was an act of disrespect to the Muslim faith.” No, not the inquisition-style executions, but rather the provocative burning of a $19.99 “sensitive item” in Florida. Many sensitive item outrages, one sensitive reaction.

But not all recent outrages involve the burning of a book which lists burning as one of the milder punishments awaiting non-Muslim NATO reps.  Invisible Children’s KONY2012 YouTube video urging continued US military help in capturing Joseph Kony hooked millions of outraged viewers last week.  And what seems to help make it so popular is precisely Kony’s lack of a sensitive item: “he is not fighting for any cause, but only to maintain his power,” narrates director Jason Russell.  One might quibble over where this viral morality was when, for instance, Kanan Makiya published his 1989 book “Republic of Fear,” documenting in Iraq what the late Max Van der Stoel called the greatest violation of human rights since World War II. But for causeless Kony, who unlike Saddam does not have a Quran written in his blood, perhaps the trouble can be summed up by the remix refrain of another viral Youtube video: “Dude, you have no Quran.”

                                                                                                                                 

Or as KONY2012 “culturemaker” Ben Affleck tweeted, it’s “not a political issue. It’s a human issue.” That’s in contrast to Iraq where, as Affleck once argued, the WMD lies and Afghanistan priorities should have absolved the US of the “human” cost of decades of American realpolitique (e.g., the Kurdish genocide).  “You owe us an apology,” a Kurdish student shouted at the lecture of the US Consul General to Kurdistan last fall, citing the 1975 and 1991 “betrayals,” and the coming December 2011 pullout.  Unfortunately for him, all our apology resources have been diverted to our betrayals of more sensitive items in Florida and Bagram.

Even so, when you walk through liberated, peaceful, Americans-dine-gratis Iraqi Kurdistan as I did last month, it is clear that for now, the Kanan Makiyas prevailed over the Ben Afflecks on the “human issue.” But walking past the months-old smutty remains of the Zakho Christians’ abandoned liquor stores (the aftermath of a mullah’s December jihad homily) was a stark reminder that here, as in the Baghdad slums hours away where gays are increasingly executed by order of pseudo-governmental Islamic fatwa, the West’s fear of the residual “political issue” of Islamic law remains our tragic flaw. Indeed, with a Christian teacher killed by a Muslim student in Sulaimaniyah this month, the Christians who were defiantly signing me the cross from the shadows should know that now, dudes, you have no Kanan.  

But they do have Orhan – Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, that is, whose 2004 novel Snow bravely faced down the “sensitivities and imagined insults” that poison Kurdistan’s Islamist politics, depicting persecutions of Turks who point out the most sensitive item’s inconsistencies (as well as the fascist retaliations). “I’ve always wanted this country to prosper, to modernize,” says the protagonist. “But it seemed to me that our religion was always against all this.”

When you can’t change the country, better to change the subject: that’s The New York Times take anyway. This week it ran an ad calling on Catholics to “quit” the Church while rejecting a parallel ad for Muslims, predicting possible “fallout” in Afghanistan. Of course, the prediction is well-found. Just last January novelist Salman Rushdie had to cancel an Indian literary festival trip due to Deobandi sensitivity to much less direct words written decades ago.  Having myself felt the dusty air sucked from a Kandahar City soccer pitch when I replied in the negative to a wild-eyed “you Muslim?” I can guess what Rushdie is getting at when he describes in an early novel just how the fallout falls on the non-Muslims: “the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant…he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles…” You know how it tends to end.

Army Regulation 600-20 states clearly that religion is “characterized by ardor and faith.” As for which religions have more ardor, leave it to a Pakistani military delegation to explain to US army privates: I recall a Culture Q&A at Basic Training culminating in a Pakistani Major providing us an actuarial summary of how the Prophet Muhammad’s miracles outnumbered those of Jesus.  Advantage Islam, in other words. Or as a University of North Carolina religious studies professor recently advised anyone confused about Afghans’ nuanced reactions to the Quran-burning fiasco, “If you really want to think of what the Quran means to Muslims, don't think of the Bible. Think of the very person of Christ.”

To be sure, when the shock and dizzying conspiracies wear off in Kandahar, the Panjway massacre will elicit plenty more outrage. But if the UNC prof’s primer left you wanting to know anything else about Islam, don’t expect to find it in the Times, literary festivals, or on any viral “human issues” video.  The next outrage – whether in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Africa, or elsewhere – and the West’s ensuing reaction should suffice.

Where have all the Chicago Boys gone?

E-e-e-everybody must get stoned.
(Founders' Porch)

How the Neo-libs can save Afghanistan. (Published at the Daily Caller)

As much as Congressman Ron Paul may enjoy ascribing the “neo-con” badge of shame to his hawkish opponents, he risked earning himself a demagogic “neo-lib” tag with his reply to a November presidential debate question on foreign aid: “we should export maybe some principles about free markets and sound money, and maybe they could produce some of their own wealth.” This is refreshing advice, yet unfortunately when it comes to applying it where it would save the most American lives – i.e. Afghanistan – many Ron Paulites and classical liberals seem more concerned with distancing themselves from “neo-con” nation-building than following Milton Friedman’s lead of pro-actively teaching the world to fish.  Indeed, while ending the war on drugs was a top priority for Friedman in his final years, the political calculations of his acolytes remain a key hindrance to rethinking the prohibition of Afghanistan’s most lucrative resource.

While poppy is conspicuously missing from the strategic debate, in Afghanistan’s plains it’s unavoidable. Last spring I drove to the outskirts of Tarin Kot, Uruzgan to purchase three cows for Mahmad, a beneficiary of a US-funded aid program.  With the Governor’s mansion only a few miles away, an ocean of humid poppy fields enveloped us – masses of the opiate, as it were. Here and there Afghan soldiers posed leisurely for Facebook photos as police jeeps snaked past. Officially, the stuff glistening for miles was illegal. Unofficially, it was quite popular – and as legal as a flat-rate bribe. Mahmad, who was eligible for aid because his son was killed when collecting candy from ISAF soldiers by a Taliban suicide-bomber, told me he would sell the cows’ milk to repay his farming debts. “What crops do you grow?” I asked. “Wheat,” he replied. Everyone listening laughed at the perfunctory lie (one readily celebrated by Alternative Livelihood Program technocrats). 

As US strategists grow increasingly desperate to wind Afghanistan down to a tolerable stalemate without putting more American lives at risk, turning to delusional fix-alls such as negotiating an end-game with the Taliban, there is a growing consensus that no option (save military escalation) is off the table.  Yet the refusal of supply-siders to dirty themselves in War-in-Afghanistan policy means that poppy legalization and its corresponding blow to Taliban drug monopolies and government kickback schemes remains not only ruled out, but politically taboo.

Conventional wisdom has it that a US-Afghanistan version of the existing US-Turkey and US-India poppy-for-medicine agreements is a nonstarter, given Afghanistan’s weak rule of law. This claim no longer levels with a strategy inching toward peace negotiations with Mullah Omar and a mid-2013 end to the US combat mission. If the rule of law can accommodate these high-risk courses of action, surely it can also accommodate one that relinquishes corrupt state power to the free market. Secondary arguments about using our poppy policy to keep Turkey and India – as well as Russia and Iran – happy suggest a relapse to Kissingerist morals. They also put faith in the idea that Russia, whose UN ambassador cryptically threatened this week to “hurt” US interests in Afghanistan due to the US position on Syria, responds amicably to tribute.

Most problematic is that the current policy, an evolution from prohibition to eradication (i.e. torching the livelihoods of rural peasants) to high-level interdiction of Afghanistan’s Al Capones, has failed. Not only have ten years and billions of dollars of US-funded counter-narcotics initiatives brought us poppy cultivation levels nearly twice as high as those during non-prohibition Taliban years (in 2011 alone, despite 521 ANSF-ISAF interdiction missions, opium production increased by 61%, and prices by 133%), but it has also created a dark underworld of drug lords and their extorted debtors.

Mahmad tragically lost a child, and was thus eligible for aid to pay off his poppy debt. But many poppy farmers, as PBS’s “Opium Brides” documentary startlingly revealed last month, choose to give their children to the Taliban in order to pay their poppy debts. ISAF’s newspaper boasted last week that 2011’s interdiction operations “hobbled the ability of the enemies of peace to harm Afghans and prevent them from living peaceful, prosperous lives.” But in reality, they’ve only heightened the debt collectors’ urgency. As Michael Hastings puts it in the recently released The Operators, “U.S. forces are not fighting and dying to combat terrorists, but are fighting and dying in local political disputes.”

With Afghanistan on the brink of an aid bubble burst and even Taliban purists calling counter-narcotics initiatives the “obliteration of the economy,” the folly of Carrie Nation nation-building is increasingly clear. Security strategist Anthony Cordesman warned last week that as Afghanistan braces for “massive capital flight,” its security force development is “in a state of total confusion,” with major elements that “cannot possibly be ready to stand on their own by the end of 2014.” Indeed, having been personally stopped at gunpoint by high policemen in Kandahar City, I’d venture that lack of training is not their only impediment to standing straight.

With such a clear case for rolling back poppy prohibition, where are the Chicago Boys when you need them? The Economist, which has fawned over “heavy weight champ” Friedman, and even taunted European leaders last month on the 100^th anniversary of the International Opium Convention for lacking “the cojones” to legalize narcotics, lamented in December that only “glacial progress” has been made in interdicting Afghan opium. Meanwhile, Reason’s Brian Doherty concluded last week that the lesson of Afghanistan is not to do “nation-building affairs more intelligently” (which might require signing Reason’s name to a neo-con blunder), but rather “to not get involved in them at all.” Cato, for its part, managed in its latest Afghanistan study to argue for a drastic 80-90% troop cut without once mentioning opium.

If the neo-libs could speak, a convincing tale they would tell on how legalization would bring the health benefits of transparency, would build up the capital for Afghans to restore their destroyed fruit orchards, and would hardly offer new opportunities for abuse in a country whose pharmacies require no prescriptions. They might cite the growing consensus reflected in the Drug Commission Report of June 2011 or Christopher Snowdon’s prescient new book “The Art of Suppression.” They might counter the ISAF jurisprudence of opium as “haram” by quoting farmers well inside Taliban territory who say “we will die for it.” But until they gain the “cojones,” their tragic nation-building prophecy will be self-fulfilling.