Columbia's War on Women

George Stephanopoulos, modestly omitting from his
2013 SIPA commencement remarks his accomplishments
in discrediting women as Bill Clinton's adviser.

Another commencement, another misogynist? (Published at The Daily Caller)

In the summer of 2012, a 22-year old woman named Sheherezad Jaafari declined acceptance to Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) on the grounds that she feared “harassment” at the hands of fellow students, many of whom had written newspaper articles and internet petitions declaring her unwelcome. It seems her gravest sin was to have worked for a few months as an unpaid intern for the Syrian government. She used this lofty post, SIPA students said, to support the Assad regime through the unlikely means of email: one email helped facilitate a Barbara Walters interview with Assad; another called Assad “handsome”; and worst of all, one email to a colleague noted, “the American psyche can be easily manipulated.”

Leaving aside how Secretary of State John Kerry pathetically validated Jaafari’s latter observation with his recent praising of Assad’s cooperation in throwing away the fraction of chemical weapons that he was kind enough not to use on Syrians (“I think it’s a credit to the Assad regime,” Kerry said), one first confronts the question of whether Jaafari would have faced equal harassment had she been a heterosexual male who had never expressed physical attraction to Assad. One begins to fear the answer before finishing the question.

More intriguing, however, is whether, when it comes to aiding Assad, the interviewer is any bit as morally complicit as the unpaid intern who perfunctorily coordinates the interview. Indeed, how fortunate Assad was last September to have Charlie Rose at the ready for a game-changing PR interview (in part thanks to Jaafari), allowing him to showcase his gentle English and give his self-pitying side of the mass murder story without having to even broach untidy topics such as his role in assassinating Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.

And yet, even allowing that Seeples can be convinced to redirect their self-righteous indignation toward Charlie Rose (who gave himself “high marks” for what he called the biggest interview of his career), what to make of George Stephanopoulos’s involvement? He set out for Syria under the pretense that he was the one chosen to interview Assad, only to be informed in Beirut (by an unpaid communications intern, no doubt), that Assad had opted for Charlie instead. Could this aspiring PR satrap, with his connections to Jaafari’s successor in the unpaid intern cubicle in Damascus, really be the same Stephanopoulos who had been greeted with roars of approval by SIPA students at the 2013 commencement just months earlier?

A double standard of sorts, but what did Jaafari expect? SIPA students have long been selective in their moral indignation, with no better exhibit than their ignoble record of consenting to misogynistic commencement speakers. One cannot feign ignorance of Stephanopoulos’s key role in using his publicly-funded position as a political advisor to Bill Clinton in the 90s to suppress and discredit the “bimbo eruptions” of women sexually harassed by his boss. Was there not one Gender Policy student at SIPA bothered that the 2013 commencement speaker was the same man who had, in 2000, publicly smeared a woman who was left emotionally devastated after Clinton paid her $200 in 1978 to abort his love-child? Is there not one SIPA student who knows the name of Juanita Broaddrick? Or is it that SIPA students have watched the interview in which Broaddrick heart-breakingly tears up as she describes how Clinton raped her, and they’ve concluded that it was not legitimate rape, and that in any case no explaining is required of the political advisor of an alleged rapist, so long as he is a Democrat.

Sheherezad Jaafari, world's most influential unpaid intern.

But give the commencement speaker selection body its due. It had tested the waters with Tara Sonenshine in 2012, a Deputy Director of Communications in the Clinton White House, which is well known to have used its Communications Department as a proxy for circulating the message that Monica Lewinsky was a gold-digging hussy; And the only qualm of Seeples had been that Sonenshine had not been more famous. And before Sonenshine it was Kofi Annan, whose best efforts to stifle the sexual harassment claims by a woman against Ruud Lubbers, a loyal friend, were reversed by the verdict of an internal UN investigation in 2005. And so it is no surprise that in 2006 it was “The Aga Khan,” whose transparent misogyny makes the unscrupulous welcoming he received from Seeples, unable to at least keep their affection for a megalomaniacal playboy discreet, all the more disturbing.

There is a sense of proportion missing here. Jaafari made coffee for a terrorist who John Kerry is now praising for his cooperative, can-do attitude. Professor Kathy Boudin of the School for Social Work actually is a terrorist. If the Left gets a pass on denigrating Sarah Palin (see Martin Bashir’s un-reprimanded comments) because she damages the feminist cause by making women look folksy and unlettered, where is the higher standard for Professor Boudin? Might she make women look like terrorists? SIPA, for its part, approached Hillary Clinton last spring for the top job. Might women be offended that the selection board had no qualms with Broaddrick's claim that Hillary once threatened her to stay quiet about the rape?

SIPA is not alone in its war on women. Just last week President Obama used the term “tea-bagger” in a letter to a concerned citizen – which refers to a sexual act performed by men to degrade women. The Left’s obsession with granting more tax benefits for married couples – whether gay or straight – comes mainly at the expense of single parent women, who are left with a larger share of the tax bill. And no one received a warmer applause at the 2012 Democrat National Convention than Bill Clinton himself. But if Seeples are intent on joining this war, they ought to have the minimal decency to abandon their selective indignation, and leave women like Jaafari out of it.

The Afghanistan Proving Ground

Tarin Kot's finest
 (Oh the lengths we go at Founders' Porch to deliver exclusive content)

Afghanistan has long humbled the ambitions of foreigners, but Kipling offers one account of quick and decisive victory. In “The Man Who Would Be King,” two ambitious Englishmen conquer Afghanistan by feigning insanity. The unruly mountain tribes find no quarrel with harmless lunatics, so the two make it all the way to remote “Kafiristan,” where they are taken for Gods. “If you could think us a little more mad,” say the unlikely victors, “we would be more pleased.” 

More and more, the US strategy in Afghanistan seems to be channeling Kipling. Few Afghans doubt that corrupt Afghan officials are largely to blame for billions of aid dollars yielding so little in sustainable gains (Kandaharis are still lucky to have six hours of electricity a day). But what puzzles them is how the US could look at such an outcome after $100 billion in nonmilitary assistance since 2002, or five times the annual GDP (which consists mostly of foreign aid), and say, as Special Representative James Dobbins did in July, “I believe Afghanistan may actually be the most successful international effort at reconstruction in a conflict or post-conflict country over the last quarter century.”

To be sure, most of that $100 billion went to project security, and much of the waste owes to the Taliban’s sabotaging of the very infrastructure projects that we are told will assuage their core grievances. But here again, Afghans wonder not so much why their security forces have suffered record casualties this year while wielding errant RPGs and growing increasingly reliant on the ISAF air support that is fading into the 2014 horizon. Rather, they wonder how the US could spend $57 billion since 2002 on training the Afghan National Security Forces, and somehow be so satisfied with the result as to have the Assistant US Defense Secretary recently praise the “rapid, remarkable development of the Afghan National Security Forces.”

And so the conspiracy theories abound.  A 2011 NATO “Red Team” report on ANSF perceptions of ISAF found that most ANSF respondents were suspicious of the US for providing massive aid to Pakistan knowing that Pakistan in turn aids the Taliban. “There is no explanation or excuse for such a stupid policy,” said one respondent. Even Afghan leaders, increasingly substituting populism for patronage as foreign dollars dry up, are leveraging this narrative.  Last November, Herat warlord-turned-Energy Czar Ismael Khan blamed “foreign conspiracies” for Afghanistan’s instability. In June, Vice President Marshal Fahim threatened to “take my weapon and go the mountains” if the 2014 elections bring more politicians with US links.  And President Hamid Karzai himself questioned US intentions in his June Doha speech: “If there is an increasing view among the youth in the Muslim world that radicalism is actively promoted by the West, the question is why and for what purpose?”

Perhaps Americans, troubled as they are by the recently revealed scope of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, can identify with the mistrust of Afghans, whose country is in many ways a proving ground for the vast American surveillance state’s capabilities.  Consider the paranoiac effect, for example, of the US Army’s recently revamped “Inform and Influence Activities” (IIA) Field Manual, which is as much a précis of ISAF’s Afghanistan strategy as the Counterinsurgency Manual was for Iraq.  Previously known as “Psychological Operations,” IIA gives ISAF the green light to convince Afghans they have won, without getting caught up in actually winning.

Unfortunately, when Afghan officials launched an information campaign on the dangers of immigration last month in order to convince the rising number of asylum seekers to stay in Afghanistan (the leading country of origin for global refugees last year), most Afghans opted for their lying eyes. “The situation in the country forces people to flee despite the risks,” said one teen.  It was a manifestation of the manual’s own caveat: “if actions and messages are inconsistent, friendly forces lose credibility.”

Indeed, the messages and actions of the US in Afghanistan drifted so far apart last year that it was not Mullah Omar whose downfall the FBI precipitated via email hacking, but rather ISAF Commander John Allen and CIA Director David Petraeus, all at the whim of an FBI agent investigating “cyber-harassment” (it remains unclear whether the agent, who sent shirtless pictures to the “victim,” Jill Kelley, has been reprimanded). Yet meanwhile, one of the FBI’s main recommendations in its assessment of Major Nidal Hasan’s 2009 “workplace violence” attack at Fort Hood was to “guard against the inappropriate use of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion as a basis for investigative activity.”

Ironically, where consistency between message and action is concerned, the Taliban’s friends have demonstrated much greater coherence than the aloof surveillance state. “He’s not insane,” said Major Hasan’s lawyer of his client, who calmly gave Army officials a power point presentation on the justification for his actions (to defend fellow Muslims in the Taliban from attack) before carrying them out. Or as another US soldier, Naser Jason Abdo, put it after stating his allegiance to Mullah Omar’s jihad and attempting to repeat the Fort Hood attack in 2010: “I wasn’t insane or post traumatic.”

The band considers my Bruce Springsteen request...
"Got a wife and kids in Kandahar Jack"

Yet the US government, which has declared neither Hasan nor Abdo a “terrorist” due to the isolated nature of their attacks, conducts the War on Terror with far less coherence. And nowhere is the paradox more amplified than in Afghanistan itself, where Afghans wonder what use all the terrorist surveillance is when ISAF prefers talking to the Taliban over labeling it a terrorist group. ISAF even struggles to comprehend the cause of the Taliban’s “insider attacks,” with Gen. Allen once suggesting it could simply be the “strain” of Ramadan. 

“In the end, all relationships rest on trust,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey in his recent re-nomination hearing.  Indeed, in the end even Kipling’s English conquerors fall, precisely when they betray their hosts’ trust. Many have noted that Afghanistan will never become a decentralized Jeffersonian democracy, but who knew it could so quickly become an Orwellian surveillance state? If we are done trying to "win" in Afghanistan, sanity requires us to give Afghans a shot at the former by unambiguously dismantling the latter.

When Irish eyes are sequestering

(Published at The Morningside Post)

A citizenry once again?

If Irish eyes were smiling on St. Patrick’s Day, it can’t have been for long. For Ireland, second only to the US when it comes to Western country fiscal imbalances, is now in its sixth year of “austerity.” Yet the “austerity” is too little too late.   “Let my country die for me,” says James Joyce’s Dedalus, and the recipients of Ireland’s intractable welfare state seem to concur. Or put another way, just as Joyce’s awestruck Bloom saw in the stars “a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present, before its future spectators had entered actual present existence,” so too for the indebted children of Ireland, who will someday inherit an economy that spent their money before they knew it existed.

Meanwhile, here in the brokest nation in history, if any SIPA students awoke on the Morning After the Sequester to find that government had somehow managed to keep the water supply from running red with blood from used needles of toddlers who had no choice after Head Start’s defunding but to buy heroin from laid off TSA workers, any ensuing twinkles in the eye at the notion that life might just go on, even with government only 41.5% omnipresent rather than 42%, must have vanished  with the receipt of a dour email from the Director of Financial Aid:

“SIPA students – Are you wondering what sequestration means for your financial aid?” What it means, it went on, is your life just got 5% more austere: what with 5% higher loan fees, and a 5% reduction of the Federal Work Study program, it seems that now only Obamacare’s condom allowance stands between you and a dire scenario in which you’d have no choice but to switch to a more lucrative concentration, like International Finance.

For these are the times that try nations’ finances. We Americans, for example, could liquidate the entire US economy, invade Canada, liquidate Canada too, and we’d still have a financing gap. Not that it matters. As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it when questioned about the circumstances of the Benghazi attack, “What difference does it make?” If you ask Prof. Stiglitz, not much: “The debt is not a big problem right now,” he told CF’ers last Fall.

Indeed, much more worrisome to America’s top leaders than trivialities like Triple A credit ratings is the idea of not being able to pile on more debt. Because even with the highest-ever debt as a percentage of, er, everything (i.e. Gross World Product), we have just barely enough money to gracefully lose to one of the relatively poorest insurgencies in history: As Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno noted regarding the War in Sequestered-stan, “When '14 starts... I either have to send in forces that aren't ready or I have to extend those that are already there.” Unfortunately you can't buy resolve, particularly for a citizenry that lives off of the resolve of future generations.

Ireland would seem Exhibit A for those who warn you can’t solve a spending crisis by spending less. In the last year, despite surrendering the title for the West’s worst deficit-to-GDP ratio to the US, Ireland’s 14.6% unemployment rate hardly jigged, while American unemployment dropped below 8%. “Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune,” writes Joyce, “and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.” That, incidentally, gives you the approximate Irish growth rate.

Yet for all the talk of “extreme fiscal austerity,” as Paul Krugman called Europe’s scourge in his February talk at SIPA, you might as well light a penny candle from a Solyndra solar-panel if you think you can seriously change the government’s preeminence once it reaches Irish levels. While low tax rates have brought in extra FDI revenue, spending persists. Of all the OECD states, Ireland subsidizes long-term unemployment at the highest rate. The competition for shortest workweek in the EU may be fierce, but the Irish are second only to the Danes. And the minimum wage is $11.20 per hour to America’s $7.25, though if you’re on the government payroll, as the Irish are nearly twice as likely as Americans to be, you’ll most likely earn more, work less, and retire earlier on a more unfunded pension than your private-sector counterpart footing the bill. “We served neither King nor Kaiser…and we’ll not serve them now!” boast Sinn Fein protestors who valiantly refuse to “serve” their creditors with such humiliations as paying for the government dependence they consume.

What’s more damaging to a nation than debt itself, in other words, is the tempting corollary that debt can substitute for a resilient citizenry.  Nowadays, for an excitable Greek hair-stylist who loses his government danger pay, joining the fascistic Golden Dawn in not so much immoral as a natural reaction to political shortcomings. Or as Professor Khalidi told NPR this week, the failure of politicians to “produce results is one of the major reasons that Hamas has become the power that it has become in the 90s and in the 2000s.” Stoning adulturesses simply being what one does when government falls short.

It’s a bit subtler in the US: “You haven't heard of the Bureau of the Public Debt before?” asks the BPD’s homepage. “We're a [ahem] small agency within the Department of the Treasury. Our customers are your neighbors, co-workers, and most likely you, too.” Ah yes, debt. Rings a bell now. But what difference does it make to a citizenry whose rulers safely assume no one's ever heard of it. So as long as you get your subsidized loan, forgivable pending employment at a place like the Bureau of the Public Debt, just let the adults deal with it.

Fixing our finances means recognizing we have a pricing problem and bursting peoples’ bubbles. As students with subsidized loans, that could mean our bubble. Will the same students who stay on their parent’s health insurance until age 26 be able to adjust? As Dedalus puts it, “Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.” And so it is that we must all be worth $16 trillion of debt. Because our entitlements belong to us.

Prescribed to Fail: Doctor's Orders

This Investor's Business Daily piece ignites an issue that’s been rolling around in my head in recent months.  Many right-thinking and liberty-loving individuals were appalled at the concept of the individual mandate.  Yet there’s so much more to fear about “Obamacare” than just the twisted reality we now live in where we can be penalized for NOT engaging in commerce.



I’d like to suggest there is more pernicious work afoot.  Reading the information outlayed in the IBD story paints a bleak picture.  It outlines a set of incentives which seem to establish a system that is catastrophically unsustainable.  

Here’s a summary: Obamacare's imposed "Community Rating" will drive premiums up for the young and healthy (see the IBD article for more detail).  The value in having health insurance for this key demographic erodes as costs leap ahead yet quality (at best) stays the same.  Paying the penalty to forego insurance becomes an attractive alternative, the young and healthy opt out of enrolling in insurance plans.  The old and sick need the premiums paid by the young and healthy to cover their care.  With enrollment dropping, premiums must rise to compensate for the smaller number of participants.  And the cycle repeats, each time driving costs higher and driving people on the margins out.

The system put in place with the “Affordable Care Act” (a laughable name by any measure) appears so inept, so obviously fraught with error that one is forced to ask “how could anyone be so daft to enact this policy?”  Daft like a fox.

I’m certainly not the first to suggest what follows, but I’d like to go on record.  I want to take what was once my benign fear and make it a public display of desperation.  After reading the IBD piece it seems painfully obvious: the system was designed to fail.  “Obamacare” was happily sent on an unsustainable trajectory not out of stupidity, but intentionally to tear down any remnant of private enterprise in healthcare.

When the left had full control of the Federal Government, a radical change from pseudo-private healthcare prior to a single-payer, government controlled system was still a bridge too far.  But the manifest failures from a system doomed to fall apart could very well provide the impetus to move to a fully state controlled system.  (Note: I say “pseudo-private” under the assumption that we haven’t had a free market in healthcare in decades; if you believe otherwise, I respectfully conclude you are kidding yourself or have no concept of real economics).

Political history is replete with examples of the Federal Government making wild miscalculations and promoting unsustainable policies only to come along with a grander (and more horrible) solution.  The response tend to be more burdensome for the taxpayer and all the more taxing on individual liberty.  For example, the recent financial crisis is a case study in this downward spiral.  Bad regulations, weak enforcement, and ill-conceived mandates for lenders contributed to the mortgage crisis in 2007-08.  The response?  A miserable piece of regulatory overkill now known as Dodd-Frank.  A real problem in mortgage lending just got a prescription worse than the symptoms.

The question isn’t if we will replace the “Affordable Care Act”, but when and what will supplant it.  My nagging fear is that the blame for its failure will be placed at the feet of private enterprise.  And if that battlefield of public opinion is lost, I hope the grand new healthcare solution covers unorthodox back problems.  Because you’ll have to bend in an awfully unnatural way to kiss your ass good-bye.

Lesson on Gun Control

In light of the recent gun debate, I thought this might be a good lesson. Tune in to this at the 5:00 mark for an especially critical lesson. I admire Dr. Gratia's guts; truth can be a tough message to a room full of U.S. Senators.

Too Good to be True

All for naught? (Kandahar Province, 2011)

Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan? (Published at the Washington Times)

“It is really too bad,” says General Elphinstone as Britain’s short-lived Status of Forces Agreement for Afghanistan descends quickly into “ice and blood and groans and death and despair” in George MacDonald Fraser’s historical fiction novel on the 1842 massacre at Gandamack.  Anthony Cordesman could not have said it better himself, judging by his December CSIS report that spared no military kiss-up or diplomatic busybody. With the US troop levels past their peak, and with post-2014 status of forces agreement (SOFA) talks flirting with the so-called “zero-option,” what is “really too bad” is precisely the US insistence that everything in Afghanistan is really too good: “The US military needs to stop embracing the mission,” he concludes. “Civilians need to stop overselling the merits of peace negotiations [.]”

Cordesman blames an “analytically illiterate media” for giving a pass to the Pentagon’s “statistical rubbish” and “worse than useless” reports on progress against the insurgency. Yet Cordesman’s quaint talk of “insurgency” reveals his own blind spot to changing times: what the Pentagon once called “battle space” is now “area of operations”; what were “combat operations” are now “stability operations”; and what was long ago a “counterinsurgency” is now a political-diplomatic attempt to tip-toe out of Afghanistan while avoiding perceptions of American culpability for the Taliban takeover of the south and east that will follow.

Far from being duped, the media and the civilians once bullied by “runaway generals” are now getting just what they wanted: a strategy hashed out by Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings and Fannie Mae chief turned National Security Advisor Tom Donilon could hardly top the current strategy of quietly divorcing counterinsurgency while keeping Afghanistan, with all of its political toxicity, at an Iraq-style arms’ length.

Yet as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s authoritarian drift and al Qaeda in Iraq’s resurgence one year after the US troop withdrawal from Iraq suggest, the arms’ length approach to negotiating the endgame may be good politics, but it does little for counterinsurgency. COIN, as Afghanistan veteran Emile Simpson stresses in his new book “War from the Ground Up,” is premised on the idea that coordinated political-military operations must earn the population’s trust. Even putting aside any notion of America’s moral responsibility for post-2014 human rights abuses and civil war, the most unsentimental among us have yet to explain why anyone should expect an insurgency uninhibited by COIN to suddenly embrace introspection and reform its tastes for terrorism.

The counter-coindinistas rebut that Afghans are forcing our hand. “As we know from our Iraq experience,” says White House advisor Doug Lute, “if there are no authorities granted by the sovereign state, then there's not room for a follow-on U.S. military mission.” Yet the real lesson from the failure to extend Iraq’s SOFA, as New York Times reporter Michael Gordon details in his recent book, “The Endgame,” was the US side’s “trouble taking yes for an answer.” Whereas President Bush had successfully prodded Maliki to crack-down on Shiite death-squads by forging a close relationship based on the notion that “you don’t put your friends in an uncomfortable position,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s paradigm that “you don’t make peace with your friends” prevailed over both Admiral Mullen’s troop level recommendation’s and Vice President Biden’s very own 2010 prediction: “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA.”

What Afghanistan’s SOFA talks are really about is perception. In Iraq, “the critical issue was not the US troop presence,” argues political advisor Emma Sky, “but the U.S. commitment to Iraq – and the building of a relationship that went beyond military support[.]”  Yet whereas the focus in Afghan talks thus far is on American perceptions (“We are leaving in 2014. Period,” Vice-President Biden has said), there is also the pesky matter of Afghan perceptions.  As one of my former Afghan staffers – a woman who has braved repeated death threats for working with Americans – put it in an email to me just this week, “My concern is getting bigger for 2014 when the US troops withdraw from Afghanistan.”

The American aversion to putting lives at risk for a lost cause, as well as the need to prioritize in the face of a deepening debt crisis, necessitates that the specifics of the Afghanistan SOFA talks have narrow parameters. The battle for perceptions, however, is wide open; yet for all the talk of a soft power “reset,” it is a battle the US seems determined to lose.  Alas, you go to war with the diplomats you have, and American diplomats are digging in for a “transformation decade” of “silk road” dreams and Taliban co-governance. “In your arrogance, you think you write the script,” says war correspondent Lara Logan. “But you don’t.”

Indeed, as one former US official told Dexter Filkins last summer, “Every plan for the future I’ve seen assumes a deal with the Taliban.” But do we know who we are dealing with? If the US AfPak Hands program is any indication, with its bizarre emphasis on training counterinsurgents to speak Farsi over the Taliban’s Pashto, it would seem not. “I’d gone to Farsi language training for four-and-a-half-months and I got sent to a Pashto-speaking area,” said one disillusioned AfPAk Hand in a testament to America’s botched soft power.

Even within the confines of a stringent SOFA, the US can still exert influence. India, which still harbors COIN illusions, judging by its recent decision to train hundreds of Afghan Army officers at its Counterinsurgency and Jungle Warfare School, is waiting for the day we end our fixation on pleasing our enemies in Pakistan. We could work with Afghans to legalize poppy for medicine. We could redouble efforts to kill Mullah Omar – a symbolic blow that would be more devastating to the Taliban than the loss of Bin Laden, who had long worn out his welcome amongst Pashtuns.  And we could adopt the Bush tactic of building our allies’ trust and confidence via personal relationships and moral clarity.

“Countries don’t ‘end,’” writes Aatish Taseer in his Pakistan novel Noon. “They rot away slowly.” For now, the rot continues in ways eerily similar to Fraser’s Afghanistan, where the Royal Army was “forever patrolling and manning little forts, and trying to pacify and buy off the robber chiefs, and people were wondering how long this could go on. The wise ones said there was an explosion coming.”