Three cups of jihad

ISIL’s rise highlights Afghan War’s shaky premises (Published at The Diplomat)

Afghans donning the "Afghani look"

Two days after the emergence of a video depicting the beheading of American journalist James Foley by so-called Islamic State militants, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called a press conference to warn reporters that ISIL is “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.” The candor and urgency of his remarks contrasted with a four-sentence DOD news release posted only a few hours prior. The release noted that Sergeant 1^st Class Matthew Leggett had been killed in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 20^th, after being “engaged by the enemy.” Kabul police offered a more vivid account: as Leggett crossed a busy Kabul road to help escort his convoy, a Taliban operative slit his throat.

As Americans debate all options short of "boots on the ground" for Iraq, little attention is being paid to boots still on the ground in Afghanistan, even as weekly losses continue – to include the recent loss of Major General Harold Greene, the highest ranking US officer killed in combat since Vietnam. Secretary Hagel vowed in his press conference to “take a cold, steely, hard look” at the ISIL threat, but the strategic assessments for Afghanistan, where the Taliban kills aid workers and journalists on a monthly basis, seem to have concluded last May with a Rose Garden statement by President Obama. “[T]his is how war’s end in the 21^st century,” he noted, as he stressed a “narrow mission” focused on “the remnants of al Qaeda.”

What remains unfinished, however, is an explanation not only of why these phantom remnants pose a greater threat to Americans than ISIL, but of how a US troop presence in Afghanistan will help us defeat them.  Indeed, in the minds of most Taliban-sympathizing Afghans, al Qaeda – which has not claimed responsibility for an attack in Afghanistan since 2009 – is less a varsity jihad team than a CIA concoction for justifying a continued American presence in Afghanistan. Conversely, the ISIL “JV team” has rapidly secured in Mosul a writ more horrifying and globally-minded than existed in Kabul during even the darkest days of the Taliban regime. Indeed, Iraq is quickly becoming more “Afghan” than Afghanistan itself: one Iraqi journalist recently described how new tastes for an “Afghani look” have Mosul men donning the shalwar kameez of Afghan Taliban fighters, leaving locals to ask, “What? Has our city become another Kandahar?”

Ironically, the selling point of the Afghanistan War strategy laid out by President Obama just weeks before ISIL’s June takeover of major Iraqi cities was that the strategy would put Afghanistan on track toward becoming another Iraq: “[B]y the end of 2016,” President Obama noted, “our military will draw down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul, with a security assistance component, just as we’ve done in Iraq.” Yet while recent events in Iraq have prompted a review of Iraq’s trajectory, US policy in Afghanistan continues to muddle along.

Indeed, if ISIL’s barbarous rise and cryptic reconnaissance of targets in the US is not enough to muster Americans to support returning US troops to Iraq, the only explanation for Americans’ support for keeping troops in Afghanistan is precisely that the mission remains muddled.  While regional Islamist groups like the Quetta Shurah Taliban and Haqqani network are responsible for most of the violence in Afghanistan today, the invocation of the “al Qaeda” bogey-man is a convenient, emotionally-charged shortcut for keeping Americans on board. It is also a legal necessity, as the operative Authorization for Use of Military Force – which defines the enemy as only those who were connected to 9/11 –would not apply to a war largely focused on twenty-something Pakistani madrassa students; their strain of Deobandi Islam, while brutal, bears far less resemblance to the global jihad of the Arab 9/11 hijackers than does the Salafism of ISIL.

Unfortunately, replacing the muddling with leadership would require leveling with Americans on the untidy complexity of the problem. It would require US officials to be open about the corruption and sex trafficking within the Afghan government, the counter-productiveness of an international aid strategy premised on keeping poppy illegal, and the perpetually malign role of our Pakistani “allies.”  Americans might then begin to sympathize with the naiveté of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, whose wandering off post in 2009 in hopes of bridging the cultural misunderstandings with the Taliban suggests he took seriously the easy fixes of “Three Cups of Tea,” required Army reading at the time. Like Bergdahl, Americans continue to underestimate the complexity of a problem that may not be worth solving.

Stressing the modesty of our goals in Afghanistan, American officials often quip that the aim is not a “Central Asian Valhalla” (former Defense Secretary Gates) or “another Switzerland” (USAID’s Afghanistan director Larry Sampler), but rather “something above Somalia but below Bangladesh” (General Stanley McChrystal). But with civilian casualties up 24 percent so far this year and the fate of the country’s first presidential transition unknown months after the election, even this low standard appears immodest. As ISIL attempts to build an Afghanistan in Iraq, the US ought to re-assess what it is building in Afghanistan.

Columbia salutes the Global Warming police

American democracy has its assets frozen
(Daily Mail, January 2014)

What happens when climate research exceeds sustainable levels... (Published at The Morningside Post, and quoted by Mark Steyn)

Last January, as the death toll of frozen Americans climbed to 21 amid 4,406 record cold temperatures across the U.S., the Weather Channel reassured its viewers that “no matter how low the temperature dropped in your area today, that doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening.”

Alas, one might have hoped that the billions of dollars the U.S. government spends on climate change research each year would have afforded us this minor detail – i.e. that global warming means cooling – a bit earlier in the game, such as before New York City began retrofitting its infrastructure and cutting its road salt stocks under the impression that “extreme cold events” were “expected to become rarer,” as the Columbia-backed 2009 NYC panel on Climate Change warned.  

This information also would have helped climate scientist Chris Turney last December when it was the Antarctic ice –instead of the science– that settled around his global warming research ship. It took a $2 million multi-national assistance force comprised of five ships and a helicopter to rescue him. As the Turney mission aptly put it: “We’re stuck in our own experiment.”

Unfortunately, the more the climate’s ironic feedback loops thwart the climate alarmists, the more the alarmists rely instead upon the positive feedback loops of groupthink to defend their dire hypotheses. They rely, in other words, on narrowing the range of acceptable public debate to the point that even alleged havens of free inquiry like Columbia University begin endorsing the unleashing of legal force against critics of publicly funded climate scientists. This past January, a federal court gave the green light to Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann’s legal proceedings against political humorist Mark Steyn of the National Review. Steyn, a Canadian immigrant to the U.S., is being prosecuted for the unlikely crime of “personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient.”

In July of 2012, Steyn, an immigrant to the U.S., made the mistake of buying into the hype about his adopted country’s “First Amendment” by weighing in on Penn State’s inquiry into allegations of Mann’s academic malpractice. The inquiry, which The Atlantic’s Clive Crook has called “difficult to parody” for its haste and sloppiness, was a response to leaked emails between Mann and fellow government-funded climate scientists discussing how best to “hide the decline” in 20^th century global temperatures revealed by their data samples. In a line reminiscent of Bridge-gate, Mann had replied to a fellow scientist’s email urging him and colleague Gene Wahl to delete all emails on the subject, with, “I'll contact Gene about this ASAP.” Marveling at Penn State’s complete exoneration – which had led some bloggers to call Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” – Steyn chided Mann’s “hockey stick” as “fraudulent,” and concluded, “Whether or not he’s ‘the Jerry Sandusky of climate change’, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his ‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.”

But before you jump to stand-down the multi-national forces from rescuing the ungrateful little immigrant from getting his assets as frozen as an Antarctic research team, consider that Columbia University itself is stuck in the same feedback loops of climate research. For in fact, named smack in the middle of Mann’s very legal suit as a “responsible” voice that has called Steyn’s comments “deplorable, if not unlawful” is the Journalism Review of the same Columbia that gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a respectable forum to announce there are no homosexuals in Iran and boasts a President who has written four books on the virtues of free speech. And just last week Columbia University Press gushed over its own client’s splendid lawsuit, announcing: “Michael Mann Takes on the National Review and Climate Change Skeptics.” Somewhere amid Morningside’s arctic breezes one can almost hear the muffled dying gasps, er, emissions, of a quaint principle: “I don’t agree with your making fun of a Nobel recipient, but I’ll defend your right to make fun of him.” 

I hesitate to note that despite claiming so in his very lawsuit, Mann has not won the Nobel prize. Or to be precise (to avoid a defamation lawsuit), “He has never won the Nobel prize,” according to the Nobel Committee. It’s a shame, because if Mann actually was a Nobel recipient, and if he were to win this case, we could all look forward to trapping many more journalists in their own experiments, starting with no less a defamer than Paul Krugman, who has called Friedrich Von Hayek – an actual Nobel recipient – a zombie, and was last seen calling cancer-stricken Senator Tom Coburn’s account of losing his doctor due to Obamacare a “garbage story.”

Indeed, with scientists at Russia’s Pulvoko Observatory now warning that we could be in for a centuries long ice age, much more worrisome than any climate feedback loops are the cultural feedback loops of mutually reinforcing group think that have made it fashionable for Columbia’s own media outlets to endorse the unleashing of government force against critics of public officials. Columbia Journalism Review and Columbia University Press owe an apology not just to Steyn, but to the entire student body, for depriving us of the essays and criticisms of writers who have felt the chill in the air and opted to let the ice settle in.