Death by 1,000 Tweets

As the youths attack Cairo embassy on 9/11/2012, PR experts within fend them
 off with a fury of tweets praising Islam

US “Counter Violent Extremist” strategy’s “public messaging” focus is no match for reality

(Published at The Daily Caller)

As Republicans conclude questioning of the Obama administration’s narrative of the anti-U.S. Libyan violence that culminated in the fatal diplomatic compound attack of September 11, 2012, the most disturbing question remaining is perhaps the least cynical: “What if the Obama administration actually believes its own narrative?”

In other words, what if, from day one of NATO’s Libya intervention, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon really did believe in the primacy of a “strong counter-narrative” (or as Sidney Blumenthal put it in an email to Secretary Clinton, his “babbling rhetoric about ‘narratives’”)?

What if the aloof requests by Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ Washington task-masters for “public messaging” solutions in the months before the Benghazi attack were sincere?

What if US Embassy Cairo was simply taking the White House’s “theory of change” to its logical conclusion when it took time out of its lively morning on September  11, 2012, to tweet, “We consistently stand up for Muslims around the world and talk abt how Islam is a wonderful religion”?

What if, by National Security Council (NSC) standards, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey’s time really was best spent on September 12, 2012, calling a Florida pastor to request he adjust his messaging to the Muslim world?

And what if the NSC Brain Trust really does believe that Islamist violence can be countered by “supporting alternatives to extremist messaging and greater economic opportunities for women and disaffected youth,” as the 2015 National Security Strategy defines its primary counter-terrorism objective?

Such would provide a coherent explanation for the perennial tragedy of the US fight against Islamist violence from Libya to Nigeria to Iraq to the “gradual progress” (reported for the nth time) of US efforts in Afghanistan. The narrative of stock villains exploiting the woes of would-be model citizens is the Panglossian formula of every front of the White House’s global war with “extremists.” Indeed, the name of the strategy alone – Countering Violent Extremism – is a nod to the philosophy of seeing problems not as they are but as one wishes them to be.

The NSC sums up this narrative-centric strategy with the motto, “Don’t do stupid sh*t,” as if the US is the problem, and the solution is a re-branding campaign. Unfortunately the NSC spends billions of dollars on refraining from doing stupid sh*t in precisely the kind of fundamentalist Islamic societies that would most benefit from adopting the NSC’s motto themselves. 

For example, complicating the US’ post-Qaddafi messaging push in Libya was the fact that 41 percent of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa support executing the messenger if the messenger is someone who left Islam. The “opportunities for women” message, in particular, has limited mileage: 87 percent of the region’s Muslims believe a woman must obey her husband, and 60 percent of Muslims in Egypt favor stoning as a punishment for adultery. To support women’s rights in this region, in other words, is to be extremist.  Yet even with the UN reporting in August that “the scale of human suffering [in Libya] is staggering,” the Obama administration refuses to follow Europe in recognizing the anti-Islamist government in Libya, content with tweeting, “International community stands ready to support Libyan people, the leaders they choose.”

Likewise, complicating the US strategy to tweet its way to the rescue of the school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria in April of 2014 is the fact that nearly 20 percent of the region’s population supports Boko Haram’s ideology. For those who do not, US messaging rings hollow: since April 2014, hundreds have been abducted and thousands killed.  Meanwhile, as the US frets over the “legitimate concerns of the people” that fuel “Boko Haram’s appeal,” Boko Harm exploits the illegitimate concerns of the people, such as outrage over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And for every statement the NSC releases about Boko Haram denying Nigerians “unfettered access to education, health care, and economic development,” Boko Haram has a more compelling beheading video.

As for Iraq, recall the Sunni Awakening of 2007, which Obama administration officials ascribe not to the problematic US troop surge, but to solution-oriented Iraqi elders getting fed up with “extremism.” The Islamic State’s massacres since the fall of Mosul in 2014 exceed even Zarqawi’s “extremism,” but where are those fed up elders now? Is it possible that their criteria for a legitimate grievance (indeed, their definition of “stupid sh*t”) differs from ours? As we narrate our concern for Iraqis’ grievances, the Islamic State expands its legitimacy with every public school Islamified, child marriage notarized, and infidel death certificate printed.

But nowhere is the US faith in the power of the narrative more tragic than in Afghanistan, where the United Nations reported a record level of civilian casualties in the first eight months of 2015. Last month, amidst the deadly tug-of-war for the key city of Kunduz and more American fatalities, the US Army rejected the appeal of a soldier who is being kicked out for beating an Afghan official who laughed off concerns about his child sex slave. As one US Army officer put it, the soldier’s fault lay in risking “a catastrophic loss of rapport” with the Afghan officials. At some point, the price of rapport exceeds its value, and the white lies of narrative-crafters outlive their utility.

The White House’s public messaging approach to dealing with Islamists is premised on a profound concern for what the Islamic world thinks of the US. It is time for the Islamic world to express a similar concern for how the world thinks of it.

Where Warlords Fear to Tread

The late Matiullah Khan coneals his infamous bare hands.

Afghanistan’s complexity refuses to fade as quickly as its strategic importance (Published at The Diplomat)

Among the greatest hits of a popular wedding singer in Tarin Kot, the capital city of the Afghan province that has produced such specimens as Mullah Omar and the man who cut off the nose of the girl on the 2010 Time cover, is a ditty about an illiterate former taxi driver, set to rebab and accordion. “Across the mountains all the people know you / For you have killed many Talibs with your bare hands / God has saved you every time / You are Matiullah Khan.”

But if you believe the reports of Afghan security officials, God did not save Matiullah Khan – a warlord and longtime US patron in the Afghanistan War – from a cross-dressing suicide bomber that lured him into the backstreets of Kabul’s police district 6 one night last March. The assassination, and the demure reaction of US and Afghan officials, suggests Afghanistan is moving beyond the days when American counter-insurgents channeled tens of millions of dollars to anti-Taliban strongmen, and is thus in line with the White House’s February National Security Strategy declaration that “we have moved beyond the large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that defined so much of American foreign policy over the past decade.” 

Yet war has not yet moved beyond the elders of Uruzgan, where Matiullah’s replacement as police chief was shot dead by a suspected Taliban infiltrator last Sunday.  They remain suspicious of the circumstances and contradictory official reports of the death of Matiullah, a man as infamous for his security precautions as he was for his summary executions of alleged Talibs. They wonder how he was seen exiting his downtown hotel on his cell phone during a rare visit to Kabul one moment, only to be blown up across town the next. Being quite familiar with the various compositions of corpses of suicide bombings, they wonder how his remained intact. Not having received any public condolences from President Ashraf Ghani, they have led protests of thousands in Tarin Kot, threatening to renounce a government that has moved beyond them.

War has not yet moved beyond the 9,800 US troops that President Obama decided last month would stay in Afghanistan through the end of 2015, either. That decision reversed plans to close a US base in Jalalabad, where a US soldier was killed two weeks later, and where a suicide bomber killed 35 Afghans a week after that.  Initial reports that the suicide bombing was the work of the Islamic State have since been disputed by U.S. officials, giving way to familiar reports of Taliban and Pakistani involvement, which cohere less conveniently with joint US-Afghan calls in March for “reconciliation” with the Taliban and “dialogue” with Pakistan.

Afghanistan, in other words, is refusing to fade in complexity as quickly as it fades in strategic importance. After all, it is the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi – and not Pakistan-based al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri nor Taliban leader Mullah Omar (an “ignorant, illiterate warlord, unworthy of spiritual or political respect,” says Baghdadi) – who governs the caliphate that meanders from the mosques of Mosul to the forests of Nigeria to the gates of the US consulate in Benghazi, and who inspired the killing of cartoonists in France last January.

It is tempting, then, for Americans to dismiss Afghanistan’s complexity – to include its Matiullah Khans –as Baghdadi dismisses Mullah Omar: no longer worthy of our strategic respect.  Yet while the strategy-fatigued American people have pronounced the counterinsurgency manual, like its architect General Petraeus, guilty, they have refused to completely wash their hands of Afghanistan’s problems, and instead fantasize that they can solve the same problems of Pakistani-fueled religious violence with ten percent of the solution.

Indeed, last December US troop levels dropped from their 2010 peak of 98,000 to 9,800, even as the United Nations reported a 22 percent increase in civilian casualties in 2014, making it the war’s deadliest year. The year also marked a record yield of Afghan opium, a resource whose abundance will spell prosperity for the country’s criminal and terrorist networks for as long as it remains illegal. Meanwhile, even the cultural metrics disappoint: for all the cups of tea shared between US “Religious Support Teams” and Afghans, Kabul in 2015 remains a city in which one faces public lynching for being accused of burning a Koran.

Such is the riddle that Matiullah Khan and his forlorn fellow warlords bequeath to the US troops and diplomats who remain. A recent Washington Post article chronicled how the waning U.S. support for Afghanistan’s warlords has pitted them in a “defining fight” for relevance, quoting one Afghan who scoffed at the naïve “Western” dismissal of warlords: “[T]hey have to be respected.” Yet for the White House, which cites “reconciliation” with the Taliban as “the surest way to achieve the full retrograde of U.S. and foreign troops from Afghanistan[,]” the anti-Taliban warlords have outlived their usefulness. Years ago, when they were still useful, one U.S. Army Colonel in Uruzgan with guarded respect for Matiullah Khan asked himself, “At what point is a person too gray and approaching black and just too bad to be tolerated?” It is time for Americans to ask the same question of Afghanistan.

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.

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.”

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.