Peace talks are delusional

Why we shouldn't confirm Mullah Omar's friend request...

(Published at the Daily Caller)

When a Youtube video surfaced last week featuring Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta responded quickly and clearly: “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” The directness contrasted with the more indefinite conclusion of an 8-month Air Force investigation into the motive of an Afghan pilot who killed eight of his U.S. Air Force mentors in a suicidal shooting spree at Kabul International Airport (KIA) last April.  The report found that shooter Ahmad Gul – who spent 18 months at a fundamentalist mosque in Pakistan before recently returning to Afghanistan because he “wanted to kill Americans” – prayed all night before the attack at his pro-Pakistan Kabul mosque and shouted in between shots for “good Muslims [to] please stay away.” Yet even with the writing seemingly on the wall –indeed, he wrote “Allah is one” on a wall with his blood and died of his self-inflicted wounds chanting “Allah, Allah” – the report found no conclusive motive. It did, however, partially rule out one: “none of the co-workers believed SUBJECT was a religious radical.”

The growing buzz of peace talks with the Taliban suggests that ten years into the war in Afghanistan, many US strategists view the Taliban leadership’s motives with a similar degree of inconclusive naiveté.  Earlier this month the New York Times, for example, endorsed peace talks, provided that the Taliban “accept the Afghan Constitution and its commitments to political and human rights for all Afghans.” Yet the Taliban, who have opened a political office in Qatar, see talks differently: a Taliban website claimed this week that it “rejects the poisonous propaganda of the enemy which depicts as if [sic] we will be content with having control of a few provinces.” Indeed, a recent “top-secret” US intelligence memo claiming that the Taliban  are still set on reclaiming power and imposing Sharia on Afghanistan was no news to any Afghan that recalls Mullah Omar’s megalomaniacal self-proclamation of universal “commander of the faithful.”

While the US push for negotiations reflects a larger strategic reevaluation along the lines of a December report by the influential Center for a New American Strategy, which called for a “shift away from directly conducting counterinsurgency operations and toward a new mission of ‘security force assistance,’” the Taliban’s strategy remains unchanged. Ironically, it is precisely the US’ blindness to the Taliban’s ideological conclusiveness that has made US strategy so inconclusive. Every month seems to bring a new busybody solution to the Afghanistan nation-building dilemma – the latest being the “New Silk Road,” which will cure Afghanistan with economic stimulus.  And for every delivery of staple food items that gets burned by the Taliban, the relief technocrats see new evidence of the need to provide more robust incentives to a disenfranchised insurgency. As long as the insurgency’s phantasmal root causes escape us, so too will appropriate responses.

Of course, admitting that Deobandi fundamentalism in Pakistan is the key energizer of the insurgency in Afghanistan hardly seems to simplify matters. As US Envoy Marc Grossman learned this week when Pakistani officials refused to meet with him, talking to Pakistan can be harder than talking to the Taliban.  If Americans are weary of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, they certainly won’t go for it in a country where Salman Taseer’s assassin (whose grievance was Taseer’s opposition to the death penalty for blasphemers) was garlanded last year by fawning crowds; where policemen salute the revered Taliban in their Boluchi mini-state; and where the most popular leader is the ascendant playboy Imran Khan, who recently called liberals “the scum of Pakistan.”

The scum, for their part, are morbidly candid about their odds in the land of Islamist godfather Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, or Zia ul “yuckee,” as the pop band Beygairat Brigade puts it in a music video that ends with a request to “like” it “if you want a bullet through my head.” Fortunately for Veena Malik, the popular Pakistani actress who recently posed topless to show-off a spoof ISI tatoo, the “dislikes” outnumber the “likes” on most of her web clips. Yet as she admits, “If some mullah on the TV today says shoot the girl, they will shoot me.”

The instability and, frankly, Islamo-fascism in nuclear Pakistan endanger Americans from Bombay to Times Square, and necessitate our success in Afghanistan.  Yet whereas the counterinsurgency advocates recognize that defeating the ideological power centers in Pakistan requires uncompromising support and security for Afghanistan’s counter-ideologies (e.g. secularism, liberal Islam), the nation-builders fail to see that the ideologies exist at all. The KIA rampage came just weeks after a mob of Afghans, including “reintegrated” Taliban, thrashed its way into a United Nations (UN) compound in Mazar-e Sharif and slit the throats of the international staff and Gurkha guards, letting the compound's lone Muslim go without a scratch. Yet the main conclusion of the UN’s Afghanistan chief, Staffan De Mistura, was “I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghans,” the cause being Terry Jones’ “despicable” Koran burning – the same adjective NATO used to describe the recent Marine incident. It was a similar attitude that months earlier had led the media to conclude that an Afghan policeman who killed six US soldiers had simply reached a personal “boiling point,” though it has since emerged that he hailed from a family of Talibs and enjoyed songs mocking those who skirt their jihad duties.

Negotiating with the Taliban can make sense on issues other than the end-game, such as the release of Sgt Bowe Bergdahl. But grander pretensions of “peace talks,” though they may produce consensus on a post-war vision of windmills, composting lessons, and institutional capacity, are a grim reminder for the aspiring Veena Maliks of the region of which kind of talk is safest. Indeed, if we do cede Afghanistan to the Taliban, “none believed subject was a religious radical” will be a fitting epitaph for the international coalition.

Who pays more in taxes?

See for your self. I'd say the tax incidence outlined below would be perfectly just if votes were counted on a weighted-tax basis. So the famous one-percenters' votes counted towards 29.5% of the total and the bottom 20% only accounted for 4.7%. Then I'd be jealous of all those rich people... paying every one else's bills for them.

Crony Capitalism

We. Shall. Overspend.

OWS and Hezbollah have less in common than you think

Say what you will about the Occupy Wallstreet protesters, but when you do, be sure to project rhythmically and stop every few syllables to allow for a minionish echo, as is their customary way of interacting with the 75% of Americans who do not support the 99%. “We. (We). Are. (Are). The 99% (The 99%).” You might rebut with a chant about how the 20% of US households are making the 75% of their money from the federal government. But here at Occupy McPherson Square in DC – home to the nation’s highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year – the 99 percenters (38% of whom are 25-34) would counter with some give-us-government-money-when?-now!-why?-because! chant, destroying $400,000 worth of stimulus landscaping in the process and  reminding you why 100% of the 99% generation’s children will be born into debt, the precise amount of which cannot be quantified in an echo chant due to its having increased by $400,000 in the time it takes to repeat it.

Of course, everyone likes a good revolution.  Perhaps that’s why a stroll through Occupy McPherson leaves one feeling so defrauded, wondering why all the proverbial ragamuffins-of-the-nation have set their sights on so slight a target this time.  “Yeah ok,” a percentage of the 99 percenters will concede, “there are some things more corrupt and reprehensible than the bagger 1% -- such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms deciding that a great way to improve a gun-tracing scheme that gives guns to Mexican druglords is to scrap the ‘tracing’ requirement.”  Then again, perhaps OWS pundit Mark Ames (the Matt “wallstreet-is-a-vampire-squid-on-the-face-of-humanity” Taibbi bash-brother) put it all in its proper context with his recent article entitled, “Historical graph shows perfect correlation between austerity programs and mass violence.”

Indeed, supposing the reason the ATF agents were making their own gun-tracing beacons from personal Radio Shack purchases was because the ATF was too austerely penny-pinched to fork it over itself, Ames has a point regarding the mass violence in Mexico. But the tears of the Italian Welfare Minister earlier this month suggest that Mexicans can find solidarity with an Italian people confronting the horrors of raising the female minimum pension age to 66…by 2018. “We had to… and it cost us a lot psychologically… ask for a…” We are all 66 year-old pensioning doñas now.

One Occupy Portland woman was so pyshologically accosted, for example, that she resorted to placing her 4 year-old daughter on train tracks. “I don’t think that any person driving a train is going to plow through a bunch of peaceful people with children,” she assured the 1%. Yet a contrarian might note that she failed to consider the contingency of it being an Amtrak train, in which case a mother might reevaluate betting her child’s life on the conductor’s mile-out stopping competence, even if that mother already sold the child’s life out in favor of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded Amtrak pensions.

But more than a protest against the cold borscht of austerity, mock-heroic evidence suggests the Occupiers might be fighting against occupation itself: Israeli occupation, that is. Ames’ friend Max Blumenthal wrote earlier this month in a pro-Hezbollah paper of the “Israelification of America’s security apparatus,” claiming that the pepper-spraying police of UC Berkley had been trained in their dark arts by an Israeli-Bahraini assassination squad. When Atlantic columnist Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out that Blumenthal misquoted his key source, Blumenthal noted that the retort by “Ex-detension camp guard Cpl. Goldberg” (he served in the IDF) was something reminiscient of “Putin’s Russia.”

As the take-your-kid to OWS echo chant went last week: “Not every police officer. Is bad. Just like. In school. Not every student. Is bad. But. One person. Can ruin it.” Or, just one extrajudicial international police strike force.  In footage reminiscient of  a “Nasha Youth meets brain-washed Hezbollah toddlers in camoflage pull-ups” rally, the teaching moment escalated into the placing of the kids’ finger-painted hearts on police property. The Israelified police responded with the covert Yehudakhat rip-down technique, resulting in lots of kids crying like an Italian Welfare Minister.

 It would be interesting to know how the Hezbollahs – who, as Lebanese journalists can attest, know a little about extra-judicial hits – interpreted the contrived desperation of Blumenthal’s article. Perhaps in the way one reads a Wikipedia please-look-at-me “personal appeal.” For even Hezbollah, basking in the glory of announcing the capture of nine CIA agents this month, felt fit to advertise as one of its top ensuing findings a tea-partyish indightment of the excesses of an overstretched federal bureaucracy. In a brooding animation video set to shrill music, a narrator reveals: “The CIA’s financial system with agents is corrupt…The officer requests the agents’ signature on a receipt that confirms the agent received the money. However what that agent receives is less than the number inked on the receipt.”

Silly Hezbollahs. This is post-America America: we signed up for signing for more than we receive (unless of course you were lucky enough to get in on, say, the $98 billion in erroneous Medicare payments in 2009). OWS sees a higher calling: “What do we want? No, really, like, what do we want, because this is getting lame and my tent is like, caked in waxy mold.” 

Unfortunately, nothing about government largesse fits the name "1 percent." Until OWS gets that, This. Is. What. Fatuousness. Looks. Like.

Mexican Standoff: Labor Union Style

Another unfortunate industry icon has recently fallen into bankruptcy. AMR Corporation, parent of American Airlines, has sought shelter under Chapter 11 provisions. There are two primary reasons behind what’s troubling AA’s performance: labor and energy costs are too high.

Bankruptcy for the Company is the latest development in an ongoing struggle between the airline and its labor union to agree on adequate cost structure. It’s a familiar story: labor unions demand higher wages and more benefits, margins get compressed, profits wither, investors balk, and down goes the whole firm.

The labor unions kept their prices so high it drove costs out of control. As airline usage curtailed over the past decade (thanks DHS, keep up the good fondling… or work, or uhhh, never mind) major air carriers were forced to find ways to cut costs and preserve profitability.

In this particular case, AA management swallowed a poison pill: declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy, take the lumps, but in the end, hopefully able to negotiate new labor contracts. So instead of having “fair wages”, potential layoffs may likely mean “no wages” for the many members of the labor union. A reasonable person might ask: “why would the labor union ask for wages so high that it would force their employer—the source of said wages—into bankruptcy?” Seems counterproductive, right? Wrong. Perennial cash cow for left-wing politicians, labor unions have a lot less to lose by forcing Chapter 11 than one might think.


This Mexican standoff between corporations and labor unions has played out before (most notably in GM). It’s not a pretty picture. GM’s bondholders, contractual obligations ignored and violated, were forced to eat pennies on the dollar for what they were owed. But the labor union made out much better, shielded and defended by friends in politically influential administrative jobs.

And to all my 99% friends out there, don’t think this is a sweet deal for the 1%. Exiting CEO Gerard Aprey has no golden parachute. In fact, he has no severance. And with AMR shares trading down 95.49%, his stock is negligible at best. That’s the length the 1% guys are willing to go to get costs under control, and get the job done. If we spread his success and everyone gets their fair share, what’s OWS’s fair share of his failure? I digress.

To further exacerbate AA’s problems, fuel prices ate away at margins. Thanks to the Obama Administration and its respective Dept. of Energy for that one: stifled drilling, grossly inadequate refining capacity, threats of taxes, and burdensome regulations have driven energy costs to unmanageable prices. And this is one problem Obama’s DOE can’t solve by handing out corporate welfare to industries building fancy electric powered vehicles. With the current problems GM is facing with the Volt, I think we’re a few decades away from electric powered airliners.

On one hand, we have a President and Administration that passes favors to labor unions in return for campaign contributions. On the other, we have a DOE that stifled growth in domestic cheap energy to satiate the bloodlust of the enviro-jihad. It’s becoming more and more remarkable that airliners are able to survive much less thrive.

Breaking news: Holy Victory! (Source: Taliban in talks with Allah regarding transitional government)

Frustratingly vague grad school admissions question: Write a letter to the editor about a fictional/real, past/future news story.

My answer:

Dear Editor of Al Emarah (official newspaper of the Afghan Taliban),

Reporter Zabiullah Mujahid’s 15 September 2015 lead story, “Holy Victory! Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan takes Kabul” serves as a grim reminder of both the failure of the International Security Assistance Force’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and the importance of standing in solidarity with those who fight Islamist fundamentalism.

While US officials (or the “imperial mouthpieces,” in Mujahid’s words) claim that no one could have predicted this “sudden and ruthless coup d’état,” Mujahid’s prescient timeline of events shows that this outcome was both predictable and preventable. He cites as "key lead-up events" the U.S.’ neutral reaction to the Pakistani ISI’s December 2012 coup d’état, the 2013 bursting of the “Aid Bubble” and the ensuing “Poppy Massacre of May 2013” (when Afghan National Security Forces shot down 130 Helmand farmers protesting the burning of their fields), and the migration panic of mid-2014 in the face of the impending withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. While Mujahid attributes these events to “the Muslim people’s dissatisfaction with the oppression of the foreigners,” they were in fact the predictable result of a U.S. counterinsurgency strategy that put so-called “realism,” faith in bloated aid spending, and domestic political calculations ahead of a population-centric approach. Indeed, the lynching of President Amrullah Saleh earlier this week and yesterday’s official power handover serve as a warning to any future U.S. patrons of the limits of committed U.S. will.

But Mujahid’s story should also serve as a warning to Americans. Mujahid notes that Pakistan was quick to officially recognize its “Islamic brother,” and Iran’s President indicated an eagerness to meet with the new administration. These neighbors have already proved they are not content with limiting the depravities of Shariah law to their own people (in 2013 an Iranian assassin carried out the Ayatollah’s fatwa against the director of the film adaptation of The Satanic Verses, and Pakistani terrorists continue to target Americans abroad). America has long undervalued its friends and freedoms, and yesterday’s coup promises less of both.

In the graveyard of straight-shooters

An exclusive report on the strange land where only the most perfunctory survive

(Published at the Daily Caller)

US Army Major General Peter Fuller was relieved of his command in Afghanistan earlier this month because, when asked about Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s recent hand-over-heart vow that, “If there is war between Pakistan and America, we will stand by Pakistan,” he called Karzai “erratic” and asked, “Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You’ve got to be kidding me.” But what was more surprising than MG Fuller’s reaction – which, if one considers the 1,800 Americans killed protecting Afghanistan, was restrained – was that of a “western diplomat” who, wishing to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of his statement, observed, “The phraseology could have been better.” In other words, weeks after Joint Chiefs Chairman (Ret.) Michael Mullen’s testimony specifically confirming Pakistani intelligence’s support of the Taliban’s September attack on the US embassy in Kabul killing 25, six months after the US hunt-down of Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani Army town of Abbottobad, and ten years into a war against a Pakistan-fueled insurgency, criticizing the grammar of a pro-Pakistan statement remains one step outside-the-shade too far for the coalition of the willing.

The firing comes amid revelations about a “secret memo” delivered from Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to Admiral Mullen last May. The memo called for US support in convincing the ISI to axe its Taliban-training “Section S,” revealing the US’ ongoing courtship of the ISI – a courtship the US plans to continue, judging by Jeffrey Goldberg’s December Atlantic profile “The Ally from Hell,” which ominously concludes with an insider’s assurance that General David H. Petraeus, in his new role as CIA director, will make progress with the ISI because he has “a good personal relationship with these guys.”

Whatever the US position, it has not taken a “secret memo” for Afghans to conclude that Pakistan is at the root of their problems. For most Afghans in Kabul, the target of a startling trend of shopping center attacks this year despite its vaunted “Ring of Steel” security perimeter, “Pakistani” is nearly synonymous with “terrorist.” Even in Pashtun-dominated Kandahar, most Afghans consider the violence – this year has brought the assassination of the provincial police chief, the provincial shurah chief, the Kandahar City mayor, and many district officials – to be a Pakistani export. Southerners rank Pakistani support as one of the top three reasons the Taliban fight, according to an Asia Foundation survey released this month. Shurah leaders in Kandahar and surrounding provinces privately say not only that they believe the ISI is supporting Taliban operations in the south, but that Paksitan will reach further as America exits.

President Karzai’s statement of Pakistani solidarity was, then, meant for Pakistani consumption, not domestic. This reflects an instinctive bow to Pakistani power at a time when the waning US presence was unable to prevent the July assassination of Karzai’s close advisor Jan Mahmad Khan and the September assassination of his nationally-respected Peace Council chief Burhanuddin Rabbani.

But the intended audience of the US’ perennially tame statements on Karzai’s corruption and Pakistan’s subversion (Admiral Mullen’s statement came only after he retired) is less clear. The center of gravity in counterinsurgency, according to Gen Petraeus’ Army field manual, is not external actors but the domestic population. An Afghan population left guessing about US feelings towards the puppet-masters in Pakistan or the corrupt administration in Kabul is more likely to be suspicious of the promises ISAF makes with conviction, particularly regarding the “transition” buzz: as a NATO spokesman assured Afghans this week, “NATO’s combat role will be progressively reduced, but Afghanistan will need support after 2014 and that support will continue.”

Unfortunately, the US’ fixation on institution-building and politicking comes at the expense of Afghans’ trust. MG Fuller was fired for weakening ISAF’s “solid relationship” with the Afghan government, but it is unclear how Afghans, a record 56% of whom reported corruption to be a major problem in daily life in 2011, view anyone boasting affinity with such a dubious bunch. Meanwhile, those who emphasize fixing “AfPak” relations, to use the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s tired phrase, overlook the second and third order effects of gaining the grassroots trust of the population: Afghans confident in US intentions, and presented with an apolitical timetable for US withdrawal would be far likelier to stop facilitating the Pakistan Taliban’s presence in Afghanistan. This, coupled with drastic cuts in the US aid given to Pakistan (and, consequently, to the Taliban and radical madrassas via the ISI), would disrupt the flow of insurgents into Afghanistan, not to mention the spill-over of the fundamentalist Deobandi teachings tightening their grip on Afghanistan’s mosques.

Indeed, the diplomats and civilian advisors are as guilty as the military in favoring politics over COIN. Too often, the most cherished metric for evaluating the over $18.8 billion the US has spent on foreign aid in Afghanistan is the “burn rate.” As the June 2011 “Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan” Senate report put it, “Political pressures create perverse incentives to spend money even when the conditions are not right.” The result is a distorted Afghan economy (it is geo-politically taboo to even suggest deregulating Afghanistan’s poppy cash crop) and a looming depression, a preoccupation of many elders at this week’s Kabul “jirga.”

As for civilian advisors, consider the lax COIN metrics of Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for a New American Strategy, “Washington’s go-to think tank on military affairs,”as the Washington Post has suggested. In July 2009 he said the “11^th hour” was at hand, predicting that by August 2010 ISAF would have to be able to demonstrate progress in lowering civilian body counts and increasing security force competence. Yet the percentage of Afghans agreeing that the police force is unprofessional and poorly trained remained a constant 58% in 2010 (dropping to 56% in 2011), and civilian deaths in the first 6 months of each year have increased from 622 in 2009 to 1,167 in 2011. Undaunted, last December Mr. Exum predicted July 2011 would be a COIN “watershed,” when “the unmistakable outlines of progress or deepening evidence of problems will emerge.” Yet as 2012 approaches, any Afghanistan verdict remains murky.

There are some encouraging signs of breaking the political impasse. Last month Afghanistan signed a long-overdue strategic partnership agreement with India, the natural enemy of the Taliban and al Qaeda in the region. This came in the wake of the US’ summer decision to delay payments on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and reimbursements to Pakistan. As for the state department, its Afghanistan budget has passed its peak, giving hope that “burn rate” obsessions and million dollar salaries for civilian “technical advisors” will be a thing of the past. Yet with Kabul jirga attendees and an Afghan opposition figure in Washington warning this week of a post-2014 civil war, the US still has a counterinsurgency effort to win. When world leaders convene in Bonn next month to make sense of where Afghanistan goes from here, “phraseology” ought to be the least of their concerns.

(Photos by Founders' Porch)