TW3 and Localism

[Political Waves]

That Was The Week That Was ... pinched and mean-spirited; blowing up kids in a playground just puts me off, I guess. And what's with the "electrodes to their tiny paws" business -- they needed this to figure out that Ho Ho's ARE heroin? Pffft! Last, who got the idea to flick their Bic at the sheep-man ... and how pleased were they with the result? Like the dozen kids that stood around watching as a 15-year-old girl is repeatedly raped and brutalized at a homecoming dance, unless we begin to get a handle on the psychosocial issues of this era, we're destined for more and worse. You'll find TW3 as bonus today.

On a larger topic, Charlie Rose had an interview this week with the David Rohde, the reporter who was captured by a particularly radical schism of Taliban in Afghanistan, who we read about in an earlier post. This kind of experience gives us an authentic 'boots on the ground' look at what's happening there -- and one not militarized, which is ... bless 'em ... a whole other kind of Kool Aid that I, at least, cannot trust. Below, you will read a well-written story of a former Marine who served in Afghanistan as a Foreign Service officer and has resigned, questioning the mission. He meets with Biden in the next days -- imagine such a thing happening in the Bushie administration!

A few things are clear to me in these two narratives -- first, that military presence in the land of the Prophet is, as always, not only risky but rash and ill-advised; and understandably. Second, much like the Pea Patch, where localism smacks of tribalism in disconcerting ways, Afghanistan is hundreds on hundreds of little Patch's with their own pecking order -- and they will quickly war with somebody down the block who attempts to encroach. Disunity is a given, and, of course, there is a level of ideological-cum-theological delusion among the Taliban and in Afghanistan as a whole, based on Muslim exceptionalism, that is almost impossible to deal with in pragmatic terms. Until the whole of the country is lifted up into some form of unified governance ... we've spent 8 years trying to form one for them and haven't gotten out of Kabul ... there IS no real solution to the problems there. Even Charlie Wilson [re: Charlie Wilson's War] sez we need to get out -- he'd rather take on a chain saw then battle the Afghani freedom fighters. However, there are important wrinkles.

We have used ... for our political purposes ... and then abandoned these people too many times; there are Afghani's that want a better life, and they risk everything to assist the US presence in a spasm of hopefulness. I once managed a Community College Resource Center, a place to remediate basic skills, and many of my students were boat people, our old Vietnam allies the Hmong. I would read their homework ... ESL practice to improve communication skills ... with tears streaming down my face. Must we always traumatize and decimate a people for our geopolitical misadventures?

Evidently, the zealots are angrier at Obama than at Bush -- they deeply resent the drone attacks, although they appear to be effective and the collateral damage uniformly exaggerated. Their jihad is against Christianity, which includes everyone who isn't them, and they're deeply dedicated to death and dying for that cause. Nihilistic to a fault, their vengeance model extends to any Afghani who isn't.

What to do? Obama has a deep dilemma ... one simply ignored by Bush until it had gone viral ... I don't know what he'll do next but whatever it is, it will get criticism. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, with whom I usually agree, pitched to bring our soldiers home when he wrote:

We invaded Afghanistan to ensure that the country could never again be used to launch attacks against the United States. That mission is accomplished, and our only goal should be making sure it stays accomplished -- whether the place is run by Hamid Karzai or the Taliban. The counterinsurgency campaign that Obama is contemplating looks like a step onto the slipperiest slope imaginable. It doesn't matter whether the step is tentative or bold.

Given what we know about the fractured but tenacious Taliban sects, I don't know if that 'mission accomplished' statement holds up and I don't think there's a hope in Hell that if the Taliban retakes the country, we won't be back where we started in terms of terrorist training camps. I do know it's pretty much a lose/lose situation for us all. And hovering around this entire project is the Pak in AfPak -- nuke enabled, internally corrupt and surely as theologically radical.

We need uncommon alternates for this situation; thinking outside of the box. And Obama needs some Guiding Angels whispering in his ear -- lend him one of yours, as this plays out into November.

Jude



U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394_pf.html

When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.

A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.

U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him."

While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis." He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that "if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure," why not be "inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won't have the same political impact?"

Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. "I recognize the career implications, but it wasn't the right thing to do," he said in an interview Friday, two days after his resignation became final.

"I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve.

"There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because "I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.' "

"I realize what I'm getting into . . . what people are going to say about me," he said. "I never thought I would be doing this."
'Uncommon bravery'

Hoh's journey -- from Marine, reconstruction expert and diplomat to war protester -- was not an easy one. Over the weeks he spent thinking about and drafting his resignation letter, he said, "I felt physically nauseous at times."

His first ambition in life was to become a firefighter, like his father. Instead, after graduation from Tufts University and a desk job at a publishing firm, he joined the Marines in 1998. After five years in Japan and at the Pentagon -- and at a point early in the Iraq war when it appeared to many in the military that the conflict was all but over -- he left the Marines to join the private sector, only to be recruited as a Defense Department civilian in Iraq. A trained combat engineer, he was sent to manage reconstruction efforts in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit.

"At one point," Hoh said, "I employed up to 5,000 Iraqis" handing out tens of millions of dollars in cash to construct roads and mosques. His program was one of the few later praised as a success by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

In 2005, Hoh took a job with BearingPoint, a major technology and management contractor at the State Department, and was sent to the Iraq desk in Foggy Bottom. When the U.S. effort in Iraq began to turn south in early 2006, he was recalled to active duty from the reserves. He assumed command of a company in Anbar province, where Marines were dying by the dozens.

Hoh came home in the spring of 2007 with citations for what one Marine evaluator called "uncommon bravery," a recommendation for promotion, and what he later recognized was post-traumatic stress disorder. Of all the deaths he witnessed, the one that weighed most heavily on him happened in a helicopter crash in Anbar in December 2006. He and a friend, Maj. Joseph T. McCloud, were aboard when the aircraft fell into the rushing waters below Haditha dam. Hoh swam to shore, dropped his 90 pounds of gear and dived back in to try to save McCloud and three others he could hear calling for help.

He was a strong swimmer, he said, but by the time he reached them, "they were gone."

'You can't sleep'

It wasn't until his third month home, in an apartment in Arlington, that it hit him like a wave. "All the things you hear about how it comes over you, it really did. . . . You have dreams, you can't sleep. You're just, 'Why did I fail? Why didn't I save that man? Why are his kids growing up without a father?' "

Like many Marines in similar situations, he didn't seek help. "The only thing I did," Hoh said, "was drink myself blind."

What finally began to bring him back, he said, was a television show -- "Rescue Me" on the FX cable network -- about a fictional New York firefighter who descended into "survivor guilt" and alcoholism after losing his best friend in the World Trade Center attacks.

He began talking to friends and researching the subject online. He visited McCloud's family and "apologized to his wife . . . because I didn't do enough to save them," even though his rational side knew he had done everything he could.

Hoh represented the service at the funeral of a Marine from his company who committed suicide after returning from Iraq. "My God, I was so afraid they were going to be angry," he said of the man's family. "But they weren't. All they did was tell me how much he loved the Marine Corps."

"It's something I'll carry for the rest of my life," he said of his Iraq experiences. "But it's something I've settled, I've reconciled with."

Late last year, a friend told Hoh that the State Department was offering year-long renewable hires for Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan. It was a chance, he thought, to use the development skills he had learned in Tikrit under a fresh administration that promised a new strategy.

'Valley-ism'

In photographs he brought home from Afghanistan, Hoh appears as a tall young man in civilian clothes, with a neatly trimmed beard and a pristine flak jacket. He stands with Eikenberry, the ambassador, on visits to northern Kunar province and Zabul, in the south. He walks with Zabul Gov. Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, confers with U.S. military officers and sits at food-laden meeting tables with Afghan tribal leaders. In one picture, taken on a desolate stretch of desert on the Pakistani border, he poses next to a hand-painted sign in Pashto marking the frontier.

The border picture was taken in early summer, after he arrived in Zabul following two months in a civilian staff job at the military brigade headquarters in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. It was in Jalalabad that his doubts started to form.

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn't want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. I didn't realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

"That's really what kind of shook me," he said. "I thought it was more nationalistic. But it's localism. I would call it valley-ism."

'Continued . . . assault'

Zabul is "one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected," a State Department official said. Kandahar, the Taliban homeland, is to the southwest and Pakistan to the south. Highway 1, the main link between Kandahar and Kabul and the only paved road in Zabul, bisects the province. Over the past year, the official said, security has become increasingly difficult.

By the time Hoh arrived at the U.S. military-run provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in the Zabul capital of Qalat, he said, "I already had a lot of frustration. But I knew at that point, the new administration was . . . going to do things differently. So I thought I'd give it another chance." He read all the books he could get his hands on, from ancient Afghan history, to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, through Taliban rule in the 1990s and the eight years of U.S. military involvement.

Frank Ruggiero, the Kandahar-based regional head of the U.S. PRTs in the south, considered Hoh "very capable" and appointed him the senior official among the three U.S. civilians in the province. "I always thought very highly of Matt," he said in a telephone interview.

In accordance with administration policy of decentralizing power in Afghanistan, Hoh worked to increase the political capabilities and clout of Naseri, the provincial governor, and other local officials. "Materially, I don't think we accomplished much," he said in retrospect, but "I think I did represent our government well."

Naseri told him that at least 190 local insurgent groups were fighting in the largely rural province, Hoh said. "It was probably exaggerated," he said, "but the truth is that the majority" are residents with "loyalties to their families, villages, valleys and to their financial supporters."

Hoh's doubts increased with Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by low turnout and widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war "has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency."

With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."

American families, he said at the end of the letter, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

'Their problem to solve'

Ruggiero said that he was taken aback by Hoh's resignation but that he made no effort to dissuade him. "It's Matt's decision, and I honored, I respected" it, he said. "I didn't agree with his assessment, but it was his decision."

Eikenberry expressed similar respect, but declined through an aide to discuss "individual personnel matters."

Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., Eikenberry's deputy, said he met with Hoh in Kabul but spoke to him "in confidence. I respect him as a thoughtful man who has rendered selfless service to our country, and I expect most of Matt's colleagues would share this positive estimation of him, whatever may be our differences of policy or program perspectives."

This week, Hoh is scheduled to meet with Vice President Biden's foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, at Blinken's invitation.

If the United States is to remain in Afghanistan, Hoh said, he would advise a reduction in combat forces.

He also would suggest providing more support for Pakistan, better U.S. communication and propaganda skills to match those of al-Qaeda, and more pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to clean up government corruption -- all options being discussed in White House deliberations.

"We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath," Hoh said. "But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve."


bonus

HARPER'S WEEKLY REVIEW
October 27, 2009

Twin car bomb attacks just outside the Green Zone in
Baghdad destroyed three government buildings, killed 155
people, and injured 520. The attack was the country's
worst since 2007 and killed an unspecified number of
children at the Justice Ministry day-care center. "There
were children killed in the swings," said a rescuer,
"others who died right where they sat on the see-saws."
More violence is expected as elections near; three
beheaded bodies were found in the province of
Babel. Fourteen Americans were killed in two helicopter
crashes in Afghanistan, and the Department of Defense
announced that 72 members of the U.S. military had
recently died while serving in Operation Enduring Freedom
in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan,
the Philippines, the Seychelles, the Sudan, Tajikistan,
Turkey, and Yemen, as well as at Guantanamo Bay. The
United States was planning a fact-finding mission to
Burma, and North Korean diplomats attended nuclear talks
in New York City. Democratic senators believed that a
health-care bill with some sort of public option would
soon pass in Congress. "Blue Dogs bark," explained a
disappointed Senator John McCain, "but never bite." The
Secret Service asked for a budget increase to handle the
death threats against President Obama. A Minnesota man
pleaded guilty to driving a La-Z-Boy while intoxicated,
and Bernard Kerik was in jail for violating his bail. An
apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared on a football-sized
rock in California, and the face of Christ was found in
the wood paneling of the men's room of an Ikea in
Glasgow. Jews fought with Muslims at the Temple Mount, and
Lebanon announced it had bested Israel's record by
creating a two-ton plate of hummus.

In Kyrgyzstan, where the full cabinet resigned after
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev took steps to consolidate his
power, an ice-skating bear mauled a circus director to
death. A mob in the Indian state of Jharkhand beat five
Muslim widows and forced them to eat excrement for their
witchcraft, and scientists said that a large meteorite
crater in Latvia was likely created by people with
shovels. It was revealed that a British investigation into
sex trafficking that lasted six months and involved every
police force in the country failed to find anyone who had
forced anybody into prostitution. Britain replaced its Law
Lords with a new Supreme Court whose justices wear no
wigs, and Morrissey collapsed onstage in Swindon. A man
was set on fire at a pub in Leeds and severely burned; he
had been all in cottonballs, dressed as a sheep. Sweden's
Lutheran church decided to consecrate gay
marriages. Nigeria was cracking down on its online
scammers, and Easter Islanders voted to limit the number
of visiting tourists. Soupy Sales died. Hundreds of
bishops called for Catholic leaders in Africa to step down
for corruption. Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana was named
to head the Vatican's justice and peace office, leading to
speculation that he could become the first black pope, and
after 25 years away from Uganda, Charles Wesley Mumbere, a
nursing assistant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, returned
home and ascended the throne as omusinga, or cultural
leader, of the Rwenzururu Kingdom, to lead the Bakongo and
Bamba peoples of the Mountains of the Moon. Scientists
found that death may make the pygmies short.

Microsoft released Windows 7, and Sun Microsystems said it
would lay off 3,000 people; economists said that the
U.S. economic recovery will not bring back lost
jobs. China was accused of cyberspying on American
businesses and announced that its GDP had grown at a rate
of nearly 9 percent in the third quarter. About 100,000
Italian women signed a petition of protest after Silvio
Berlusconi made fun of a homely lady, and Texas
researchers found that estrogen regulates fat-cell growth
and keeps womens' bellies from growing as fat as mens', at
least pre-menopause. "Nobody ever does female rodent
research," said one scientist, explaining why such basic
findings were so long in coming. "Male researchers hate
working with female rats." Chicago rats fed a diet of
sausage, pound cake, bacon, cheesecake, and Ho Hos began
to behave like rats addicted to heroin, consuming
increasing amounts of food to feel satisfied and
continuing to eat even when to do so meant that electric
shocks were delivered to their tiny paws. When switched to
healthful food ("the salad option") the rats, which had
become obese, their brains numbed by junk, simply refused
to eat. A man in Iowa punched another man, who was
ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie. Researchers
from Oregon determined that ancient beavers did not eat
trees, and a firm in New Jersey was distributing vaginal
mints.

-- Paul Ford
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/WeeklyReview2009-10-27

"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

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