Tag Archives: afghanistan

No, Staying in Iraq Wouldn’t Have Changed Anything

by Kyung Wilhoite Posted on June 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Iraq is close to being overthrown by a small Sunni insurgent force:

Sunni militants who overran the northern Iraqi city of Mosul as government forces crumbled in disarray extended their reach in a lightning advance on Wednesday, pressing south toward Baghdad….By late Wednesday there were unconfirmed reports that the Sunni militants, many aligned with the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, were battling loyalist forces at the northern entrance to the city of Samarra, about 70 miles north of Baghdad.

So how did this happen?

Iraqi officials told the Guardian that two divisions of Iraqi soldiers — roughly 30,000 men — simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters. Isis extremists roamed freely on Wednesday through the streets of Mosul, openly surprised at the ease with which they took Iraq’s second largest city after three days of sporadic fighting.

Senior government officials in Baghdad were equally shocked, accusing the army of betrayal and claiming the sacking of the city was a strategic disaster that would imperil Iraq’s borders.

The developments seriously undermine US claims to have established a unified and competent military after more than a decade of training. The US invasion and occupation cost Washington close to a trillion dollars and the lives of more than 4,500 of its soldiers. It is also thought to have killed at least 100,000 Iraqis.

This is one of those Rorschach developments, where all of us are going to claim vindication for our previously-held points of view. The hawks will claim this is all the fault of President Obama, who was unable to negotiate a continuing presence of US troops after our withdrawal three years ago. Critics of the war will claim that this shows Iraq was never stable enough to defend regardless of the size of the residual American presence.

And sure enough, I’m going to play to type. I find it fantastical that anyone could read about what’s happening and continue to believe that a small US presence in Iraq could ever have been more than a Band-Aid. I mean, just read the report. Two divisions of Iraqi soldiers turned tail in the face of 800 insurgents. That’s what we got after a decade of American training. How can you possibly believe that another few years would have made more than a paper-thin difference? Like it or not, the plain fact is that Iraq is too fundamentally unstable to be rebuilt by American military force. We could put fingers in the dikes, but not much more.

Max Boot, of course, believes just the opposite, and I might as well just quote myself from a few weeks ago on that score:

I’m endlessly flummoxed by the attitude of guys like Boot. After ten years—ten years!—of postwar “peacekeeping” in Iraq, does he still seriously think that keeping a few thousand American advisors in Baghdad for yet another few years would have made a serious difference there? In Kosovo there was a peace to keep. It was fragile, sure, but it was there. In Iraq it wasn’t. The ethnic fault lines hadn’t changed a whit, and American influence over Nouri al-Maliki had shrunk to virtually nothing. We had spent a decade trying to change the fundamentals of Iraqi politics and we couldn’t do it. An endless succession of counterterrorism initiatives didn’t do it; hundreds of billions of dollars in civil aid didn’t do it; and despite some mythologizing to the contrary, the surge didn’t do it either. The truth is that we couldn’t even make a dent. What sort of grand delusion would persuade anyone that yet another decade might do the trick?

If we committed US troops to every major trouble spot in the Mideast, we’d have troops in Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Lots of troops. The hawks won’t admit this outright, but that’s what their rhetoric implies. They simply refuse to believe the obvious: that America doesn’t have that much leverage over what’s happening in the region. Small commitments of trainers and arms won’t make more than a speck of difference. Big commitments are unsustainable. And the US military still doesn’t know how to successfully fight a counterinsurgency. (That’s no knock on the Pentagon, really. No one else knows how to fight a counterinsurgency either.)

This is painfully hard for Americans to accept, but sometimes you can’t just send in the Marines. Iraq may not have been Vietnam 2.0, but there was certainly one similarity: military success against an insurgent force has a chance of succeeding only if we’re partnered with a stable, competent, popular, legitimate national government. We didn’t have that in Vietnam, and that made victory impossible. We don’t have it anywhere in the Mideast either. For better or worse, the opposing sides there are going to have to fight things out on their own. This isn’t cynicism or fatalism. It’s just reality.

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No, Staying in Iraq Wouldn’t Have Changed Anything

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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now

by GuadaluMcclanah Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Speaking of Bowe Bergdahl, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt have a fascinating piece in the New York Times that just went up. They got hold of a detailed report that was written two months after Bergdahl walked off, and what makes it interesting is that it’s based on extensive contemporaneous interviews. This allows us to compare what people are saying now with what they were saying back then. For example, there’s this:

A classified military report detailing the Army’s investigation into the disappearance of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in June 2009 says that he had wandered away from assigned areas before — both at a training range in California and at his remote outpost in Afghanistan — and then returned, according to people briefed on it.

….Whether Sergeant Bergdahl was a deserter who never intended to come back, or simply slipped away for a short adventure amid an environment of lax security and discipline and then was captured is one of many unanswered questions about his disappearance. The issue is murky, the report said, in light of Sergeant Bergdahl’s previous episodes of walking off.

And this:

The report is said to contain no mention of Sergeant Bergdahl having left behind a letter in his tent that explicitly said he was deserting and explaining his disillusionment, as a retired senior military official briefed on the investigation at the time told The New York Times this week. Asked about what appeared to be a disconnect, the retired officer insisted that he remembered reading a field report discussing the existence of such a letter in the early days of the search and was unable to explain why it is not mentioned in the final investigative report.

And this:

Its portrayal of him as a soldier is said to be positive, with quotes from both commanders and squadmates — apparently including some of the men now criticizing him — describing him as punctual, always in the correct uniform and asking good questions. It quotes colleagues as saying that he expressed some boredom and frustration that they were not “kicking down doors” more to go after insurgents who were destroying schools.

And this:

The report is also said to contain no mention of any alleged intercepts of radio or cellphone traffic indicating that Sergeant Bergdahl was asking villagers if anyone spoke English and trying to get in touch with the Taliban, as two former squadmates told CNN this week in separate interviews that they remembered hearing about from a translator who received the report.

The moral of this story is simple: memories can change, and once you’ve taken sides you’re likely to embellish things considerably. The stuff that Bergdahl’s critics are saying today may be accurate, or it may be a product of anger growing out of control over the passage of time. We really need to wait before rushing to judgment.

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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now

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Five Quick Things to Know About Bowe Bergdahl

by NoeBoltbnhui Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s an open question whether the White House handled the recovery of Bowe Bergdahl well. Probably not, and it’s a legitimate topic for speculation. But on the substantive question of the prisoner exchange itself, here are five things you should keep firmly in mind:

  1. We don’t know if Bergdahl is a deserter. We’ll only know that after the military legal process has run its course and rendered a verdict. Obviously nothing is going to shut up the hotheads and Fox News blowhards, but the rest of us on both left and right would be wise to reserve judgment until that happens.
  2. Either way, we still should have gotten Bergdahl back. We don’t leave prisoners behind to face justice from the enemy. We dish it out ourselves.
  3. The evidence suggests that, in fact, probably nobody died searching for Bergdahl after he left the base.
  4. When wars end, you exchange prisoners. This is always distasteful and contentious: the issue of POWs was so fraught at the end of the Korean War that it actually extended the fighting for more than a year. But eventually you agree to an exchange, and the Afghanistan war is no different. Foreign policy hawks might not like it, but America’s longest war is finally coming to an end, which means our Taliban prisoners would have been exchanged fairly soon no matter what. We didn’t actually give up much in this deal.
  5. As Michael Hastings reported two years ago, Bergdahl didn’t think much of his unit, and his unit didn’t think much of him. Given the rancor between them, it’s not surprising that his teammates have plenty of lurid things to say about him now. They never liked him much in the first place. For the time being, you should take everything they say with a big grain of salt.

Practically everything you’re hearing right now about Bowe Bergdahl is being driven by extreme partisans with a huge ax to grind. You should view the entire feeding frenzy with intense skepticism until we learn more about what actually happened.

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Five Quick Things to Know About Bowe Bergdahl

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“You’ll Need to Relearn How to Be a Person”: A Letter to Bowe Bergdahl From a Fellow Former Hostage

by MirtaFarkas Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Bowe Bergdahl, you are now free, but many of your problems are just beginning. You have left a world of extreme isolation and entered one that is vastly more complex. It will be hard for you to adjust. Anyone who spends a significant amount of time as a prisoner comes out handicapped. This would be true whether you were held by the Taliban or anyone else. And along with all that, you will have to cope with being an odd celebrity.

You will have infinitely more support than most prisoners do when they are released. People will recognize you on the street and welcome you home. But you’ll soon discover that others, in op-eds, blogs, and emails, say terrible things. You’ll find that many are blaming you for your own captivity. Ironically, these are generally people who feel very strongly that your captors are their enemies. Some of them think you should be punished further. You’ll see that many blame you for the deaths of American soldiers, rather than blame the war itself. Blaming the victim is always a way to protect the powerful.

When you get back to the United States, people will ask you over and over, in confidential and heartfelt tones, how you are doing. When they ask, they will look you in the eyes to show you they understand. You will not be able to give an answer that feels true, possibly because you will grow annoyed with such questions, but also because “great” and “awful” will probably both be true at once, though you won’t really understand the awful part.

You will get unreasonably angry at times, even when your life is good. You will carry a strange tension around that you never felt before, one that is unlike the anxiety and fear you felt in captivity. You might develop new nervous ticks. You’ll probably feel tempted to drink more than usual. You might have problems with your memory.

Chances are you will feel anxious in crowds. It may be hard for you to make choices for a while without being told what to do. You will be wracked with guilt for a thousand things. That, or you’ll feel nothing. There will be something you’ll come to miss about captivity, though you might keep this a secret—there, the source of your problems were clear. Now that you’re free, they won’t make sense.

Some people—strangers—will become oddly emotional around you. You’ll come to learn that some relate their own crises to yours and they’ll look to you for answers that you won’t possess. You’ll find that the person many see when they look at you isn’t really you, and this will be awkward.

Some will relate to you as a hero for walking off the military base (if that is what you in fact did; we don’t yet know), which might feel supportive, but also uncomfortable. Some will treat you as a hero for being a soldier, which, if you were in fact disillusioned with the military, might also make you uncomfortable. You will come to understand that you are now a symbol and a story, and you’ll need to relearn how to be a person.

For years to come, people will tell you dreadful things they’ve been through when they first meet you. Some will preface their stories by saying things like, “Of course this doesn’t compare to your situation, but…” Others won’t preface anything. Some will probably tell you things far worse than anything you’ve ever experienced. Eventually, strangers will forget your face and you’ll enjoy your anonymity (while missing the attention).

You’ll find yourself trying carefully not to bring up your captivity, not because you have such a hard time talking about it, but because you want to enjoy your dinner or the party or the company of friends without someone telling you yet another terrible story. You’ll learn how to condense your own experience into sound bites that can wrap everything up in a few minutes and leave the listener feeling satisfied.

It’s impossible to say what is best for another person, but what helped me when I was released after 26 months of captivity in Iran was to find others who have been through similar experiences. Through them, you will see that your confusion is not unusual. When I got out of prison, I found solace in conversations with other Americans who had been wrongfully detained, from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.

I also connected with people who were wrongfully convicted in the United States, some getting out after more than 20 years behind bars. I related to a former Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Errachidi, who was detained without trial, did three years in solitary, and was released six years after being captured. When I called him up in Morocco and he told me he was having a hard time feeling happy, feeling like he had his life back, I felt less alone.

More likely than not, you will give a press conference or interviews at some point. If you do, you will find that many want to shape your story for you, and this will be hard to navigate. You’ll also realize that, for most everyone else, your story hinges on a moment four years ago—did you, or did you not walk off the base?—as if that would explain everything. Embedded in the question will be a subtle suggestion that if you did, you might have deserved being held captive for four years with the Taliban. This question will be disappointing, though you will answer it so many times that your answer will become rote. For you, of course, the moment you were taken captive will feel like the distant past.

If I could say one thing to you, it would be this: Getting free is complicated. It is difficult. Sometimes unbearable. But this will pass. Just like you slowly adjusted to being a prisoner, you will slowly adjust to being free. And several times, you will think you have adjusted, then you will realize that you haven’t.

This will keep happening, for so long that you will think that you are permanently damaged. You are not. It will be hard at first to make your own decisions, but you will learn. People will want you to do things that you don’t want to do, even people close to you. You don’t need to do them. Your decisions are no longer matters of life and death. You are free now.

If you want to chat, hit me up. Seriously.

P.S. To my fellow journalists:

It would be nice—though its hard to imagine—if the media didn’t descend on Bowe Bergdahl like a pack of wolves. When I was released from Iran, some journalists tried to squeeze their way onto my flight home. One tried to embed with our families as they waited for Josh’s and my release, even though our relatives were very clear that they did not want this.

There are some things more important than a scoop. Nothing special will be added to the world if you are the first person to interview this man; you will only satisfy your own ego. He is new to the world. He is going through the slow process of coming to grips with freedom, to being able to function on his own. Don’t prey on him. Give him a chance.

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“You’ll Need to Relearn How to Be a Person”: A Letter to Bowe Bergdahl From a Fellow Former Hostage

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

by ElizaTSK Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

We jabber a lot these days about how the real action in income inequality lies in the 1 percent. That is, the big increases haven’t really been between the earnings of, say, teachers and computer programmers, but between computer programmers and Wall Street traders. And rising inequality is even more apparent within the 1 percent: The super rich in the top 0.1 percent are pulling away from the merely rich in the top 1 percent at an astonishing rate.

Today, Sarah Kliff points us to a kinda sorta related chart that’s pretty eye-opening. As high earners, you’d think that doctors would be more likely to contribute money to Republicans than Democrats. But it turns out that isn’t true. A new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that merely well-off doctors—your allergists, your pediatricians, your pulmonologists—favor Democrats. It’s only when you get into the territory of medical royalty—your surgeons, your urologists, your radiologists—that political contributions start to heavily favor Republicans. Even within one of the best paid professions in the country, there’s a class divide, with the haves favoring Republicans and the have-nots favoring Democrats. That’s fairly remarkable.

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

by CeceliaEllery Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does the Bowe Bergdahl outrage on the right have legs? Yesterday I didn’t think so. Today I’m not so sure. We’ll see.

I want to steer clear of the fever swamp stuff for now,1 but one aspect of all this prompts me to finally get around to writing something that’s been on my mind for a while. One of the questions surrounding the Bergdahl prisoner swap is whether President Obama broke the law by releasing five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo without giving Congress its required 30-day notice. Republicans says it’s a clear violation of the law. Obama says the law is an unconstitutional infringement of his Article II authority as commander-in-chief. Who’s right?

Here’s the thing: these kinds of disputes happen all the time in various contexts. Federal and state agencies take various actions and then go to court to defend them. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. It’s pretty routine stuff.

And that’s what should happen here. Congressional Republicans should challenge Obama in court and get a ruling. This would be useful for a couple of reasons. First, it would be a sign of whether Republican outrage is serious. If it is, they’ll file suit. If they don’t file, then we’ll all know that it’s just partisan preening. Second, we’d get a ruling. The scope of the president’s authority would become clear. (Or at least clearer.)

But this doesn’t happen very often. Sometime problems with standing are at issue, but not usually. Congress has standing to challenge this. No, the more usual reason is that it’s hopeless. Courts traditionally treat disputes between the president and Congress as political, and decline to weigh in.

This is fine if a dispute truly is political. But this, like many other so-called political disputes, isn’t. It’s a clear question of how far the president’s commander-in-chief authority extends and what authority Congress has to limit it. If Republicans truly believe Obama violated the law, they should be willing to go to court to prove it. And courts should be willing to hand down a ruling. It’s a mistake to simply wash their hands of these kinds of things.

1Speaking of which, you should have seen my Twitter feed after yesterday’s Bergdahl post. Hoo boy.

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

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Good News for August

by Cesar2853jg Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hey! Rick Perlstein’s final (?) volume in his account of the rise of the modern conservative movement, The Invisible Bridge, is coming out on August 5. How did I not know this until now?

In any case, this is good news. I’ll have something good to read in August. And so will you.

UPDATE: I just got an email from Rick:

not final….

Just signed contract to write fourth and final volume taking story through 1980 election.

Hmmm. This is sounding very Game-of-Thrones-ish. It keeps expanding. When volume 4 is released, will we learn that Rick decided the 1980 election really deserved a book 5 all of its own?

In any case, I’ve long felt that that the 70s are one of the most underrated decades. An awful lot of what’s happened since was germinated in the froth of the 70s. It was a decade in which a lot of things—political, cultural, and economic—were in flux; and whether we knew it or not, we were making choices that determined which direction we were going to take over the next few decades. I’m looking forward to Rick’s take on this.

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Good News for August

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

by AbbieBenes Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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For deep coverage of President Obama’s decision to roll out new limits on CO2 emissions from power plants, I commend to you the fine folks who cover the environment for us. Their real-time reporting on today’s events is here.

For now, I’ll just make a couple of points. First, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy sure is right about this:

McCarthy said critics who warn of severe economic consequences of the rules have historically decried all environmental protections. She described them as “ special interests” who “cried wolf to protect their own agenda. And time after time, we followed the science, protected the American people, and the doomsday predictions never came true. Now, climate change is calling our number. And right on cue, those same critics once again will flaunt manufactured facts and scare tactics.”

Before the rules came out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would cost the economy $50 billion annually and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, from the coal-heavy state of Kentucky, called it “a dagger in the heart of the American middle class.”

You should basically ignore cries of doom from conservatives and business interests. They’ll be producing reams of data showing that the new EPA regs will cost untold billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and thousands of plant closures. This is what they’ve done with every environmental regulation ever proposed. In virtually every case, they’ve been wrong. The cost of compliance turns out to be a lot lower than we expect, as does the impact on jobs and energy prices. Roughly speaking, this is because capitalism really does work, something these fans of capitalism always forget whenever it becomes inconvenient. But work it does: we invent new ways of compliance and new ways of generating energy, and it all turns out far better than the doom-mongers expect.

But you probably knew that already. So here’s something else to ponder: What is Obama’s real goal in announcing these new regulations? The reason I ask is that today’s announcement is just the first step. We now have to go through the normal drafting and public comment phase, and this is a lengthy process—even if the courts don’t get involved, something I wouldn’t bet on. Obama may have directed the EPA to issue the final rule by June 2015, but that seems hopelessly optimistic to me. At a minimum, for a complex and powerful regulation like this one, I’d expect a minimum of two or three years.

In other words, it probably won’t go into effect during Obama’s presidency. And that makes me wonder if it’s as much a bargaining chip as anything else. Back in 2010, when cap-and-trade was being considered in the Senate, Obama warned that if it didn’t pass, he’d take executive action on his own. That wasn’t enough to scare Republicans into supporting the bill, but now he’s actually doing it, which means there’s a concrete regulation to compare alternatives to. And I wonder if that isn’t the main point: Produce something specific enough that it’s possible to get some Republican support for an alternative. Even now, I suspect that Obama would be much happier with congressional legislation than with an executive action.

I’m just noodling here, and I might be entirely off base. God knows Obama has no reason to think that anything short of Armageddon will provoke any serious compromising from Republicans in Congress. Still, the timing certainly seems a bit peculiar. It’s been four years since cap-and-trade failed. Why did it take this long to produce the EPA regs that he had threatened as the price of failure?

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

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Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.

by ZHOAlyceiwatjt Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff points today to an interesting new Kaiser poll about Obamacare. The question is whether Obamacare has directly helped or hurt your family. It turns out that far more Democrats think it’s helped them than Republicans.

Now, there are some reasons to think this is objectively true. Obamacare exchanges have generally been more effective in blue states, signing up more people. Medicaid expansion has been almost entirely limited to blue states. And Obamacare is directed primarily at those with low incomes, who lean heavily Democratic. Put all this together, and you’d expect that a lot more Democrats have benefited from Obamacare than Republicans.

However, Kliff thinks this doesn’t explain the entire gap. A lot of it is just plain partisanship: “Democrats likely overestimate the health law’s reach, Republicans underestimate and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.” I suspect that’s true, and it’s the chart on the right that demonstrates it most clearly. Take a look at the question in the middle. A full 34 percent of Republicans say they personally know someone who lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare. Given the rather small number of people who actually fall into this category, it’s vanishingly unlikely that 34 percent of Republicans truly know someone who lost coverage. But since they don’t like Obamacare, I suppose they’re more likely to count friends of friends, or someone that Aunt Millie told them about, or someone they heard about at that party last Christmas. Democrats probably act the opposite.

On the other hand, the results of the question about gaining coverage actually seem fairly reasonable to me. I’d expect about a 2:1 difference between Republicans and Democrats, and that’s what we see. For some reason, I suspect that people are answering questions about gaining coverage fairly honestly. It’s only on the issue of losing coverage that partisan loyalties are skewing the results.

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Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.

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Low Interest Rates May Be the New Normal

by CallieEomyavt Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman says that low interest rates are likely to be with us for a long time:

Structural change is happening fast — just not the kind of structural change people like to talk about. Never mind the stuff about skill mismatches and all that. What’s really happening fast is the demographic transition i.e., an aging population, with Europe very quickly turning Japanese. And the US, although growing faster, also turning down sharply.

Add to this the fact that what we thought was normal actually depended on ever-growing household debt, and it becomes clear that historical expectations about normal interest rates are likely to be way off. You don’t have to believe in secular stagnation (although you should take it very seriously) to accept that low rates are very likely the new normal.

If this is true, is it another reason to think that Thomas Piketty might be wrong about returns to capital staying high over the next century even as economic growth slows down?

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Low Interest Rates May Be the New Normal

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