Tag Archives: syria

Here’s Why "Arming the Opposition" Usually Doesn’t Work

by LarhondPYKO Posted on October 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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I routinely mock the tiresomely predictable calls from conservative hawks to “arm the opposition.” It never seems to matter who the opposition is. Nor does it matter if we’re already arming them. If we are, then we need to send them even better arms. Does this do any good? Can allied forces always benefit from more American arms and training? That gets tactfully left unsaid.

Today, Phil Carter, who has firsthand experience with this, writes a longer piece explaining just why the theory of indirect military assistance is so wobbly in practice:

The theory briefs well as a way to achieve U.S. goals without great expenditure of U.S. blood and treasure. Unfortunately, decades of experience (including the current messes in Iraq and Syria) suggest that the theory works only in incredibly narrow situations in which states need just a little assistance. In the most unstable places and in the largest conflagrations, where we tend to feel the greatest urge to do something, the strategy crumbles.

It fails first and most basically because it hinges upon an alignment of interests that rarely exists between Washington and its proxies.

….Second, the security-assistance strategy gives too much weight to the efficacy of U.S. war-fighting systems and capabilities….For security assistance to have any chance, it must build on existing institutions, adding something that fits within or atop a partner’s forces….But giving night-vision goggles and F-16 aircraft to a third-rate military like the Iraqi army won’t produce a first-rate force, let alone instill the will to fight.

….The third problem with security assistance is that it risks further destabilizing already unstable situations and actually countering U.S. interests. As in Syria, we may train soldiers who end up fighting for the other side or provide equipment that eventually falls into enemy hands.

There are some things we should have learned over the past couple of decades, and one of them is this: “train-and-equip” missions usually don’t work. Sometimes they do, as in Afghanistan in the 80s. But that’s the rare success. In Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan in the aughts, they failed.

So why do we hear cries to arm our allies during practically every conflict? Because it turns out there aren’t very many good choices in between doing nothing and launching a full-scale ground war. One option is aerial support and bombing. Another option is arming someone else’s troops. So if you know the public won’t support an invasion with US troops, but you still want to show that you’re more hawkish than whoever’s in charge now, your only real alternative is to call for one or the other of these things—or both—regardless of whether they’ll work.

And of course, the louder the better. It might not help the war effort any, but it sure will help your next reelection campaign.

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Here’s Why "Arming the Opposition" Usually Doesn’t Work

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Gun Control’s Biggest Problem: Most People Just Don’t Care Very Much

by Neil4262623928 Posted on October 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Atkins writes about the problem of getting gun control legislation passed:

There is a broadening schism in the activist community between those who focus on nuts-and-bolts electoral and legislative politics, and those who spend their energy on issue-area visibility and engagement….Election work and party involvement is increasingly seen as the unhip, uncool, morally compromised province of social climbers and “brogressives” not truly committed to the supposedly “real work” of social justice engagement by non-electoral means.

….There is certainly great value in persuasion, engagement and visibility model….But gun politics in the United States shows above all the weaknesses and limits of the engagement model. The vast majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws….Numerous organizations have engaged in countless petitions and demonstrations to shame legislators into action from a variety of perspectives, but it essentially never works.

….The reason that the United States cannot seem to do anything about guns is simply that the NRA and the vocal minority of the nation’s gun owners mobilize to vote on the issue, while the large majority that favors gun safety laws does not….Gun control will pass precisely when legislators become more afraid of the votes of gun control supporters than they are of gun control opponents. That will only happen when interested organizations invest in field work—that much maligned, unsexy work of precinct walking and phonebanking—to mobilize voters on that issue, and when liberal organizations work to unseat Democrats who do the bidding of the NRA and replace them with ones who vote to protect the people.

I’m not sure Atkins has this right. The problem is in the second bolded sentence: “The vast majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws.” There’s some truth to this, but there’s also a big pitfall here, and it’s one that liberals are especially vulnerable to. I routinely read lefties who quote polls to show that the country agrees with us on pretty much everything. Voters support teachers, they support the environment, they support financial reform, they support gun control.

But this is a bad misreading of what polls can tell us. There are (at least) two related problems here:

Most polls don’t tell us how deeply people feel. Sure, lots of American think that universal background checks are a good idea, but they don’t really care that much. In a recent Gallup poll of most important problems, gun control ranked 22nd, with only 2 percent rating it their most important issue. Needless to say, though, gun owners are opposed to background checks, and they care a lot.
Most polls don’t tell us about the tradeoffs people are willing to make. In the abstract, sure, maybe a majority of Americans think we should make it harder to buy guns. But if there’s a real-world price to pay how willing are they to pay it? A few months ago, a Pew poll that pitted gun control against gun rights found that gun rights won by 52-46 percent.

There are lots of polls, and some of them probably show a greater intensity among those who support gun control. A lot depends on question wording. But that’s sort of my point: If you get substantially different responses because of small changes in question wording or depending on which precise issues you ask about (background checks vs. assault weapons, gun locks vs. large-capacity magazines) that’s a sign of low intensity.

Atkins is certainly right that Democratic legislators won’t act on gun control until voters are mobilized, but that puts the cart before the horse. You can’t mobilize voters on an issue they don’t really care much about in the first place. In this case, I think the folks who prioritize issue-area visibility and engagement probably have the better of the argument. Until voters who favor gun control feel as strongly as those who oppose it, all the field work in the world won’t do any good.

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Gun Control’s Biggest Problem: Most People Just Don’t Care Very Much

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

by CarmeloPerkinson Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lots of people have asked lots of questions about Hillary Clinton and her email server. That’s fair enough. But I’ve got a couple of questions for the people with all the questions. There might be simple answers to these, but they’ve been bugging me for a while and I still don’t really understand them. Here they are:

One of the most persistent suspicions is that Hillary set up a private server in order to evade FOIA requests. But this has never made any sense to me. What could possibly have led either Hillary or her staff to believe this? There’s simply nothing in either the statute or in the way it’s been applied in practice to suggest that official communications are beyond the reach of FOIA just because they’re in private hands.

On a related note, what was going on in the State Department’s FOIA office? They received several FOIA requests that required them to search Hillary’s email, and responded by saying there was no record of anything relevant to the request. But the very first time they did this, they must have realized that Hillary’s email archive wasn’t just sparse, but nonexistent. Did they ask Hillary’s office about this? If not, why not? If they did, what were they told? This should be relatively easy to answer since I assume these folks can be subpoenaed and asked about it.

Generally speaking, the reason I’ve been skeptical about this whole affair is that the nefarious interpretations have never made much sense to me. What Hillary did was almost certainly dumb—as she’s admitted herself—and it’s possible that she even violated some regulations. But those are relatively minor things. Emailgate is only a big issue if there was some kind of serious intent to defraud, and that hardly seems possible:

Hillary’s private server didn’t protect her from FOIA requests and she surely knew this.
By all indications, she was very careful about her email use and never wrote anything she might regret if it became public.
And it hardly seems likely that she thought she could delete embarrassing emails before turning them over. There’s simply too much risk that the missing emails would show up in someone else’s account, and that really would be disastrous. Her husband might be the type to take idiotic risks like that, but she isn’t.

School me, peeps. I fully acknowledge that maybe I’m just not getting something here. What’s the worst case scenario that’s actually plausible?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m asking here solely about FOIA as it applies to the Hillary Clinton email server affair. On a broader level, FOIA plainly has plenty of problems, both in terms of response time and willingness to cooperate with the spirit of the statute.

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

by RobtKirkland Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Thanks to the endless release of her emails, we’ve learned something about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t gotten much attention: As near as I can tell, she’s sort of a technology idiot. She asked her aides for information that she could have Googled in less time than it took to ask. She needed help figuring out how to use an iPad. She didn’t know her own office phone number. She used a BlackBerry. She had trouble operating a fax machine. She was unclear about needing a WiFi connection to access the internet.

In other words, when Fox News reporter Ed Henry asked whether Clinton’s email server had been wiped, and she answered, “What, like with a cloth or something?”—well, that might not have been the sarcastic response we all thought it was. She might truly have had no idea what he meant.

As for setting up a private server with just a single account in order to evade FOIA requests, it looks as though she’s genuinely not tech savvy enough to have cooked up something like that. She probably really did just think it sounded convenient, and nobody stepped in to disabuse her of this notion.

So what was the deal with FOIA? I don’t know, and I suspect we’ll never know. But I’ll say this: there were obviously people at State who knew that Hillary used a private server for email. The folks who respond to FOIA requests are responsible for figuring out where documents might be, and in this case it was just a matter of asking. Apparently they didn’t, which is hardly Hillary’s fault. The alternative is that they did ask, and Hillary’s staff flat-out lied to them and said that she never used email. You can decide for yourself which sounds more plausible.

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I decided to do some Googling myself to check a few things. And it turns out that I’m not, in fact, the first to notice Hillary’s technology foibles. Just a few weeks ago, Seth Myer did a whole late-night bit about this.

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Here’s Why I Doubt That Hillary Clinton Used a Private Email Server to Evade FOIA Requests

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Putin Is Wasting Blood and Treasure in Syria. Let Him.

by LazaroPaquin Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Tom Friedman gets it right on Syria:

Today’s reigning cliché is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart.

Yep. Charles Krauthammer, for example, is nonplussed. “What’s also unprecedented is the utter passivity of the United States,” he said yesterday. “The real story this week is what happened at the U.N., where Putin essentially stepped in and took over Syria. He’s now the leader.” And here’s another Republican on the same theme:

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) says Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his support for the Assad regime in Syria because he thinks the Obama administration won’t stop him. “He sees no pushback, no price to pay,” said Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the Washington Ideas Forum on Wednesday. “What he’s doing is raising popularity in his country.”

….The Foreign Relations chairman also criticized the Obama administration for missing opportunities in Syria, citing the decision to pull back from its redline after the regime used chemical weapons.

“We have missed opportunities,” he said….”That could have really changed the momentum at a time when we really did have a moderate opposition. “By us not taking that action, it took the wind out of their sails,” he said. “That was the biggest moment of opportunity … and that was mishandled.”

This has become almost pathological. Every time Putin does something, Republicans start wailing about how he’s taking charge, showing what a real leader does while Obama meekly sits back and does nothing. They assume that military action always shows strength, while avoiding military action always shows weakness. That’s just crazy. Let’s take a quick survey of the real situation here:

Syria is the last ally Russia has left in the Middle East. Putin didn’t suddenly increase his military support of Assad as a show of brilliant grand strategy. He did it because he was in danger of losing his very last client state in the Middle East. This is a desperate gamble to hold on to at least a few shreds of influence there.

Fred Kaplan: “In the past decade, Russia has lost erstwhile footholds in Libya and Iraq, failed in its attempt to regain Egypt as an ally….and would have lost Syria as well except for its supply of arms and advisers to Assad….Syria is just one of two countries outside the former Soviet Union where Russia has a military base….His annexation of Crimea has proved a financial drain. His incursion into eastern Ukraine (where many ethnic Russians would welcome re-absorption into the Motherland) has stalled after a thin slice was taken at the cost of 3,000 soldiers. His plan for a Eurasian Economic Union, to counter the influence of the west’s European Union, has failed to materialize. His energy deal with China, designed to counter the west’s sanctions against Russian companies, has collapsed.

Intervention is unpopular with Russians. Corker is dead wrong about Putin doing this to curry favor with the public. On the contrary, they don’t care about Syria and are reluctant to lose any lives helping Assad. Putin is assisting Assad despite the domestic difficulties it will create for him, not because he expects the Russian masses to rally to the flag.

Amanda Taub: “A recent poll by Moscow’s Levada Center shows that only a small minority of Russians support giving Bashar al-Assad direct military support. Only 39 percent of respondents said they supported Russia’s policy toward the Assad regime. When asked what Russia should do for Assad, 69 percent opposed direct military intervention. A tiny 14 percent of respondents said that Russia should send troops or other direct military support to Syria.”

Putin is targeting anti-Assad rebels, not ISIS. For public consumption, Putin claims that he’s helping the US in its counterterrorism operations against ISIS. This is obvious baloney, since Russian jets aren’t operating in areas where ISIS is strong. They’re operating in areas where anti-Assad rebels are strong.

Andrew Rettman: “Philip Breedlove, Nato’s top military commander, believes the Latakia build-up has nothing to do with counter-terrorism….’As we see the very capable air defence systems beginning to show up in Syria, we’re a little worried about another A2/AD bubble being created in the eastern Mediterranean,’ he said.

‘These very sophisticated air defence capabilities are not about IS, they’re about something else … high on Mr. Putin’s list in Syria is preserving the regime against those that are putting pressure on the regime.'”

The benefits of getting further entangled in Syria are….what? Russia may be concerned about Syria becoming a breeding ground for terrorists who then make their way up to Russia. But that’s about it. Putin isn’t going to win Syria’s civil war, and Assad will become a bottomless pit of demands for more military support. Aside from winning the admiration of American conservatives, it’s hard to see Putin getting anything of real worth out of this.

The same is true of the United States. There has never been a cohesive “moderate opposition” that would have ousted Assad if only we had supported them earlier. Republicans keep repeating this myth, but when they had a chance to support strikes on Syria in 2013, they didn’t do it. That shows about how much they really believe this. Nor has there ever been a chance that the United States could topple Assad short of committing tens of thousands of ground troops, something that nobody support. “Arming the opposition” is the last refuge of hawkish dead-enders: something that sounds tough but rarely has much effect. You mostly hear it from people who don’t have the courage to recommend ground troops but are desperate to sound like they’re backing serious action.

The United States doesn’t have the power to fix the Middle East. We can nudge here and there, but that’s about all. As Friedman says, Obama may have caused some of his own problems by talking a bigger game than he’s willing to play, but he’s still right not to play. If Vladimir Putin is so afraid of losing his last foothold in the Middle East that he’s willing to make a reckless and expensive gamble in the Syrian quagmire, let him. It’s an act of peevishness and fear, not of brilliant geopolitical gamesmanship. For ourselves, the better part of wisdom is to stay out. Modest action would be useless, and our national interest simply isn’t strong enough to justify a major intervention. Like it or not, war is not always the answer.

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Putin Is Wasting Blood and Treasure in Syria. Let Him.

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A Syrian Photographer Survives to Show His Country’s Destruction

by AnnWhearew Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mahmoud al-Basha wore a camera around his neck and an easy smile when I first met him in southern Turkey in the summer of 2014. Four months earlier, he had escaped a kidnapping attempt by an armed group in Syria allegedly associated with the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. Basha and British reporter Anthony Lloyd had been sold out by a rebel commander they’d come to trust, taken at gunpoint, and stuffed into the trunk of a car. Basha seized an opportunity to break free, kicked open the trunk, and fought off his captors.

Eventually, fighters from the Islamic Front, a rebel group that controlled much of northwestern Syria, helped Basha and Lloyd reach the Turkish border. It was the second time Basha had been kidnapped, if you don’t count the three months of torture he endured in one of Assad’s jails.

Four years earlier, when Syria’s revolution began, Basha had rallied in the streets during the first demonstrations against Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad. His activism led to him getting kicked out of his university in Homs and being imprisoned by the Assad regime. He then returned to his hometown of Aleppo to document the war that has now claimed more than 210,000 lives and turned another 4 million Syrians into refugees. He used hidden cameras, formed secret groups of activists and citizen journalists, and helped establish the Aleppo Media Center to provide the rest of the world with a rare glimpse of the carnage in Aleppo: government barrel bombs falling on homes, children torn apart by explosives, a man beheaded by ISIS militants in a case of mistaken identity.

“#Syria Before the war there were about 2,500 doctors in #Aleppo … today are just 100 …” March 12, 2015 Mahmoud al-Basha

Aleppo has “completely changed,” he says. “The city’s neighborhoods are devastated because of daily shelling and the use of barrel bombs by the Assad regime.” Amid the horror of the war, Basha also focused on the White Helmets, a group of volunteer rescuers who tunnel into bombed-out buildings to save the people trapped inside. He also turned his lens to children, who “have lost all kinds of fun and happiness in childhood” but still have “big dreams after the end of the war.”

After four years of covering the war, Basha has moved to Gaziantep, Turkey, where he works as a fixer for foreign journalists along the border with Syria. He recently returned to Syria, but to be married, not to work.

When he was kidnapped last year, Basha lost his entire photo archive. Below is a selection of images he took and posted to Twitter during his time covering the war in Syria.

“#Syria The dolls in a normal world represent the life …. the joy … in Syria represent death.” February 16, 2015 Mahmoud al-Basha

“#Douma_Exterminated #Syria In Douma today: 56 killed by #Assad airstrikes.” February 10, 2015 Mahmoud al-Basha

“#Syria #Aleppo White Helmets of race to the danger to the aid of those in need …@SyriaCivilDef.” September 22, 2014 Mahmoud al-Basha

“#Aleppo Children take on the task of bringing supplies home…” August 11, 2014 Mahmoud al-Basha

“#Syria SNHR has documented the killing of 130 people yesterday, August 3, 2014 …” August 4, 2014 Mahmoud al-Basha

“#Aleppo Rescuers continue 2 search for bodies amid the rubble of more homes destroyed in the latest regime airstrikes.” July 31, 2014 Mahmoud al-Basha

“Today in #Syria 41 people get killed including two women and two children by ASSAD shelling bomb …” April 19, 2015 Mahmoud al-Basha

“In a normal country used to transport building materials … #Syria is used to carry the dead and wounded.” April 11, 2015 Mahmoud al-Basha

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A Syrian Photographer Survives to Show His Country’s Destruction

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

by Pilar2325h Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an astute observation about ISIS in an interview with Bloomberg.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria, the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the…conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” said the former Maryland governor.

Republicans were quick to seize on the comment as an indication of O’Malley’s weak grasp of foreign policy. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the suggestion of a link between ISIS’s rise to power and climate change was “absurd” and a sign that “no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

Here’s the thing, though: O’Malley is totally right. As we’ve reported here many times, Syria’s civil war is the best-understood and least ambiguous example of a case where an impact of climate change—in this case, an unprecedented drought that devastated rural farmers—directly contributed to violent conflict and political upheaval. There is no shortage of high-quality, peer-reviewed research explicating this link. As O’Malley said, the drought made it more difficult for rural families to survive off of farming. So they moved to cities in huge numbers, where they were confronted with urban poverty and an intransigent, autocratic government. Those elements clearly existed regardless of the drought. But the drought was the final straw, the factor that brought all the others to a boiling point.

Does this mean that America’s greenhouse gas emissions are solely responsible for ISIS’s rise to power? Obviously not. But it does mean that, without accounting for climate change, you have an incomplete picture of the current military situation in the Middle East. And without that understanding, it will be very difficult for a prospective commander-in-chief to predict where terrorist threats might emerge in the future.

The link between climate and security isn’t particularly controversial in the defense community. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat” to national security. A recent review by the Defense Department concluded that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that exacerbates other precursors to war, while the Center for Naval Analysis found that climate change-induced drought is already leading to conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

In other words, O’Malley’s comment is completely on-point. If Priebus and his party are serious about defeating ISIS and preventing future terrorist uprisings, they can’t continue to dismiss the role of climate change.

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

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How These Stoner Kids Landed a $300 Million Pentagon Arms Contract

by StacieWisewould Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

In early 2007, three stoner twentysomethings won a Defense Department contract to supply the Afghan military with $300 million worth of ammunition. “The dudes,” as they came to be known—a ninth-grade dropout, a masseur, and a low-level pot dealer, all with little or no experience but plenty of nerve—had begun bidding on Pentagon arms contracts and winning out over massive international conglomerates. The Afghan contract wasn’t their first, but it was by far their largest. They would have to source thousands of tons of mortar rounds, grenades, rockets, and 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition and deliver all of it to Kabul at a particularly fraught time for the Afghan war effort.

Arms and the Dudes publishes June 9.

To fill the order, though, the dudes secretly repackaged millions of rounds of decades-old, surplus Chinese ammo—illegal under the contract terms—before shipping them to Afghanistan. It was all going fine until they got caught by Pentagon investigators and wound up with their mugshots spread across the front page of the New York Times.

Their story is detailed in Guy Lawson‘s new book, Arms and the Dudes, a wildly entertaining saga with dual narratives. The first involves blackmail, criminals, hustlers, corrupt government officials, and three kids in way over their heads. The other, and for Lawson more important, side of the story, concerns how the Pentagon came to use private contractors like the dudes as proxies—and eventual fall guys—to secure weapons from gray market arms dealers, the only people who could supply what it needed. I caught up with Lawson to talk about Pentagon contracting, weapons proliferation, and the act of “buying up guns and pouring them into conflict zones like it’s gonna solve the fucking problem.”

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How These Stoner Kids Landed a $300 Million Pentagon Arms Contract

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ISIS Just Captured One of Syria’s Most Magnificent Ancient Cities

by JulianneMilner3 Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, militants from the so-called Islamic State captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. After nearly a week of fighting, government forces reportedly fled the city, according to the British monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Palmyra, a desert outpost of 50,000 people, sits on a strategic highway and is close to several gas fields that ISIS has repeatedly attacked. It’s also a magnificent UNESCO World Heritage site known for its 2,000-year-old, Roman-era tombs, temple, colonnades, and artifacts, as well as a storied mythology.

As ISIS has taken more territory, it has damaged or destroyed many cultural heritage sites and priceless artifacts. Condemning much ancient art as idolatry, its fighters have chiseled the face off of a 3,000-year-old Assyrian winged bull and broken apart statues of the kings of Hatra. And, as I’ve reported, what ISIS doesn’t destroy, it loots and sells on the international black market to fund its activities.

When ISIS reached the gates of Palmyra late last week, fears arose that the World Heritage site would face the same kind of destruction seen elsewhere. Amr Al-Azm, an archeologist who works with a secret network of activists trying to safeguard Syria’s cultural heritage, told me, “If they get their hands on a World Heritage site, the looting itself could be bad, plus they have a ready made site for cultural heritage atrocities that they’re very likely to commit. Palmyra is full of Roman tombs and carvings. They’ll smash up what they want and steal what they want. It’s an iconoclast’s heaven.”

As of this evening, ISIS militants had seized the city, and the ruins were left “unguarded.” Syria’s antiquities director Maamoun Abdulkarim has claimed that hundreds of statues have been moved to safety. But nothing can be done for the remaining structures at the ancient site. Before ISIS took the town, AbdulKarim told the Guardian, “If ISIS enters Palmyra, it will spell its destruction. If the ancient city falls, it will be an international catastrophe.”

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ISIS Just Captured One of Syria’s Most Magnificent Ancient Cities

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US Weapons Have a Nasty Habit of Going AWOL

by ShantelMnj Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon can’t say what happened to more than $500 million worth of gear—including “small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles and other supplies”—it had given to the Yemeni government. The news comes as Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed groups vie to control the country following the collapse of the country’s US-backed regime in January. The Post noted that the Pentagon has stopped further shipments of aid, but the damage has been done. “We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” an anonymous legislative aide said.

This isn’t the first time US military aid to allies has gone AWOL or wound up in the wrong hands. A few notable examples:

Libya: In late 2012, the New York Times reported that weapons from a US-approved deal had eventually gone to Islamic militants in Libya. The deal, which involved European weapons sent to Qatar as well as US weapons originally supplied to the United Arab Emirates, had been managed from the sidelines by the Obama administration.

Syria: More than once, American arms intended to help bolster the fight against ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq have ended up in the group’s control. Last October, an airdrop of small arms was blown off target by the wind, according to the Guardian. ISIS quickly posted a video of its fighters going through crates of weapons attached to a parachute.

Iraq: American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army have also found their way ISIS via theft and capture. And weapons meant for the Iraqi army have also gone to Shiite militias backed by Iran. This isn’t a new problem: As much as 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces between 2004 and early 2007 could not be accounted for.

Afghanistan: It’s been widely documented that American forces invading Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 had to face off against weapons the United States had once supplied to mujahideen fighters battling the Soviets in the ’80s.

Somalia: In 2011, Wired reported that as much as half of the US-supplied arms given to Uganda and Burundi in support of the fight against al-Shabaab was winding up with the Somali militant group.

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US Weapons Have a Nasty Habit of Going AWOL

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