Month: July 2012

Remember what would happen in school if the whole class essentially failed the calculus exams? The professor would grade the students on a curve. It was a way of pretending a D+ was an A- by changing the standards on which grades were based.

Turns out, the Pentagon is a lot like your calculus teacher.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has been responsible for training army and police forces for Washington’s nation-building efforts in Afghanistan. After years of training and billions of dollars spent, Afghan forces remain illiterate, drug-addicted, clumsy, and impotent. Very few brigades can operate independently of their NATO trainers and there are concerns of widespread infiltration by the Taliban (the fact that Afghan forces keep shooting and killing NATO forces, doesn’t help). “The police and most of the soldiers are cowards,” one Afghan told Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker. “They cannot fight.”

But the Obama administration can’t afford to have the training program be a failure. And if you fail, you’ve just got to learn to – what’s the saying? – …lie?

The Pentagon’s decision to change the standards used to grade the success of Afghan police and soldiers, who are a centerpiece of U.S. strategy for smoothly exiting the war in Afghanistan, helped it present a positive picture of those forces’ abilities, a U.S. government watchdog reported on Tuesday.

“These changes … were responsible, in part, for its reported increase in April 2012 of the number of ANSF units rated at the highest level,” the Government Accountability Office said in a new report on Afghan national security forces, known as ANSF.

In a twice-annual report to Congress in April 2012, the Defense Department reported that Afghan police and soldiers “continued to make substantial progress,” classifying 15 out of 219 army units as able to operate ‘independently with assistance’ from foreign advisors. Almost 40 out of 435 police units got the same rating.

This reminded me of a piece by Joshua Foust last week:

The U.S. government has relied on what it calls “burn rate” to measure its success in rebuilding Afghanistan. It is a measurement of how much it spent – not what it accomplished, or how the country was changing, but how much money it spent. The assumption behind this measurement was that more is better, and if the government spent a lot of money, then it was clearly accomplishing something.

Such an assumption has no basis in fact. Assuming the connection between an action and an outcome is called, in psychology, “magical thinking.” It’s like making policy with a rain dance. For the last ten years, policymakers have promised that if only enough money were spent, then many of the war’s objectives (a strong central government chief among them) would appear and make victory possible.

Magical thinking is a perfect way of putting it. Nearly everything about the Obama administration’s thinking on Afghanistan is divorced from reality.

Time for an embarrassing confession. Even though it’s been out for months, and even though it’s the first book I ever contributed content to, I had never read Why Peace. I mean not all the way through. I’d read my essay and a few others of people I knew, but its a really big book and it sort of languished on my shelf for a long, long time.

Yesterday it was 100 degrees outside, yet again, and when it’s that hot out you can’t really go do anything. I saw Why Peace on the shelf and just grabbed it, sat down in a comfy chair, and read for a few hours.

I found that I can’t really put it down. From the Philip Giraldi essay at the start to Tom Nash’s compelling closing essay, there are just dozens of really important, thought provoking arguments to be made in favor of peace, or at least against the alternative.

The dog days of summer are really a great time to find some air conditioning and catch up on the big titles you might’ve missed. Now you’ve got Kindle and Nook options for the book as well as the huge paperback edition, so there’s no real excuse not to give it a try. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

John Reed, writing last week in Foreign Policy, describes Washington’s militarized empire of bases in the Persian Gulf in all its gritty detail. The Obama administration has moved significant military reinforcements into the Persian Gulfin order to intimidate Iran and increase the number of fighter jets capable of striking the Islamic Republic in any potential conflict. But as Reed explains, “what’s already there is pretty impressive.”

Take Jebel Ali. Built in the 1970s and located roughly 20 miles southwest of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, the port has the largest man-made deep-water harbor in the world; and, covering 52 square miles, it’s the largest port in the Middle East, with more than 1 million square meters of shipping container storage. A quick look on Google Earth reveals a U.S. Navy Nimitz class aircraft carrier tied up alongside the service’s fenced in R&R facility there. And where there are carriers, there are Aegis radar-equipped guided missile cruisers and destroyers, frigates, at least one attack submarine, and several supply ships similar to the Rappahannock nearby. While it’s not officially a major Navy base, it sees a steady stream of ships that are rotating through the region on deployments from their homeports in the United States.

Next up is the headquarters for the Navy’s Middle East operations, in Manama, Bahrain, a site the sea service describes as, “the busiest 60 acres in the world.” While Naval Support Activity Bahrain, as it’s formally known, isn’t necessarily bustling with as many large ships as Jebel Ali, it serves as the nerve center for the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a variety of U.S. and international task forces that do everything from protecting Iraq’s oil platforms to hunting pirates off the Somali coast. It’s also the home port of numerous U.S. Navy minesweepers and patrol boats, while bigger Navy ships often pull into Bahrain’s extensive repair and resupply facilities that sit just across the harbor from the base.

Much as Jebel Ali does for the Navy, the UAE air force’s Al Dhafra Air Base serves as a major hub for U.S. and allied jets. American KC-10 and KC-135 aerial refueling tankers, E-3 Sentry AWACS jets, U-2 spy planes, and even F-22 Raptors regularly deploy there. The base is also home to the Gulf Air Warfare Center, a facility that brings together the air forces of the GCC states, the U.S. Air Force, and other nations for air combat exercises. Al Dhafra is also rumored to be a potential home for U.S.-made high-altitude missile defense systems.

Perhaps more important than Al Dhafra is the American base at al Udeid, Qatar, U.S. Central Command’s hub for allied forces in the region, as well as host to a number of bombers, cargo planes, tankers, and spy jets. Again, a Google Earth overview reveals B-1 heavy bombers, KC-135 tankers, RC-135 Rivet Joint signals intelligence collection planes, E-8 Joint STARS ground-scanning radar jets, C-130 tactical airlifters, P-3 Orion submarine hunters, an EP-3 Aries signals intelligence plane, a C-5 Galaxy airlifter, and C-17 airlifters on the ramp there.

Meanwhile, Camp Arifjan in Kuwait has served as the regional depot for U.S. military ground vehicles in the Gulf, most recently thousands of tanks, trucks, MRAPS, and other armored vehicles departing Iraq. Camp Arifjan is closely linked with the Kuwaiti port of Shuaiba, where the ground vehicles are loaded and unloaded from cargo ships. The Air Force maintains a wing of C-130 Hercules tactical airlifters at Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait.

That’s all just the beginning. Reed goes into even further detail on the current reinforcements being brought to the Gulf states; everything from minesweepers, attack helicopters, “Griffin missiles and their associated launchers,” and high-tech radars, not to mention beefing up the militaries of these brutal, undemocratic regimes. And people still wonder how it is that innocent fisherman get killed by US forces in the Gulf waters, why Iran feels threatened (and acts accordingly), and of course…”why they hate us.”

A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report [PDF] recently described how Washington aims to maintain key military bases and troop presence throughout the entire region and how to overcome challenges to maintaining such dominance, which is vital because the region is “home to more than half of the world’s oil reserves and over a third of its natural gas.” The report, rather unapologetically, admitted that US military presence in the region as well as US support for brutal dictatorships has generated widespread hatred and blowback. According to the report, the challenge is to maintain the imperial dominance over the region, but avoid the messy “backlash” and embarrassment from the support for vast “human rights abuses.”

Do we face any actual military threat from Iran, or any other state in the Middle East? No. But as Colin Powell recently explained, American defense has nothing to do with defense, and everything to do with offense. These postures, as Madison said of standing armies, are one of history’s greatest mischiefs.

Rosa Brooks writes in Foreign Policy about our “socialist military.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average member of the military is paid better than 75 percent of civilian federal workers with comparable experience. Members of the military and their families can also lay claim to America’s most generous (though arguably unsustainable) social programs.

As the spouse of a career Army officer, I’m stunned by the range of available benefits. Health care? Free! Groceries? Military commissaries save military families roughly 30 percent over shopping in civilian stores. Education benefits? Career personnel can expect the military to finance additional higher education, and the post-9/11 GI Bill provides up to 36 months of benefits to veterans, amounting, in effect, to full tuition and fees for four academic years. (The education benefit is also transferable to dependents.)

Housing? Free on base and subsidized off-base (the housing allowance goes up with family size: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need). Pensions? After 20 years of service, military personnel can retire and immediately begin to receive, at the ripe old age of 40 or so, an annual pension equal to half their salary — for the rest of their lives. Anyone who thinks socialism failed in America has never spent time on a military base.

Brooks writes that these inordinate benefits packages taxpayers are forced to provide the military are an illustration of “the increasingly reflexive esteem in which we hold the armed forces.” We’re told these soldiers make the ultimate sacrifice, putting their lives on the line for our freedoms, and so they’re worth the cost. But this is state doctrine which is perpetuated to hide the fact that our armed forces are largely for conquest, not for the protection of our freedom.

The doctrine, which demands automatic, society-wide praise for military service, is unwavering even in the face of obvious refutation. For example, numerous studies have concluded that violent sexual assault is rampant in the U.S. military. In 2008, an estimated 41 percent of all the women serving in the military were victims of sexual assault, a problem Rep. Jane Harman called “an epidemic.” Recent FBI investigations found that “Gang members have been reported in every branch of the U.S. military,” constituting “a significant criminal threat.” But so long as these individuals sport fatigues, they are freedom fighters?

I’ve asked before: what does it say about a culture that idolizes and fetishizes a commitment to kill on the orders of politicians in Washington? Now adding to that, is it right that those who make that commitment should get free housing, health care, groceries, education, and early retirement on the public’s dime?

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Assuming Mayer’s account is correct, consider the implications of the country’s main intelligence agency – an unaccountable group whose actions are secret mostly because they’re illegal – bullying a new president into not applying the rule of law to themselves or their preceding superiors.

I tend to think the Obama administration didn’t prosecute the Bush administration because they wanted to be able to continue many of those policies without much legal burden. But I don’t doubt the CIA put pressure on elected officials to sweep their crimes of torture under the rug.

An excerpt of Noam Chomsky’s latest contribution to TomDispatch:

The concept of due process has been extended under the Obama administration’s international assassination campaign in a way that renders this core element of the Charter of Liberties (and the Constitution) null and void.  The Justice Department explained that the constitutional guarantee of due process, tracing to Magna Carta, is now satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch alone.  The constitutional lawyer in the White House agreed.  King John might have nodded with satisfaction.

…Presumption of innocence has also been given a new and useful interpretation.  As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” So post-assassination determination of innocence maintains the sacred principle of presumption of innocence.

It would be ungracious to recall the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of modern humanitarian law: they bar “the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

See here, here, and here for more of Antiwar.com on drones and due process.