Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton will be interviewing investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. Mr. Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Army, will take a critical look at the Washington Post’s Top Secret America. KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles/98.7 Santa Barbara, Friday, July 16 at 5:00 PM Pacific. Listen live here.
Last week, Mr. Horton interviewed Gareth Porter and Michael Hastings for KPFK. The archive can be heard here.
As part of the continuing discussion of Michael Steele, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Rep. Ron Paul bravely take on former UN Ambassador and AEI senior fellow John Bolton with passion but the winning zinger goes to Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Professor Preble dares to ask why conservatives who opposed nation building under President Clinton now embrace such under President Obama.
Antiwar.com founder Eric Garris spoke to Russia Today on the extent of the U.S. government’s intervention overseas, the effect of endless war on the economy, the lack of probing mainstream coverage on Afghanistan and the reality of life in Gaza.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyErv6d44SY[/youtube]
Although several news outlets spent the day barking about the Afghanistan death toll crossing the 1,000 mark, the truth is that casualty counting is a little more complicated. Icasualties.org is where the media are grabbing that 1,000 figure. The Web site does report that that the death toll in “Operation Enduring Freedom” has crossed that many deaths, but with one caveat: “U.S. fatalities In and Around Afghanistan remain under this benchmark.”
Clicking one more link will take you to their actual toll for Afghanistan (including neighboring Pakistan and Uzbekistan), which is still 70 shy of the millennium mark. The rest of the servicemembers died in such far away countries as Cuba (Guantánamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Yemen.
Some have asked me why I care where they died, as it’s still one war. True, but that’s 15 other countries where our relatives, friends and neighbors are dying in this worldwide war. It may not bring them back to notice the details, but it underscores how absurdly spread out the war machine has gotten. And for what purpose?
It wasn’t 15 minutes into the coverage of this afternoon’s massive and certainly disastrous earthquake just 10 miles from Port-au-Prince on CNN, when Wolf Blitzer cut off the weeping Haitian ambassador to the US to go to a CNN staffer who spent another 2-3 minutes blathering about the lack — surprising, apparently — of United States troops on Haitian soil. But not to worry, he assures, Southcom, the US military’s bureaucracy for meddling in the internal affairs of our Latin American neighbors, could wrangle some firepower to help out our Haitian friends in their hour of need. More evidence of our society’s cultural embrace of military solutions to every problem.
(Cross posted at @TAC)
I know it is a tired trope, but it’s helpful to look at the ultimate success of Counterinsurgency, or the vaunted COIN doctrine dominating the popular ethos of the American military establishment, as a three-legged stool.
As it is conceived, or at least projected for public consumption, in order for COIN to work in Afghanistan —
1) The central government must be legitimate in the eyes of the Afghan people and willing to work hand in glove with the U.S military to pursue the campaign to its proscribed ends.
2) Afghan security forces must be trained and equipped and trusted enough by the civilian population to eventually provide security and to “hold” in the long-term any territory coalition forces can wrest from the “enemy” in the current campaign.
3) The U.S military must have trust (and assistance) from the Afghan civilian population in order to gain leverage over the insurgency and to build legitimacy for the government in Kabul.
All three goals bear serious problematic signs of failure today and yet, there is no realistic talk from the Obama Administration, nor the senior military brass about the prospects of any of this having a snow ball’s chance in hell of ever seeing fruition. Karzai’s legitimacy, and particularly his standing with the Pashtun people (at least 46 percent of the population), is a joke. The reliability of the Afghan security forces is much worse than any administration flak or Washington COIN pusher will concede.
And the military’s success with winning over “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people? We can’t necessarily blame the soldiers themselves. They were trained to kill — and in a post-9/11 world, their target practice was on dummies with funny headgear who spoke even funnier languages and lived in sand traps and goat-dotted mountains — not to make friends or strive to be the next Greg Mortenson. But it is in the soldiers’ and Marines’ own words that we can sense the truth of the matter — and of how flimsy this house of cards really is.
First, war scribe Robert Young Pelton wrote this engaging chronicle earlier this year of his time with one unit of the Human Terrain Project — the Army’s (clearly problematic) attempt to inject anthropologists/social scientists onto the battlefield to engage the people and to learn more about the regional tapestry for the benefit of the mission. What he found was earnest but overwhelmed personnel, and, more than a little disdain, a lot of confusion and a truck load of condescension and outright scorn for the whole “touchy-feely” approach from the chain of command he had encounters with. A good read, for which Pelton tells me he has been virtually “cut off” from the press office and the lead guy for the project (it’s also worth it to read the reaction to Pelton’s piece, particularly from the Army and subsequent comments).
Secondly, this little nugget, posted yesterday by COIN hagiographer Tom Ricks. Again, it takes a non-commissioned officer, not a “senior officer who represents the Establishment Party they serve” as one commenter described, to show how this thing is headed to nowheresville. Why? This last paragraph says it all:
Doesn’t matter if you like the people or not. Don’t really care if you think their ideology is bullshit. Fact is if you want to win, the people have to believe that you are sincere and convincing them that it is in their best interest to support you vice your enemy is a key part. Winning is what matters and the only way to do that is getting better at COIN and IO, regardless of how much we hate it.
As Ricks so artfully blurts at the end, “nuff said?”
