Yes, this is apocalyptic -- and not a drill

There's so much to worry about -- wildfires, hurricanes, domestic and foreign fascists -- to list a few immediate local threats. But we can't entirely look away from this:

By early September a third of Pakistan was under water. 40 million people, one fifth of the population are displaced, a third of the country was under water and more than half of its 160 districts have been declared “calamity hit”. A million houses have been destroyed or damaged. More than 160 bridges had collapsed or are severely damaged and thousands of miles of roads have been damaged. Hundreds of thousands of farm animals have died, and as many as 73,000 women are expected to give birth over the next month without adequate medical support. In some ways it was a miracle that only 1400 people have so far been declared dead. 

It should be a world historic moment. At this point, our habit of talking about climate change as a future risk has once and for all, to stop. One third of the fifth most populous country in the world, one of the most sensitive geopolitical hotspots on the planet, is under water. 40 million people are displaced. The climate emergency has arrived. This is not a drill. 

... The final tally for the current disaster is anyone’s guess at this point. If the 2010 floods that affected 15-20 million Pakistanis came to $10 billion, it would not seem unreasonable to set the tally this year in region of $!5-20 billion, which would be 4-5 % of GDP. For an economy already reeling under the impact of devaluation, power cuts, and high energy prices and the extreme heat earlier in the summer, which seriously impaired the wheat crop, it is another body-blow. Both rice and cotton crops are likely to be severely affected. 

Even more urgent are the public health risks in a country a third of which has been underwater. Waterborne diseases — malaria, diarrhea, dengue - and apocalyptic clouds of mosquitos pose an acute risk. [My emphasis. By way of economist Adam Tooze, Sept 21, 2022]

The Scientific American explores "Why Are Pakistan’s Floods So Extreme This Year?"  The science is not simple, but deserves a read.

Listen to a weatherman ...

Embed from Getty Images

No, I'm not reminiscing about a leftist splinter group of the 1960s. I'm passing on what Dr. Jeff Masters, who really is a meteorologist, warns as India and Pakistan trade small attacks and big threats.

As nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engage in military clashes over the disputed Kashmir region, consider that a “limited” nuclear war between them is capable of causing a catastrophic global nuclear winter that could kill two billion people. The inevitable wars and diseases that would break out could kill hundreds of millions more.

A 2008 paper by Brian Toon of the University of Colorado, Alan Robock of Rutgers University, and Rich Turco of UCLA, "Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War", concluded that a war between India and Pakistan using fifty Hiroshima-sized weapons with 15-kiloton yield on each country, exploded on cities, would immediately kill or injure about forty-five million people. However, the final toll would be global and astronomically higher, according to recent research. ...

The shooting war would be only the beginning. It gets worse. Read it all.

It is not clear to me that a more responsible U.S. regime could do much to diffuse this potential catastrophe. But it sure doesn't help that at this moment this country has sloughed off any credibility it might have had to restrain two putative allies.

Even the greatest mountaineers get old

I thought Karakoram: Climbing Through the Kashmir Conflict by Steve Swenson would provide easy, distracting, travel reading and possibly also be informative about a region of the world that could blow up at any time. It did provide gripping story telling without adding much about that India/Pakistan/Kashmir low-level war -- but it is full of other wisdom I'm glad to have encountered.

Swenson recounts fifteen expeditions over 35 years to the monster mountains on the Pakistan border; 28,251 foot K2 is probably the most familiar to people who don't read this kind of literature. It's worth noting that less than half of these several month trips -- involving illnesses, treacherous snows, awful weather, freezing nights, and other hardships -- ended in success. That is, if by "success" is meant reaching the summit of the intended target peak. For this mountaineer, often the journey is the reward -- though during his career he did summit both K2 and Everest, the highest mountains on the planet.

Though Swenson is obviously an extraordinarily accomplished climber, his story makes it clear that climbing mountains of this remoteness, size, and scale may demand as much sheer stubbornness and willingness to suffer as technical finesse. He seemed to always know he could dredge a little more out of his hurting body. This is clearer here than in any other mountaineering narrative I've ever read.

And he only had the chance to put himself through his chosen pain-fest over and over because he is a superb organizer. This sort of climbing expedition is all about organization: assembling a compatible team, clearing bureaucratic hurdles, buying supplies, hiring armies of porters to move the supplies close to the peaks -- all that has to be done successfully before anyone tries to climb anything. Swenson recounts learning to do it, making local friends who stood ready to help, and avoiding the sorts of inter-personal conflicts that tear apart climbing teams. Coming from my experience, I suspect this guy would have been terrific on a political campaign -- same skills there.

But while all of this is interesting, I probably would not have been writing about this book if it had not for Swenson's final theme: how he sought to age gracefully in a young person's sport. The book's final chapter recounts his expedition in 2015 to two Pakistani peaks, Changi Tower (very technical climbing at 21,325 feet) and K6 Central (higher at 23,294 feet). He wanted to mentor some young climbers, share the complexities of the logistics in Pakistan's high mountains, and introduce them to his many Pakistani friends. He chose Graham Zimmerman and Scott Bennett, both highly accomplished mountaineers who had no Karakoram experience. He launched off with plenty of trepidation.

My main concern was our age difference. I’d recently turned sixty-one, and I’d be spending a couple of months in Pakistan trying to keep up with two under-thirty-year-olds. ... Changi Tower and K6 Central were still unclimbed [by the routes he planned], largely because it was difficult to reach them.

And so his team with its local porters, cooks and government minders took off for the mountains. Swenson used his experience to identify and lead them in setting up a secure advanced base camp (ABC) at over 17,000 feet from which they could move on the summits.

... While dozing that afternoon in the tent, I realized my work to establish our ABC was winding down. What should my role be now that we were getting into position to start these climbs? Scott and Graham were stronger, more skilled, and faster climbers than I was. As was the case on all these expeditions to the great ranges, it was less important to share the leading than it was to assign everyone the jobs for which they were best suited. Although it would be fun for me to do some of the leading on Changi Tower, it would be more efficient if Graham and Scott did all of it. I would follow in support, carrying as much food, fuel, and bivouac equipment as I could. I decided to propose this when the time came.

... Climbing back up, I felt that as I acclimatized, my breathing became steadier and my heart beat a bit slower. But after several days of chasing Scott and Graham around, I experienced a deeper fatigue that was hard to recover from—a symptom of being older. Accepting that it was harder, or not possible, for me to do things that I could do when I was younger wasn’t easy. I wondered if this would be my last expedition to these huge, serious mountains.

But climb on he did behind Bennett's brilliant lead up treacherous snow cliffs.

... On August 9, we rose in the dark at 4:00 a.m., and after brewing up we were on our way by 6:00 a.m. ... After kicking steps up a short slope of firmer snow, Scott reached the final rocky summit block and scratched his way up with tools and crampons to reach the top in the fading light. Graham climbed up to Scott as it got dark, and I followed using my headlamp in the pitch black.

There followed a tough descent which included repeated choices about whether it was safe to push on while removing their equipment from exposed cols and disrupted glaciers. But all made it safely.

And then Swenson took stock of himself and the expedition's goals and convened a planning meeting:

... the three of us had completed a spectacular first ascent of Changi Tower.

... Given my health, I didn’t have the confidence in myself that I needed to attempt K6. Perhaps climbing Changi Tower was enough for me on this trip. I woke up early, thinking that the three of us would have a discussion at breakfast about our strategy for K6. ... my life as a professional engineer helped me realize how critical these strategy discussions were to the team’s safety and success. We could communicate in a way that established respect rather than control. Despite our need to act as individuals, working as a team was as important as any of the technical climbing skills we possessed.

... I had decided not to attempt K6 Central. I didn’t think I could recover quickly enough from Changi Tower. My health wouldn’t be good enough, and if they had a short weather window to make their ascent, I might slow them down enough to miss the summit. ... The conversation that morning in the mess tent went well. I told Scott I’d only seen the kind of brilliant climbing he displayed on Changi Tower a few times in my life. When I shared my plans to stay behind on K6, Scott said, “I don’t think you’d slow us down.” Graham agreed. “Yeah, I think you should go with us,” he said, “and we think you’d be an asset, so don’t stay behind because of us.” I thought they were probably sincere, but my lack of confidence made me feel they were just being polite. “I appreciate your encouragement,” I said “but I don’t think I’ll change my mind.” They had the strength and ability to do it on their own, probably more efficiently without me.

And so he found himself watching anxiously from below as the two younger men worked their way into position to approach that summit. In the end, they didn't have enough good weather to complete the traverse they'd hoped for, but did complete the second ever ascent of K6 West. Swenson adopts as his own the conclusions of his Pakistani friend Rasool:

“I am so happy with this expedition. This expedition is 100 percent. Many expeditions are 90 percent, but I am so very happy—this expedition was 100 percent.” I felt the same way: the camaraderie, our climbing success, and a safe trip left us feeling pretty good about what we had accomplished.

***This is not a book for everyone. I'm sure there are lots of readers who have no interest in super-athletic men pushing their bodies through unnecessary, dangerous, and cold adventures. But I found Swenson's account of coming to terms with his aging forthright and moving. May we all be so graceful.

Somebody asked some Afghans ...

I first became conscious of Carlotta Gall's reporting from Afghanistan for the New York Times in 2003 when she broke the story that U.S. military medical authorities had labeled the death while in custody of a detainee named Dilwar a "homicide." She was the rare foreign reporter who seemed to assume that the journalist's job was to find out what it meant to Afghans to be invaded and then occupied by U.S. and NATO forces.

Here's that story again in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014. On hearing that a prisoner had died in U.S. custody, Gall went looking to understand more.

When I visited his family in Yakubi in February, Dilwar's brother, Shahpoor, showed me a death certificate they had been given along with the body. The certificate was in English, and the family did not understand fully what it said. It was dated December 13, 2002, and was signed at the bottom by Major Elizabeth A. Rouse, a pathologist from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology based in Washington, D.C., and medical examiner Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen M. Ingwersen from the Army Medical Corps based in Landstuhl, Germany.

It gave the circumstances of death: "Decedent was found unresponsive in his cell while in custody." Under "Cause of death" was typed, "Blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." Mode of death, it stated, was "homicide."

Dilwar was a young taxi driver picked up by mistake; he had no part in resisting U.S. forces. His story is told in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

Gall lived in Afghanistan from 2001 through last year. She's a Brit whose father had reported from Afghanistan and who had worked herself in Chechnya and Bosnia. She likes Afghans. Her explanation of why she wrote this book:

[The conflict/occupation] would become America's longest overt war. Thirteen years later, there is no swift resolution in sight, and support at home has waned. Few Americans seem to care anymore about Afghanistan, and I decided owed it to all those caught up in the maelstrom of Afghanistan to put down a record of events as I had seen them from the ground.

In Gall's view, the arc of the U.S. Afghanistan war begins with most Afghans welcoming help in throwing off Taliban rule; through neglect, failure and corruption as the U.S. turned its attention to Iraq; the Petraeus/McChrystal "surge" under Obama which Gall portrays as succeeding in the Pashtun heartland from whence the Taliban originated; through U.S. disengagement and the Kabul government's weakness, pointing to an uncertain future. Looming over this entire bloody trajectory, in Gall's view is the unceasing determination of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to manipulate Afghanistan by funding, training and inciting Afghan Islamists. Pakistan was the true enemy of Afghan peace and security; only in those sporadic episodes when U.S. administrations pressured Pakistan's governments to curb the militants did Afghanistan enjoy relative peace and development.

There are many other schools of thought about the NATO/US Afghanistan adventure; perhaps the one most familiar to readers of this blog is that the U.S. never decided what its objective was in mucking about in this strange, distant, peripheral hornet's nest of a place and consequently accomplished little except death and destruction. Gall has another view, one informed by extensive discussion with many sorts of Afghans. The book is fascinating on that level.

A Western reader naturally wonders how a woman reporter managed to function so broadly in such a conservative religious environment. Gall explains:

Most Afghan and Pakistani houses have separate rooms for entertaining guests and holding meetings. The guest room often has its own entrance and is designed to allow visitors to be entertained without disturbing the sanctity of the women's quarters. Many Afghan and Pakistani families, especially the conservative tribal and religious ones, still continue the practice of purdah. Women only mix with their extended family and do not meet unrelated men. ...

As a foreigner I was exempt from such rules. I had little difficulty working as a woman in Afghanistan and Pakistan where hospitality is a much-honored custom, and I often had the bonus of being invited into the inner sanctum to visit the women of the family.

... It is a strictly honored custom that no one enters an Afghan's home without being invited, and no man unrelated to the family enters the women's quarters. This becomes second nature to anyone living in Pakistan and Afghanistan, yet the readiness of foreign soldiers to violate this cherished custom in their search for militants, kicking down doors in house-to-house raids and searching women's quarters, became one of the most upsetting issues for Afghans across the country.

The American and NATO forces violated a code that could have worked in their favor: when you are invited into someone's home, you are under the protection of your host. I felt no fear going to interview a Taliban commander in the warren of Quetta's [Pakistan] back streets. I knew and trusted my host, who had organized the meeting. He would make sure I came to no harm.

In Gall's view, U.S. forces sacrificed their chance at a cooperative relationship with Afghans by killing too many ordinary civilians, whether through mistaken application of their overwhelming firepower or out of blatant (racist?) indifference to Afghan life. She reports a chilling story:

One day an Afghan I knew and trusted told me a story he had never dared tell anyone, even his closest family. He had worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military for several years.

One night he had accompanied U.S. special operations commandos on a raid. Helicopters dropped off the team a mile or so from their target village, and they hiked in silence to its edge. The unit split up, and the interpreter went with a group of four men to a house in the center of the village. Two men were in front of him and two behind, armed with American assault weapons with silencers attached. They moved without noise, communicating with hand signals. They kicked in the door of the house and entered a room.

A gas lamp was burning very low but enough for the interpreter to see the astonished faces of a young couple in their twenties as they leapt up from their bed on the floor. "Why? Why are you shooting?" the man asked. The Americans did not answer. They crouched and shot them both. They fired four or five rounds, the silencers making a dull "tick, tick" sound. As the woman fell, she let out a dying gasp. A child sleeping beside them began to cry.

The Americans moved straight on to the next room. The translator began to shake. This time he did not enter the room but stopped at the door. He saw four people by the lamplight. A grandmother stood, her head uncovered, and asked, "What's happening? Why?" Three teenagers, a boy and two girls, were cowering on the floor, wordless, trying to hide among their bedclothes. The Americans did not speak. They fired two or three rounds. The translator did not see who was shot. He was never asked to translate anything. "You have to wait until they ask. If you say anything, or translate anything, they say 'Shut up, motherfucker, or I'll shoot you.'"

Gall also describes the atrocities U.S. soldiers experienced from Taliban ambushes.

One Humvee had made it out with survivors, but three men were dead at the scene and two more were missing. Search parties scoured the area for the rest of the day. Just before dark they came across the remains of one of the men. He had been dragged nearly a mile from the ambush site, and his body had been mutilated. His arms had been cut off, and someone had tried to carve out his heart. The search went on through the next day, but the units only ever found parts of the other soldier.

... The mutilation of victims, which was not often revealed to the public, was a particular horror for the men serving in Afghanistan, a sign of the brutalizing effects of the war. It was a grim burden for those who encountered it and led to acts of retaliation on both sides.

Gall is not hopeful about Afghanistan's future.

... after thirteen years, a trillion dollars spent, 120,000 foreign troops deployed at the height, and tens of thousands of lives lost, the fundamentals of Afghanistan's predicament remain the same: a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists. ...

... The cost in lives to reach this unfinished state had been painfully high. There is no complete count of how many Afghans have died since the American intervention began in October 2001. My own rough estimate places it between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans. By the end of 2013, over 3,400 foreign soldiers have died in the campaign, 2,301 of them American.

Civilian deaths in the war had been running between two and three thousand a year since 2006. Casualties among Afghan security forces have been between one and two thousand a year, and rising, as their forces have grown and they have taken up the frontline fighting.

Thousands of young Afghan and Pakistani men have died in the ranks of the Taliban, too, many of them villagers and madrassa students, used as so much cheap cannon fodder. They are referred to as "potato soldiers" by their Pakistani recruiters.

This is not a hopeful book. Whether or we agree with Gall's take on the geopolitical situation, we can be glad that someone from the Western media bothered to listen so closely to so many Afghans.

Crimes catalogued and documented

I thought I had a pretty comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the ignorant and shameful policies chosen by the leaders of the United States since 9/11. But though I've worked to keep up with ongoing revelations, and I'm certainly not uninformed, I now believe I was wrong. Jeremy Scahill's new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, paints a panoramic picture of murder, arrogance, desperation and folly. For the moment, until additional sources spill further dimensions of perfidy and evil as they well might, this is the definitive account of our global "war on terror." Certainly see the movie, but if you can stand to care, you do need to read the book.

Unavoidably, lots of us have some awareness of what an ongoing horror show the US invasion of Iraq made of that unhappy country. That war was a bloody imperial lie from start to finish. And, painfully, we've gotten to the point that a majority of us think the Afghanistan adventure wasn't worth the blood and treasure (not to mention the dead Afghans.) But other escapades of empire, especially those in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, have gotten less notice. Scahill's been there.

I found the sections on Somalia informative; somehow I'd missed a lot of this. The CIA took the lead in our war in that nation and apparently replicated its practice from Afghanistan, buying up shady, vicious warlords to attack other factions it considered Islamist threats. In retrospect, it is hard to see any of them as "good guys." When many Somalis rallied around a faction that threw these warlords out, the US hired the Ethiopian state to invade. When Somalis rose up against the Ethiopian occupation, the US picked up a new set of warlords and the small al Shabab Somali set signed on with al Qaeda. Along the line, US special military forces (the Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC] -- the guys who finally offed bin Laden) took over the bulk of Somali operations, as they have also the better known US drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen.

President Obama seems to have become a great fan of using JSOC to do his dirty work. This military force seemed such a clean, safe alternative to George W.'s blunderbuss style of empire. He got his introduction to JSOC's value in 2009 when Somali pirates seized the merchant ship Alabama and carried its captain off in a small boat.

The commander asked, 'Do I have your permission to execute?' And the President says "Yes you do." The commander gives his order.

Pop. Pop. pop. Three shots, fired almost at the exact same moment by three different snipers. Three dead Somali pirates.

Captain Richard Phillips was rescued and returned to the United States with much fanfare. President Obama won praise from across the political spectrum for his leadership in taking down the pirates and bringing an end to the hostage situation without losing a single US life and with just three bullets fired. Behind the scenes, it was a powerful lesson for President Obama about the clandestine force that President Bush had once praised as "awesome" -- JSOC.

JSOC had given a politically dangerous made-for-TV movie episode a politically advantageous outcome -- and Obama apparently realized a President possessed a ready-made weapon controlled by him as Commander in Chief to replace George W.'s "dumb wars."

Scahill goes on to tell the story of our drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen and of the administration's embrace of targeted assassination, including of US citizens. The account is detailed and depressing and, like Mark Mazzetti's book on the CIA role, leaves me wondering how real a threat truly exists if so much energy can have been wasted on bureaucratic chest bumping over who got which piece of the action. ***For me, one of the most significant parts of Scahill's story is the reconstruction of what US forces, under the JSOC mantle, did at Camp NAMA near Baghdad during 2003-4. Though there have been numerous reports, there have been no consequences, no trials, no true accounting for this torture regime that didn't even serve any plausible military purpose.

The acronym NAMA stood for "Nasty-Ass Military Area," Its motto, as advertised in posters throughout the camp, was "No Blood, No Foul." A Defense Department official said it was a play on a task force adage: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."

… The task force at NAMA was run by lSOC, but it was built by pulling personnel from a variety of agencies and units. There were CIA and DIA interrogators, air force interrogators, and a variety of analysts and guards. "They told us we can't tell our chain of command about who works here or what [the task force] does. You're completely shut off. You can only discuss it amongst yourselves. That's what they told us from the very first day," recalled an interrogator who worked at Camp NAMA in 2003-2004. … Many of the members of the task force would grow long beards and seemed eager to make themselves look as frightening or intimidating as possible. "This is the dark side of the forces. This is the realm where you have essentially a cadre of folks who have a great deal of freedom. 'The folks that get to this level are treated with a certain amount of deference," Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer told me.

… The harsh interrogation methods that were being refined in black sites and in Afghanistan were to be unleashed in Iraq. "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," said a former senior intelligence official. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11] But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there." … Each morning, the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust. Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier. One official quoted him as saying, 'They must be there!' At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers," according to [journalist Rowan] Scarborough.

… The JSOC Task Force did not categorize Camp NAMA as a prison but rather as a "filtration site" where intelligence was being obtained. This gave cover for all the dirty activity and the secrecy that shrouded it. … The interrogations … often incorporated extremely loud music, strobe lights, beatings, environmental and temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, twenty-hour interrogation sessions, water and stress positions, and personal, often sexual, humiliation. The forced nudity of prisoners was not uncommon. Almost any act was permissible against the detainees as long as it complied with the "No Blood, No Foul" motto. But, eventually, even blood was okay.

One former prisoner -- the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards -- said he was made to strip, was punched repeatedly in the spine until he fainted, was doused with cold water and forced to stand in front of the air-conditioner and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Prisoners held at other facilities also described heinous acts committed against them by interrogators and guards, including sodomizing detainees with foreign objects, beating them, forcing water up their rectums and using extreme dietary manipulation-nothing but bread and water for more than two weeks in one case.

Members of the task force would beat prisoners with rifle butts and spit in their faces. One member of the task force reported that he had heard interrogators "beating the shit out of the detainee." According to a former interrogator with the task force, one of his colleagues was "reprimanded and assigned to desk duty because he pissed in a bottle and gave it to a detainee to drink." Members of the task force would also interrupt non harsh interrogations and begin slapping or beating detainees. On at least one occasion, they abducted the wife of a suspected insurgent being hunted by the task force "to leverage the primary target's surrender." The woman was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three who was still nursing her six month-old baby.

…The abuse and torture at Camp NAMA was not an anomaly, but rather a model. When the US government began probing how the shocking horrors meted out against prisoners at Abu Ghraib happened, how it all began, the investigation revealed that those running the prison had looked to the example set at Camp NAMA, Guantanamo and at Bagram in Afghanistan.

President Obama says "we don't torture." That's dubious; we certainly do still "render" prisoners to other countries to torture and hold others in uncharged military detention. There has been no accountability for the intellectual authors who ordered these crimes, even if we were to choose to let the actual perpetrators off the hook as dupes of authority. The stain lingers.***I should mention that Jeremy Scahill is practicing journalism these days along with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and others at The Intercept.

Netroots Nation snapshots: Hanging in for our rapidly vanishing freedom under law

Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, was the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo until he resigned in protest after being asked to move cases against prisoners who he believed had been tortured in violation of the Nuremberg principles and the Geneva Conventions.

He pulls no punches:

“After 9/11, we [the people of the United States] became the constrained and the cowardly.”

"Every case that has come out of Guantanamo has been a black eye to the American government.”

Pardiss Kebriaei is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center Constitutional Rights. She has represented several Guantanamo detainees, both some released and some still held, as well as the al-Awlaki family of the father and son, both U.S. citizens never convicted of any crime, who were killed by U.S. drones in Yemen. She faults the President for failing to follow through with closing Guantanamo.

“Obama has failed to rebut false narratives that depict all detainees as terrorists.”

The majority still locked up at Guantanamo have been cleared for release, but the administration has failed to follow through. Many prisoners are on hunger strike, ready to die if, after a decade, they are left to give up hope.

Kebriaei also emphasized that conditions in supermax prisons inside the United States may not be any more humane than those in Guantanamo; significant numbers of prisoners are being held in solitary confinement on 23-hour a day lockdown, apparently for life.


At the panel "Challenging Drones from Pakistan to Oakland," moderator Zahra Billoo, director of CAIR California, asked participants to answer the question "Why should I care about drones?"

Omar Shakir was one of a Stanford Law School team responsible for a joint report with NYU Law students called Living Under Drones. He pointed out that, after experiencing a half a decade of overflights and repeated missile strikes from drones, most Pakistanis are firmly convinced that the United States is their enemy. How would you feel if you had these things flying around overhead all the time -- and sometimes firing? he asked.

"Only 2 percent of drone kills have been high level al Qaeda leaders."

Nadia Kayyali of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee works with local jurisdictions where law enforcement authorities are often salivating over the prospect of getting their own drones. The federal government seems to have money to throw at these purchases, even if for little else. Politicians listen to the well-heeled drone lobby speaking for war contractors. There is even a Drone Caucus in Congress.

She maintains that widespread domestic enthusiasm for police drones reinforces the normalization of

ambient and persistent surveillance in this country.

Linda Lye of the Northern California ACLU listed three reasons to care about drones:

• low cost: by the standards of high tech spying these are cheap toys. The usual expense disincentive is weak;

• surreptitiousness: we'll soon see police deploying bird size drones;

• and context: these days every public and private entity that can is gathering all the data it can sweep up on all of us.

She emphasizes that the legal framework for protecting individual rights has simply failed to keep up with technological progress. Consequently, we're all in danger of losing basic freedoms without debate or consent.

A meditation on "religion" and "the rules"

A friend, a Chinese American whose family has been in the United States for many generations, once proposed to me that the Chinese just don't have any religion. This seemed like a very broad generalization from a less than unimpeachable source -- there are an awful lot of Chinese and he'd barely visited the place.

Still I think he meant something like what Brent Nongbri writes about in Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept.

My father grew up in the Khasi Hills of northeastern India. The Khasi language is today spoken by roughly one million people, mostly in the state of Meghalaya. When I was in college and just becoming aware of the complexity of studying religion, it occurred to me one day that I had no idea what the Khasi word for "religion" was. I owned a small Khasi-English dictionary, but it did not provide English-to-Khasi definitions. … a few years later, the topic came up in a conversation with my father, and I asked him about the Khasi term for "religion." He replied that it was ka niam. By this time I was a graduate student in religious studies, and I was curious to learn more about this word. I dug out my little dictionary and looked it up. I found it could also simply mean "customs," that is to say, not necessarily anything particularly or especially religious. More intriguing, though, was the asterisk beside the word that directed me to a short note at the bottom of the page. It turned out that niam was in fact not an indigenous Khasi term at all but a loan-word from the Bengali niyama, meaning "rules" or "duties." My father's language, it seems, had no native word for "religion."

Nongbri sets out to show that the way we commonly use "religion" is an artifact of European adjustments to the splintering of medieval Christendom into a multiplicity of warring nation-state Christianities; the most effective way to stop the bloodshed between rival sects was to confine "religion" to a personal, private sphere. What mattered was not what individuals thought was "true," but what made for law-abiding citizens in the public realm under a regime of law. That is, "religion" ceased to be synonymous with society's core operating principles, "the rules." Because this occurred concurrent with European discovery of and colonial domination around the world, we overlaid our concept of "religion" on peoples and their social structures where it is not necessarily a good fit.

…This projection provided the basis for the framework of World Religions that currently dominates both academic and popular discussions of religion: the world is divided among people of different and often competing beliefs about how to obtain salvation, and these beliefs should ideally, according to influential figures like Locke, be privately held, spiritual, and nonpolitical. It was only with this particular set of circumstances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concept of religion as we know it began to coalesce.

… Because of the pervasive use of the word "religion" in the cultures of the modern Western world (the "we" here), we already intuitively know what "religion" is before we even try to define it: religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity. Such a definition might be seen as crass, simplistic, ethnocentric, Christianocentric, and even a bit flippant; it is all these things, but it is also highly accurate in reflecting the uses of the term in modern languages. Every attempted definition of "religion" that I have seen has implicitly had this criterion at its base. Most of the debates about whether this or that "-ism" (Confucianism, Marxism, etc.) is "really a religion" boil down to the question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant Christianity. This situation should not be surprising given the history of the category of religion.

*** These acute observations came to mind as I listened to a devastating account by Mobeen Azhar on the BBC of the religious "cleansing" being suffered by the half million Pakistani Hazara Shias Muslims at the hands of some Pakistani Sunni Muslims. A series of a devastating bombings have killed hundreds , robbing this long established Central Asian segment of the population of Pakistan's Balochistan state of any security. Children ask their parents "will we be martyrs?" Young people attempt to emigrate and often die in the process.

Azhar interviewed Sunni politicians campaigning in the May 11 elections about what should be done about the atrocities against the Hazara.

Salafi-inspired groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and its sister organisation Sipah-e-Sahaba have terrorised Pakistan's Shia community for years.These groups have been banned by the Pakistani government but the organisation has re-branded itself as Ahle Sunnah Wal Jamaat. The party is now fielding candidates in general elections due this month on a specifically anti-Shia platform.

Senior party member and National Assembly candidate Mohamed Fayyaz denies that the organisation is involved in attacks on Hazara Shias. "Just because someone said they are from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, what proof is there that it was someone from our group? We don't want to murder Shias. We want them to be declared non-Muslim in the National Assembly. That is what we're working towards."

Clearly for Mr. Fayyaz, the Hazara's "religion" is a vital threat to "the rules." And Mr. Fayyaz' attitude is a threat to the life and limb of the Hazaras. This sort of "religion" is a threat to the peace of communities. It will require leadership from within the affected communities to come to some sort of agreement to co-exist to end the bloodshed; this may, or may not, come from the same sort of accommodation that led to the invention of the European idea of "religion."

Warming Wednesdays: will rising temperatures bring down the Pakistan state?

These days I'm reading Anatol Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country. It's a big, smart, wide ranging book about a country where the U.S. is both deeply involved and often deeply ignorant.

There are lots of U.S. pundits who dismiss Pakistan as an irrational, Muslim-fundamentalist, ungovernable "failed state." Lieven is offering an alternative narrative: his Pakistan is a wildly diverse, complicated but essentially resilient society where competing ethnicities, religious traditions, and economic classes somehow co-exist and are likely to continue to succeed in doing so. He labels it a "negotiated state" -- two big political parties (that are both actually ethnic and feudal assemblages) alternate ostensible control of government, occasionally interrupted by military takeovers, but underneath all the fuss, life for most Pakistanis goes on with little change.

The book is full of interesting anecdotes and arresting facts. Who would have thought that in 2002, according to economists' system for measuring such things (the Gini co-efficient), Pakistan is actually a less economically unequal society than the United States? Though millions live in absolutely destitute poverty, their plight is mitigated by family, clan and tribal ties. That is, they enjoy a safety net; it is just organized differently than ours.

I should however point out that Lieven's somewhat attractive Pakistan works not nearly so well for its women.

Lieven sees only one threat that might turn Pakistan into the violent, dangerous "failed state" of so many Western imaginings. That threat is the loss of water resources exacerbated by climate change.

The huge youth bulge making its way through the Pakistani population means that this population will continue to grow steeply for a long time to come (in 2008, 42 per cent of the population was estimated as under the age of fourteen). If present trends continue, then by the middle of the twenty-first century, according to World Bank projections, Pakistan may have as many as 335 million people.

This is far too many people for Pakistan's available water resources to support, unless the efficiency of water use can be radically improved. If the old Indian economy used to be described as 'a gamble on the monsoon', then the entire Pakistani state can be described as 'a gamble on the Indus [river]' -- and climate change means that over the next century this may be a gamble against increasingly long odds. The capricious power of water in this area is demonstrated by the remains of numerous cities -- starting with those of the Indus Valley civilization 4,000 years ago -- that have been either abandoned because rivers have changed their course, or been washed away by floods, as so many towns and villages were by the great floods of 2010.

At an average of 240 mm of rainfall per year, Pakistan is one of the most naturally arid of the world's heavily populated states. … Only 24 per cent of Pakistan's land area is cultivated -- the great majority through man-made irrigation systems. The rest is pastoral land, or uninhabited: desert, semi-desert, and mountain. Chronic over-use, however, means that many of the natural springs have dried up, and the water table is dropping so rapidly in many areas that the tube-wells will also eventually follow them into extinction. That will leave the Indus once again; and in the furor surrounding the debunking of the exaggerated claim that the glaciers feeding the Indus will disappear by 2035, it has been forgotten that they are nonetheless melting; and if they disappear a century or two later, the effects on Pakistan will be equally dire, if no serious action is taken in the meantime radically to improve Pakistan's conservation and efficient use of water.

If the floods of 2010 are a harbinger of a long-term pattern of increased monsoon rains, this on the other hand would potentially be of great benefit to Pakistan -- but only potentially, because to harness them for agriculture requires both a vastly improved storage and distribution infrastructure, and radical measures to stop deforestation in the mountains and to replant deforested areas. Otherwise, increased rainfall will risk more catastrophes like that of 2010 …

…dependence on the Indus is the greatest source of long-term danger to Pakistan. Over the next century, the possible long-term combination of climate change, acute water shortages, poor water infrastructure and steep population growth has the potential to wreck Pakistan as an organized state and society. Long-term international aid projects in Pakistan should be devoted above all to reducing this mortal threat, by promoting reforestation, repairing irrigation systems and even more importantly improving the efficiency of water use. Human beings can survive for centuries without democracy, and even without much security. They cannot live for more than three days without water.

… If anyone thinks that the condition of Pakistan will be of little consequence to the rest of the world in the long run, they should remember that a hundred years from now, if it survives that long, Pakistan will still possess nuclear weapons, one of the biggest armies in the world, one of the biggest populations in the world and one of the biggest diasporas in the world, especially in Britain. lslamist radicalism, which has already existed for hundreds of years, will also still be present, even if it has been considerably reduced by the West's withdrawal from Afghanistan. All of this will still mean that of all the countries in the world that are acutely threatened by climate change, Pakistan will be one of the most important.

That's what global warming may mean in one country. Some of the earth's oldest known civilizations arose in the Indus River valley; the collapse of the present order there could unleash hideous consequences for Pakistan's people and even for those of us half way round the globe.

Warming Wednesdays: mountains becoming more wild?

Having a glacier like this coming flowing toward you wouldn't be any fun. Argentine Patagonia

For most people this probably isn't the most significant manifestation of global warming, but I find it fascinated and threatening.

Sharper seasonal variations of ice and snow and temperature are being repeated all across the world from the Himalayas to the Andes, which scientists say are driven by a higher level of energy in the atmosphere from global warming. As a result, climbers have to think twice about what they might expect one year to the next, or even one day to the next, in places they might have climbed for decades.

On [Alaska's Mount] McKinley, the snows this year have been prodigious, and the four avalanche deaths have tied a record last seen in 1987. And conditions have varied widely. This month, a weather station on the mountain recorded a temperature range from 21 degrees above zero to 13 below over two days, with 21 inches of snow falling in the middle, rare for July.

“The chances of having an average year are very likely going down as climate variability increases,” said Brian Lazar, the executive director of the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education and a senior scientist at Stratus Consulting, an environmental research company.

New York Times, July 15

Of course melting glaciers have more widespread consequences than increasing the risks to a few adventurous climbers. Pakistan faces high risk of both drought from decreasing melt -- and floods following sudden releases of glacial waters.

Increased melting of glaciers and snow in the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau threatens the food security of millions of people in Asia, a study shows, with Pakistan likely to be among the nations hardest hit.

…The Brahmaputra and Indus basins are also most susceptible to reductions of flow because of climate change, threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people, or roughly the population of Italy. "The effects in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins are likely to be severe owing to the large population and the high dependence on irrigated agriculture and meltwater," the authors say in the study. ...

[The scientists] said adaptation was crucial. "The focus should be on agriculture as this is by far the largest consumer of water," [Walter Immerzeel] told Reuters in an email interview.

Reuters, June 10, 2010

If we can't or won't stop pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and fueling the "wild," we better begin to get our minds around that concept: "adaptation."

Drone war thoughts

We live in the era of the drone war now. For the moment, the U.S. has something of a monopoly on using this new weaponry, though there is nothing to prevent other states from joining the fray. Do we really have any idea where this technological breakthrough is taking us?

Michael Cummings -- back from deployments with the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has a simple explanation of what's dangerous about the military's new toys:

Kill enough of the wrong people, and everyone will join the insurgency. Why not? The Americans will probably come kill you soon enough.

That's the blowback the drone program creates in an actual theater of war. There's lots of argument about how many of the "wrong people" -- "innocents," non-combatants, children -- are being killed remotely in Afghanistan, but at least in that country there's a recognized war. And -- perhaps -- there's something of a recognized war in the adjacent areas of Pakistan where angry Pashtuns and many Taliban live, so there may be some justification for strikes on people the U.S. regards as "terrorists" in "safe havens." Whether knocking these guys (and their relatives) off is worth destabilizing a fragile nuclear weapons-armed state is a judgement question. A huge majority of Pakistanis certainly don't think so.

And we are also killing people in countries where we don't claim to be at war, but where there's not much government either, like Yemen and Somalia. Sometimes we know who we're killing, but apparently the administration has also authorized "signature strikes." If some bunch of remote tribal guys act in ways the C.I.A. associates with terrorist cells, sure -- blow 'em away.

Law professor David Cole points out the implications of that seemingly safe exercise:

While such a strategy might make sense on hot battlefields, where one frequently kills “the enemy” without knowing precisely who they are, it is extremely dangerous when employed beyond battlefields, where it can be very difficult to know with any degree of certainty which groups are engaged in hostile military action. For this reason, Obama initially banned such strikes in Yemen, but news accounts indicate that he has relaxed that ban recently. What criteria are used to distinguish the enemy from those who merely look like the enemy? As President Bush showed us, it’s all too easy to make mistakes in identifying the enemy. A mistakenly detained man can be released, as hundreds held at Guantánamo have been. Mistakes in the drone program are final.

That's the thing about killing people; you can't bring them back.

And that, perhaps, points up the worst feature of the drone option -- it seems so easy and clean. Press a button and "the enemy" is gone. But as real world warriors like Michael Cumming know, kill the "wrong people" and pretty soon all the people are ready to fight you. This new weapon may not prove so antiseptically safe after all.

Is Pakistan about to melt down?

Journalist Ahmed Rashid has been at his project for much of his adult life. He knows we just don't seem to get it. He's determined to explain war-ravaged Afghanistan and his loved homeland of Pakistan to Western English-speaking readers. First there was Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000) which became a best seller after 9/11. Then there was disillusionment chronicled in Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008). (More here.) Now the engulfing war and social and political collapse has crept yet closer to home as he explains in Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

This volume is unstinting in its examination of U.S. failure in Central Asia. The arrival of the Obama administration did nothing to turn the tide in Afghanistan.

If anything undermined President Obama's entire Afghan deployment, it was the failure to develop a comprehensive political strategy that the U.S. military could not delay or even hold hostage. … The Obama formula for Afghanistan failed to do several things: encourage Pakistan to change its policy of harboring the Taliban, build up an indigenous Afghan economy, start talks with the Taliban parallel to the military surge, and persuade Karzai to improve governance and end corruption. … Before Obama was elected president, his admirers viewed him as a practical visionary who had seen the world, knew how it worked, and promised to move U.S. policy away from the ideological blinders of the Bush administration. … So what happened? Obama was utterly trapped by the Bush legacy of failures in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2008 and by the power and authority of the U.S. military establishment after September 11: it became arbiter, driver, and decider of U.S. foreign policy. Obama's cold sense of reality could not free itself from the Pentagon's way of thinking or doing. …

That is -- the inertial energies of an empire always confidently expecting to make its own reality won the day. Rashid is a clear eyed observer, but also often seems the ultimate Pollyanna who hopes beyond reason that the U.S. empire's better angels will somehow override the demons it looses on the world.

As a U.S. and NATO withdrawal from the region becomes inevitable (the war without purpose is lost, whether we admit it or not), there remain more questions than answers.

By both action and inaction, the United States has contributed significantly to the region's dangerous instability. The Obama administration has failed to detail its aims in the region beyond 2014, thereby giving rise to speculation and conspiracy theories. … What are Washington's geostrategic interests in the region, and to what extent is it willing to deploy troops to pursue those interests? Does the United States want to stabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan, or would it rather try to contain or even challenge Iran and China? Or would it prefer to leave the region in the hands of trusted allies like India and Turkey -- a surefire way to antagonize Pakistan? Moreover, while the United States has other strategic priorities now, such as the Arab Spring, a greater commitment to East Asia, and containing China, it has far fewer resources than it once did to playa global role.

What distinguishes this book is its attempt to offer a kind of "Pakistan for beginners." Considering its size, importance and complexity, in the U.S. we usually allow ourselves to be vague about Pakistan. It has the sixth largest population among nations and the seventh largest army -- an army armed with nuclear weapons. It is the world's second largest Islamic country (Indonesia is the largest). Ostensibly a developing democracy, it seems very close to sinking into the chaos of a failed state.

Four factors have prevented Pakistan from stabilizing and becoming a cohesive state. First, its political elite has failed to establish a coherent national identity capable of uniting the nation. The very subject remains deeply contentious: Is Pakistan an Islamic state, or is it a state for Muslims that has space for other religions and ethnic minorities? Is it not a democratic state as envisioned by its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah? Are its people Muslims first, Sindhis or Punjabis second, and Pakistanis third? Or are they Pakistanis first and foremost? …

The second factor dividing the country is Pakistan's national security paradigm: Is it to remain India-centric [structured around fear of India], as determined by the military? Or is it to adopt an alternative vision, as advocated by civil society and the progressive political elite? The long-running civilian-military rift that underlies these two views has contributed to the army's rule of Pakistan for nearly half the country's existence. Whenever the army feels that its control over national security is being challenged -- usually in the midst of a political-constitutional-economic crisis, when an incompetent and corrupt civilian government is at the helm -- it invariably overthrows the government and imposes military rule. This has happened four times in Pakistan's history, and military rule has often lasted a decade or more. …

Third, Pakistan has become an abnormal state that uses Islamic militants -- jihadi groups, non-state actors -- in addition to diplomacy and trade to pursue its defense and foreign policies. These non-state actors have deeply antagonized its neighbors, all of whom have, at one time or another, felt their pressure. …

The fourth factor perpetuating Pakistan's fragility is the inability of its ethnic groups to find a working political balance with one another, and the failure of Pakistan's political system, its parties, and its army to help them do so. …

Whatever else a reader may take away from this book, it makes it impossible to doubt that dealing with Pakistan requires knowledge, subtlety and patience. U.S. forces blundering about in Central Asia since 9/11 have showed none of these attributes. Rashid has written a cri de coeur, an anguished cry from his heart, describing the dangerous instability of his country. If U.S. policies contribute to collapse and horror in Pakistan, U.S. authorities will likely claim we couldn't have known things would get so bad. Rashid has done his best to make that claim unsustainable.

How to prolong and spread hatred

A couple of observations:

… the war on terrorism is like the war on drugs. We keep locking up drug dealers, but the demand for drugs is so strong, and selling them so lucrative, that there's always someone to fill the imprisoned drug dealer's shoes. Even if we put a whole drug-selling gang out of business--let's call it the al Qaeda of cocaine--a new drug distribution network will emerge.

The good news is that the war on terrorism is not, in principle, as challenging as the war on drugs. After all, the thing that keeps drawing people into the drug dealing business is built into human nature: the basic structure of brain cells makes cocaine feel good.

In contrast, the thing that draws people into the anti-American terrorism business--hatred of America--is a transient historical fact. Whereas cocaine has always felt good, hating America hasn't always felt good--at least, not to as many people as it feels good to now.

So how do we reduce the number of people who hate America? It's a tough, multi-dimensional problem, but here's something that probably isn't helping: endlessly raining drone strikes on Muslims. The strike that killed al-Libi also killed more than a dozen other people and was the third drone strike in Pakistan in three days.

Robert Wright

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates up to 830 civilians, including many women and children, might have been killed by drone attacks in Pakistan, 138 in Yemen and 57 in Somalia. Hundreds more have been injured.

Now Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA's counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, has told the Guardian that the drone programme is targeted too broadly. "It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences," Grenier said in an interview. …

"We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said.

… I am very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen," Grenier said.

The Guardian

Killing for peace always reveals a terrible failure of imagination.

The administration has adopted a "military age male located in territory the U.S. does not control" as an adequate definition of a "terrorist" deserving death-by-drone. Furthermore, current strikes are evidently targeting mourners and first responders.

And we wonder why they hate us?

Costs of US wars since 9/11: it's even worse than we think

The Eisenhower Research Project based at Brown University has created a new website devoted to exploring what the misguided United States wars since 9/11 have cost this country -- and the unfortunate countries and people in the way of the injured, but infantile, imperial colossus. Many of their findings reproduce what people seeking peace have attempted to highlight for a decade, but it seems worthwhile to reproduce the suggestive conclusions from the executive summary.

• While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.

• At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.

• Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.

• Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.

• The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.

• The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.

• As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans’ care into the future will be a sizable portion of the full costs of the war.

• The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been under-appreciated.

• While it was promised that the US invasions would bring democracy to both countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war.

Two conclusions made me want to add further comments:

• The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.

I didn't know that. And since our war within Pakistan is barely admitted, does the apparent intent among our rulers to wind down Afghanistan and Iraq suggest they intend to also get out of Pakistan? Or is Pakistan the new central theater of the permanent imperial war? Wouldn't it be a good idea to let the citizens who pay for this stuff in on our government's intentions?

Another bullet point seems both encouraging and problematic:

• Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the U.S.

After 9/11, a baffled and frightened US people wanted vengeance on someone, barely caring who. Collectively, we were suckers for mis-leaders who treated war as if it were an easy, sanitary, cost-free activity and dispatched our military where they had pre-existing grievances -- into Iraq. People who had other ideas about how to respond to the atrocity in New York and Washington -- think for example about 9/11 Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow -- were ignored, as was a massive worldwide peace movement. It would be a very good idea to recognize that the antiwar movement was right and our rulers were very, very wrong and have left the country broke, diminished and without good options.

In fact, the freedom of movement of both the administration (which seems to have some glimpses of this) and the entire political system are profoundly constrained by the destruction wrought by the wars of the '00s. Too many good options available in 2001 -- for example effective, cooperative international police work against terrorists -- are gone, undermined by the jack-booted rendition and torture policies adopted by the Bush administration. Terrorism suspects captured in Europe can fight extradition to the United States because we are considered a torture-practicing country with an impoverished grasp of basic human rights.

The costs of these wars are even greater than the Eisenhower Research Project study -- we have only begun to appreciate them.

H/t Washington Note for pointing to this study.

In whose interest?

I was impressed by Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. I am disquieted by Mortenson's sequel volume, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace Through Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There's an enormous amount to like about this detailed recounting of the Central Asia Institute's efforts to build schools "at the end of the road" that conventional aid agencies never reach. Again, Mortenson shares his simple and sensible prescriptions for Westerners who want to "help": listen to and respect the people who live in remote places; trust that people who survive in these hostile environments have figured out how to live there; and offer educational opportunity so that people can more easily find their own paths toward development. He truly believes in education for girls and explains why:

Studies from the World Bank indicate that just one year of primary school can result in an income bump of 10 percent to 20 percent for women later in life. ... In communities where girls have received more education, they marry later and have fewer children than their illiterate counterparts. ...

It is important to be clear about the fact that the aim of the Central Asia Institute is not indoctrination. We have no agenda other than assisting rural women with their two most frequent requests: "We don't want our babies to die, and we want our children to go to school." And in the process of addressing those wishes, it is certainly not our aim to teach the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan to think or to act like Americans. We simply want them to have the chance to attend schools that offer a balanced, nonextremist education. In this respect, we're also extremely sensitive to the difference between literacy and ideology. It is our belief that the first helps to thwart intolerance, challenge dogma, and reinforce our common humanity. The second does the opposite. ...

Education is one of the many basic values that Americans of all faiths share with Muslim people everywhere.

Moreover, Mortenson's focus on building schools is the opposite of impersonal. In this book, I was especially impressed by his account of trying desperately to reach and assist friends and staff after the terrible 2005 earthquake in northeastern Pakistan which killed hundreds of thousands, a natural disaster little noted in the West. And his account of learning to pass in Afghanistan, to project a "style" that prevented him from being instantly recognized as a wealthy foreign interloper, is funny and charming.

So what's not to like about Stones into Schools? In this book, Mortenson recounts a growing intimacy between his Central Asia Institute (CAI) and the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He certainly has been a critic of his country's war. For example, as early as 2002, he was questioning whether coming in without real conversation with Afghans and with guns blazing might not be a wrong approach.

Toward the end of 2002, I was given the opportunity to express these views when a marine general who had donated a thousand dollars to the CAl invited me to the Pentagon to address a small gathering of uniformed officers and civilian officials. In the course of my talk, I devoted a few minutes to explaining the tribal traditions that governed conflict in that part of the world-including the manner in which warring parties hold a jirga before joining a battle in order to discuss how many losses each side is willing to accept in light of the fact that the victors will be obligated to care for the widows and orphans of the rivals they have vanquished. ...

"I'm no military expert, and these figures might not be exactly right," 1 said. "But as best 1 can tell, we've launched 114 'Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles, tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced, nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure'?"

In fact he's still questioning the U.S. war. In a 2010 interview with Bill Moyers, he critiques the Obama administration for asking neither Afghan elders nor the American people to participate in war-making decisions.

But he has also become a cheerleader of the U.S. military's shiny new counter-insurgency theories, a set of prescriptions for "winning hearts and minds" all too familiar to those of us old enough to have watched a U.S. army lose its last big war in Asia. When the generals discover raw firepower won't eradicate indigenous nationalism, they shift to "more subtle" but still lethal efforts to co-opt and subdue the uppity natives. It seems to me that Mortenson found in the U.S. military something that years of work in Central Asia had not previously given him: peers from his own culture, big tough men like himself who were truly immersed in learning about these remote people and places, men who could appreciate what he was doing in building schools where it seemed impossible to accomplish anything. Here's a sample of Mortenson's conversion:

Eventually, I came to understand that a group of people who wield enormous power happen, oddly enough, to espouse some of the very same ideals imparted to me by people in Africa and central Asia who have no power at all. The reason for this, in my view, is that members of the armed forces have worked on the ground--in many cases, during three or four tours of duty--on a level that very few diplomats, academicians, journalists, or policy makers can match. And among other things, this experience has imbued soldiers with the gift of empathy. ...

... as I experienced the equivalent of sharing three cups of tea with the U.S. military, my perspective began to change. In a way, each side had something to teach the other, and we both wound up emerging wiser and enriched by the encounter. In the end, I also came away with the conclusion that the military is probably doing a better job than any other institution in the United States government -- including the State Department, Congress, and the White House -- of developing a meaningful understanding of the complex dynamics on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Actually, I can agree with that. The military is full of smart people who learn from their experiences. But to what end? There's a part of me that has empathy with Mortenson's attraction to the military and military individuals became faithful contributors to CAI. But after ten years of Afghan war, I still encounter reports like this from the Washington Post in late February.

KABUL - To the shock of President Hamid Karzai's aides, Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested Sunday at the presidential palace that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting.

The exact language Petraeus used in the closed-door session is not known, and neither is the precise message he meant to convey. But his remarks about the deadly U.S. military operation in Konar province were deemed deeply offensive by some in the room. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

They said Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, dismissed allegations by Karzai's office and the provincial governor that civilians were killed and said residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on U.S. forces and force an end to the operation.

"I was dizzy. My head was spinning," said one participant, referring to Petraeus's remarks. "This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd."

That too -- that mad cultural chauvinism and belief in Western superiority -- is the face of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

I was horrified by the account in Stones into Schools of Mortenson delighting in giving Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S. commander, a photo op at the opening of one the CAI schools.

...the Pushgur project--an eight-room structure that would accommodate over two hundred girls--was scheduled to receive its official inauguration at 11:30 on the morning of July 15 with a very special guest. ... Less than an hour after we arrived, two UH -60 Black Hawks and one CH-47 Chinook flew in from the southwest, circled the area, and then landed, creating an explosion of dust that covered everything. The first man to step out of the lead Black Hawk, clad in desert-camouflage fatigues, was Admiral Mike Mullen. "Hey Greg," he shouted over the roar of the engines. "I hope you don't mind that I brought some media with me."

As he spoke, the Chinook disgorged a dozen journalists, including reporters from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC, and ABC-TV, as well as Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial-page columnist for the New York Times. ...

It would be difficult to overstate the symbolic impact of witnessing an eight-room school for girls inaugurated by the admiral who served as the principal military adviser to the president of the United States.

Yeah, sure. It's awfully hard to square that with another assertion in Stones into Schools:

...The Central Asia Institute is not affiliated with the U.S. military, and in order for us to maintain credibility with the communities in which we work, we bend over backward to keep this distinction clear.

Somehow I doubt any Afghan who saw the Pushgur event believes that. They may have made the sensible calculation to get whatever they can from these big, dumb, dangerous invaders, but they are not likely to be confused about who is working for who.

I came away from Stones into Schools saddened. A naive generosity is something we could all use more of. Solidarity with the peoples of the world includes taking on crazy projects in crazy places with unforeseeable results. But naive innocence is not enough.

As Mortenson clearly knows, his country cannot bring solutions to the real problems of the Afghans and Pakistanis he has come to love and respect. Yet he has let his project be drawn into the vortex of the United States' war in the western Himalayas. I find it hard to believe that's in the interest of Afghan girls.