MoDo has a question in “Lost in a Maze:” Why can’t we train the fierce warriors of Afghanistan to be the fierce warriors of Afghanistan? She says “The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do.” This line is brought to you fresh from the “No Shit, Sherlock” Department. The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Want the Good News First?”, says the Gulf Coast doesn’t look so bad on the surface. But it’s the unknowns that nobody is talking about. Here’s MoDo:
The waterfall of leaks on Afghanistan underlines the awful truth: We’re not in control.
Not since Theseus fought the Minotaur in his maze has a fight been so confounding.
The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do. As Congress passed $59 billion in additional war funding on Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful, they’re disdainful.
Washington gave the Wall Street banks billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, handing out a fortune in bonuses to the grifters who almost wrecked our economy.
Washington gave the Pakistanis billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, pledging to fight the militants even as they secretly help the militants.
We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.
Robert Gibbs recalled that President Obama said last year that “we will not and cannot provide a blank check” to Pakistan.
But only last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to hand over a juicy check: $500 million in aid to the country that’s been getting a billion a year for most of this decade and in 2009 was pledged another $7.5 billion for the next five. She vowed to banish the “legacy of suspicion” and show that “there is so much we can accomplish together as partners joined in common cause.”
Gibbs argued that the deluge of depressing war documents from the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks, reported by The New York Times and others, was old. But it reflected one chilling fact: the Taliban has been getting better and better every year of the insurgency. So why will 30,000 more troops help?
We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing. And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work. Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.
But whenever America tries to train security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan so that we can leave behind a somewhat stable country, it’s positively Sisyphean. It takes eons longer than our officials predict. The forces we train turn against us or go over to the other side or cut and run. If we give them a maximum security prison, as we recently did in Iraq, making a big show of handing over the key, the imprisoned Al Qaeda militants are suddenly allowed to escape.
The British Empire prided itself on discovering warrior races in places it conquered — Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, as the Brits called Pashtuns. But why are they warrior cultures only until we need them to be warriors on our side? Then they’re untrainably lame, even when we spend $25 billion on building up the Afghan military and the National Police Force, dubbed “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” by Newsweek.
Maybe we just can’t train them to fight against each other. But why can’t countries that produce fierce insurgencies produce good standing armies in a reasonable amount of time? Is it just that insurgencies can be more indiscriminate?
Things are so bad that Robert Blackwill, who was on W.’s national security team, wrote in Politico that the Obama administration should just admit failure and turn over the Pashtun South to the Taliban since it will inevitably control it anyway. He said that the administration doesn’t appreciate the extent to which this is a Pashtun nationalist uprising.
We keep hearing that the last decade of war, where we pour in gazillions to build up Iraq and Afghanistan even as our own economy sputters, has weakened Al Qaeda.
But at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. James Mattis, who is slated to replace Gen. David Petraus, warned that Al Qaeda and its demon spawn represent a stark danger all over the Middle East and Central Asia.
While we’re anchored in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda network could roil Yemen “to the breaking point,” as Mattis put it in written testimony.
Pakistan’s tribal areas “remain the greatest danger as these are strategic footholds for Al Qaeda and its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the blunt four-star general wrote, adding that they “remain key to extremists’ efforts to rally Muslim resistance worldwide.”
Questioned by John McCain, General Mattis said that we’re not leaving Afghanistan; we’re starting “a process of transition to the Afghan forces.” But that process never seems to get past the starting point.
During the debate over war funds on Tuesday, Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, warned that we are in a monstrous maze without the ball of string to find our way out.
“All of the puzzle has been put together, and it is not a pretty picture,” he told The Times’s Carl Hulse. “Things are really ugly over there.”
Get. Out. Now. Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Grand Isle, LA:
It is pretty much a tossup for me: Who poses a greater long-term threat to America’s Gulf Coast ecosystem: the U.S. Senate or BP? Right now, from what I’ve seen flying over the Louisiana coast at the mouth of the Mississippi, my vote is the U.S. Senate. BP at least seems to have finally gotten its act together and is cleaning up the oil spill. The Senate, in failing to pass even the most modest bill to diminish our addiction to oil and begin to mitigate climate change, has not even begun to do its job.
I have to admit, I was surprised and pleased that it took us an hour of flying in our float plane over Breton Sound and Barataria Bay and across the marshes, bayous, barrier islands and open water that lie about 70 miles from the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig before we spotted any significant ribbon of oil. “There it is,” said our pilot, as he banked the plane for a better view of the small oil slick and as if he were pointing out a pod of whales we had been searching for all day.
Here’s the good news. Thanks to: the capping of the broken oil well; the cleanup efforts so far by a flotilla of shrimp boats converted to skimmers; the currents that have blessedly taken a lot of the spill away from the shore; the weathering process that is breaking down a lot of the crude into different compounds that dissolve, evaporate or get absorbed by microbes in the ocean; and the dispersants that have broken up the biggest oil slicks, there is less and less to see here on the surface. Walking along the beach on Grand Isle, the only inhabited barrier island on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, it appears that our worst fears have not materialized — so far.
So much for the good news. The bad news is what you can’t see that is happening under the ocean’s surface and the stuff you can see — the decades of degradation along the whole Gulf Coast from decades of unfettered development — that no one is talking about.
“From a biological perspective, we know what happens when oil hits the beach. We can see those impacts; we can mitigate those impacts; we can quantify those impacts,” said Keith Ouchley, the biologist who leads the Nature Conservancy in Louisiana. “What we don’t know are the biological impacts that occur as that oil is dispersed through the deep water columns under the ocean’s surface. We don’t know what it is doing or affecting today or in the future. There is very little experience with this scale of spill at these depths in such a biologically productive system as this.”
The greatest concern, added Ouchley, is what impact the undersea oil concentrations could have on the billions of tiny larval fish, shrimp and other organisms that are at the bottom of the whole marine food chain — and we may not know that for many years.
What compounds that worry is that the marshes, sea grasses, oyster beds and barrier islands that provide the nurseries for those larval fish, shrimp and other marine life — and that provide natural barriers against storm surges from hurricanes — had already been dramatically weakened long before the BP spill. That was thanks to the building of levies that have prevented the rivers’ natural flooding of life-giving freshwater and sediments into the marshes, as well as the laying of oil and gas pipelines and shipping navigation channels all across the ecosystem. “A football field of marsh is being washed into the ocean every 30 minutes,” said Ouchley.
Bob Marshall, an environmental reporter for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, put the BP spill in the right context when he wrote: “We need to remember this is a temporary problem on top of a permanent disaster. Long after BP’s oil is gone, we’ll still be fighting for survival against a much more serious enemy — our sinking, crumbling delta. Our coast is like a cancer patient who has come down with pneumonia. That’s serious, but curable. After the fever breaks, he’ll still have cancer.”
That’s where the Senate has failed miserably. There are three things it should be doing for the gulf and our other vital ecosystems. First, taking out some minimal insurance against climate change by reducing our carbon emissions; this region is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and the more intense storms that climate change will bring. Second, set us on a path to diminish our addiction to oil so we don’t have to drill in ever-deeper waters. And, finally, provide the federal funding to restore America’s critical ecosystems. The Senate abandoned the first two but is still working on the third.
The Senate’s failure to act is a result of many factors, but one is that the climate-energy policy debate got disconnected from average people. We need less talk about “climate” and more about how conservation saves money, renewable energy creates jobs, restoring the gulf’s marshes sustains fishermen and preserving the rainforest helps poor people. Said Glenn Prickett, vice president at the Nature Conservancy: “We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth and show how it matters in people’s everyday lives.”
