Last night, Glenn Greenwald’s partner was the target of a blatant intimidation attempt by UK authorities who detained him for hours under the powers granted them under anti-terrorism statutes. Glenn’s full account of the incident can be found here. This act backfired, both in instilling Greenwald and his partner with more determination to expose the misdeeds of the U.S.’s deep state and in stoking further outrage among observers, including Andrew Sullivan, whose shellacking of the UK’s David Cameron is well worth reading. The most important way in which the detention of David Miranda backfired, though, was in illustrating how policies supposedly crafted to combat terrorism can be abused to harass those who annoy politicians holding the levers of power.
Explain to us again how we’re supposed to trust the U.S. government with sweeping surveillance powers–powers that could very, very easily be turned to coerce citizens–under what’s essentially a “trust us” framework.
Sullivan summarizes the revelations that leave us at the “trust us” frame:
…I’ve watched the debate closely and almost all the checks I supported have been proven illusory. The spying is vastly more extensive than anyone fully comprehended before; the FISA court has been revealed as toothless and crippled; and many civilians have had their privacy accidentally violated over 3000 times. The president, in defending the indefensible, has damaged himself and his core reputation for honesty and candor. These cumulative revelations have exposed this program as, at a minimum, dangerous to core liberties and vulnerable to rank abuse. I’ve found myself moving further and further to Glenn’s position.
The U.S.’s British allies just illustrated the danger in trusting governments with sweeping anti-“terror” powers that could easily be abused to intimidate and harass dissenters. Remember that when they ask you to trust them with your entire telecommunications history.
It’s hard to get started writing a blog again. I’ve had so much downtime from activism–and so many conflicting feelings about it–that I find myself paralyzed by the thought of putting my toe back into painful waters. I can’t watch and not write, however, so I hope readers will accept an advance apology for the navel-gazing it will take to get going again.
“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
“America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.” –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (.pdf), the U.S. spends around $700 billion per year on the military. That sum roughly doubled since 2001, and it accounts for about 43 percent of all military spending in the world in 2010. Yet, even in the context of an ongoing unemployment crisis and widespread opposition for the major war in which the U.S. is embroiled, the Pentagon had the audacity to drop a spending plan (.pdf) earlier this month that calls for a continued increase in military spending and to portray the massive levels of outlays on war made at the height of the Iraq War as “breaking faith” with the military. To paraphrase Dr. King, to use for violence these resources better spent rescuing the 50 percent of Americans now in or near poverty is demonic.
It is natural for people and organizations to want to associate with King. He was a true prophet in the best sense of the word, someone whose courage, dignity and clear moral vision burned so hot and bright that his after-image remains in our eyes long after he’s gone. But there is a deep, deep difference between trying to associate by emulation and association by manipulation.
Today is MLK Day. For many, it will be a day of service, and that’s certainly an incredibly powerful way to honor King’s memory. But equally powerful is the demand that we hear his message–his whole message, including his condemnation of war as a means to settle conflict–and use it as a genuine opportunity for reflection and action. This year it is especially critical that we do so, as the policy choices waiting in the wings in Washington, D.C. over the next few months so tragically resemble those made regarding the poverty programs of King’s day and the Vietnam War.
Since the deficit committee officially failed to produce a plan as of last week, expect the war profiteer spin to hit the fan. Here’s an early warning of what to expect, courtesy of Reuters last week:
Failure of a special congressional committee to strike a deficit-reduction deal is expected to unleash desperate lobbying by U.S. arms makers to get lawmakers to block $600 billion in automatic cuts.
Their weapon of choice: jobs.
Unfortunately for them, War Costs’ new video exposes the truth about massive military budgets and employment: military spending is a job killer.
But, don’t expect the truth to get in the way of a good propaganda campaign.
The profiteer’s agitprop push is already underway. Searching for “defense cuts” on Google early this morning already brings up articles high in the search feed from paid war-industry shills in the top results, notably a lengthy piece from Loren Thompson, perennial paid defender of massive military budgets (himself on the war industry dime). His argument, that Obama could lose the election due to job losses from military cuts, is one you better get used to seeing.
This argument is part of a massive, coordinated effort headed by war industry CEOs and their advocates on Capitol HIll to push elected officials to protect the massive, corruption-filled war budget by slashing social safety nets. This would be a disaster for our economy. As we show in our latest War Costs video, military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money, and Congress must cut this spending if we are to get out of this unemployment crisis.
Massive Military Budgets Cost Jobs
“If we’re really serious about building anything approximate to a full employment economy, or at least getting us out of the damn recession, the best thing to do is to start cutting the military.”
Robert Pollin is the co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He and his colleague, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, are working on a new update to an employment study that discusses the jobs impact of various kinds of government spending. PERI has a strong message for elected officials: if you are going to cut, cut the Pentagon budget.
Brave New Foundation’s War Costs project spoke with Pollin and other experts several times over the past several weeks as press reports indicated a disposition among the many elected officials to spare the Pentagon from the cuts required to the budget by the debt ceiling law. The consensus of these experts–as opposed to those funded heavily by military money and war profiteers–is that the U.S.’s massive military budgets are terrible for job creation, and that the talking points coming from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the war-profiteer front campaign, “Second To None,” are specious propaganda.
PERI’s study uses Department of Commerce data to determine how many people are employed by various kinds of spending, including military, health care, green energy and education. They also examine the employment effects of basic consumer spending. Their discoveries, validated repeatedly as they’ve updated the study every two years since the original study in 2007, might startle those who bought the Washington consensus on military spending. In short, among the kinds of spending examined, military spending actually costs jobs compared to any other form. It’s the only spending that scored worse than basic consumer spending, and it created far less than half the jobs created by education spending.
Here are the numbers from their latest available study (.pdf):
Job Creation Per $1 Billion Spent:
Military: 11,200
Tax Cuts for Personal Consumption: 15,100
Clean Energy: 16,800
Health Care: 17,200
Education: 26,700
In short, at bare minimum, every billion dollars spent on the military costs at least 3,900 jobs compared to other spending types, and if compared to the best job creator from the study, education, $1 billion in military spending costs 15,500 jobs.
And, according to some experts, the actual jobs costs of massive military budgets over the past several decades could be in the millions.
“Large military budgets are very bad for job creation especially in the long run, and actually responsible in my view for much of the loss of American industrial jobs…that’s a job killer. …As a matter of fact, cutting defense spending is absolutely crucial to revitalizing American industry and creating millions of jobs that we’ve already lost–getting them back and getting more on top of that.”
Military contractors and their advocates, desperate to prevent cuts to the bloated Pentagon budget, point to critical technological developments that spring from military research. For example, the head of the Aerospace Industries Association, Marion Blakey, said in a recent press conference:
“For decades we’ve seen how investments in military aerospace endeavors lead to breakthroughs that benefit all of us – the Internet and GPS that grew out of DARPA research come to mind.”
Not so fast, according to Dumas. While he concedes that some spill-over effect exists, Dumas pointedly rebuts the implication that we should fund military R&D because of asserted benefits to civilian life. That way of obtaining innovative products is highly inefficient because military application drives research, experiment design and which results get attention. This means that discoveries that could have civilian application come at a much, much higher cost to society than if society sought those innovations directly through civilian research.
Despite the fact that economic data clearly suggest that military spending is a terrible priority for a government supposedly concerned with job creation, and despite the negative effect of this spending on the United States’ long-term competitiveness in the world market, an astounding number of representatives in Congress, Pentagon officials and war industry executives want to protect the military budget from cuts. Even worse, they are trying to wrap their campaign in the one word that certainly should not be applied to military spending: jobs. Add a healthy dose of fear-mongering about security into the mix, and you have a killer message campaign run largely with taxpayer dollars to protect war industry revenues.
The Fear Campaign
War industry CEOs have allies all over Capitol Hill pushing Congress and the administration to protect the bloated military budget from cuts.
For example, House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) recently sent a high-temperature letter to the deficit committee, including the mind-blowing assertion that less military spending will result in longer wars–irrespective of the fact that we’re spending all this money on the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan. He’s continued his agitation after the committee’s failure, which isn’t all that surprising considering his massive campaign cash take from the war industry.
McKeon and Panetta have both included in their scare-mongering the theme that cuts to the military budget would “hollow out” the military. Of course, they always fail to mention that the Pentagon’s budget would only be drawn down to roughly 2007 topline number for the military budget (which, by the way, McKeon enthusiastically voted for–twice), after which it would resume growing again.
The real lipstick that McKeon, Panetta and others put on their propaganda pig, however, is the jobs fiction cooked up by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a “nonprofit” governed by executives from the major military contractor organizations which advocates for their businesses on Capitol Hill. AIA paid Dr. Steven Fuller from George Mason University to write a paper about job losses that would occur if sequestration–the across-the-board cuts triggered by deficit committee failure–took place. Fuller’s estimate checked in at roughly 1 million jobs.
Pollin, however, takes strong issue with AIA’s methods in the debate, pointing to their study’s total lack of context.
“The real point is to compare the relative employment impacts of military spending versus spending on domestic infrastructure, on the green economy, on health care and on education. …It is fair to say that every time we take money out of these alternatives, it is costing the economy jobs by putting money into the military.”
Long-time war industry observer Bill Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, had a simple description for the Panetta/McKeon/war industry media push around jobs. He called it simply, “a propaganda campaign.”
“To me there’s no question that this scare campaign about jobs by the Pentagon and the industryis a propaganda campaign. And the reason I say that is, first of all, it’s coordinated. So for example, one day an executive from the Aerospace INdustries Association says we’re going to increase unemployment 1 percent if we make significant cuts in military spending. The next day, Secretary of Defense Leon panetta calls congress and says, ‘Guess what? We’re going to gain 1 percent in unemployment if we make significant cuts in military spending.’ So they’ve obviously sat down and gotten their stories straight. They’re working shoulder-to-shoulder to scare people into spending more on the military than we need.”
Hartung pointed out the industry’s penchant for inflated jobs numbers, urging readers to take them with a healthy dose of skepticism. (See our latest video for more information.)
Right now, Congress and the administration are the target of a coordinated propaganda campaign involving war industry allies in Congress and the administration, funded in large part by huge corporations whose executives rely on the taxpayer for lavish lifestyles. This spin campaign flies in the face of what economists know to be true: that military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money. If Congress acts on the “information” they’ve obtained during this propaganda push, there’s a real chance they will protect the worst kind of spending for job creation–the military budget–by slashing other kinds of spending that create far more jobs. This would be a disastrous decision that would prolong and deepen our economic woes.
We’ve got to push back with the truth: military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money.
I’ve not posted here in a while–sorry about that. Will change in the next few days. I’ve got a few ideas banging around in my head for posts, but haven’t made time to put them into words on the page. Thanks for your patience.
Osama Bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan in any significant numbers. While the Afghanistan War long ago lost a strategic rationale supported by actual outcomes on the ground (insurgent-initiated attacks continue to rise every year, despite the massive escalations of the past two years), Bin Laden’s death obliterates the last plausible excuse for keeping troops in Afghanistan any longer. It’s time to bring the troops home.
The celebrations following the death of Bin Laden were about more than the demise of a terrorist kingpin. They were an outpouring of relief and a release of tension–there is a feeling that something is ending. As one troop told the Army Times, “He’s dead. Can we go home now?”
The White House, though, doesn’t seem to understand what most Americans want. According to The Hill:
The White House has stressed that the death of bin Laden is a major victory in the battle against al Qaeda, but should not be seen as a reason to change the U.S. game plan in Afghanistan.
Really? The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to get Bin Laden and destroy al-Qaeda. General Petraeus admits al-Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden is dead. The fact that the administration does not view the death of Bin Laden and the driving out of al-Qaeda as a reason to draw the Afghanistan War to a close shows just how disconnected the war strategy has become from the original rationale for the U.S. invasion in the first place. In fact, in pursuit of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, we’ve been scratching the backs of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies, who may be implicated in allowing Bin Laden to shelter in their country.
But, if the death of Osama Bin Laden isn’t a good enough reason to change the game plan in Afghanistan, here’s another: the counterinsurgency strategy is a failure on its face. In the first quarter of 2011, insurgent attacks more than doubled compared to the first quarter of 2009, when President Obama took office and doubled down in Afghanistan. NATO expects insurgent attacks to continue to escalate as fighting season commences. So when the fighting heats up, what possible explanation can we offer to the next military family who loses their loved ones following Bin Laden’s death? What possible rationale remains? Supporting the corrupt, criminal Kabul government, which includes the man who brought Bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place, along with the warlord that helped him escape Tora Bora? Please.
“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. …All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations.”
This is the first week after Bin Laden’s death, and during this week we’ll spend more than $2 billion on Afghanistan War. Every week we continue to do so is a week when Bin Laden is laughing at us from the grave.
A report March 2 by the British Parliament’s foreign affairs committee concluded that despite the “optimistic progress appraisals we heard from some military and official sources … the security situation across Afghanistan as a whole is deteriorating.” Counterinsurgency efforts in the south and east have “allowed the Taliban to expand its presence and control in other previously relatively stable areas in Afghanistan.”
“The Taliban have the momentum, especially in the east and north,” analyst Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the committee. “There is no change in the overall balance of power, and the Taliban are still making problems.”
One of the most hawkish of the Petraeus backers in the Senate, Senator McCain, is working hard to set the bounds for acceptable debate in Congress, but he, like the counterinsurgency campaign, is failing:
“I expect certainly some skepticism on both sides of the aisle,” McCain said. “I don’t see any kind of pressure to withdraw immediately.”
Petraeus and McCain can try to spin this all they want, but the fact is that the counterinsurgency gamble failed, and the American people want our troops out, pronto. Nobody buys the counterinsurgency propaganda anymore, and the more these guys trot it out, the more damage it does to their credibility.
If you’re fed up with this war that’s not making us safer and that’s not worth the cost, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter, and join your neighbors for a Rethink Afghanistan Meetup in your hometown.
1. On the 12th day of March during the consulship of Tuscus and Anolinus [295], when Fabius Victor had been brought into the forum at Tebessa, together with Maximilianus, and their advocate Pompeianus had been granted an audience, the last declared, “The temonarius Fabius Victor is present, together with Valerianus Quintianus, the praepositus Caesariensis, and the fine recruit Maximilianus, Victor’s son. Since he is acceptable, I ask that he be measured.” The proconsul Dion said, “What are you called ?” Maximilianus replied, “Why do you want to know my name ? It is not permitted to me to serve in the military since I am a Christian”. The proconsul Dion said, “Ready him”. When he was being got ready, Maximilianus replied, “I cannot serve in the military; I cannot do wrong; I am a Christian.” The proconsul Dion said, “Let him be measured”. When he had been measured, an official reported, “He is five feet ten inches tall.” Dion said to the official, “Let him be marked.” And as Maximilianus resisted, he replied, “I will not do it; I cannot serve in the military.”
2. Dion said, “Serve so that you do not perish.” Maximilianus replied, “I will not serve; cut off my head; I do not serve the world, but I do serve my God.”Dion the proconsul said, “Who has persuaded you of this ?” Maximilianus replied, “My soul and he who has called me.” Dion said to his father Victor, “Advise your son.” Victor replied, “He himself knows – he has his purpose – what is best for him.” Dion said to Maximilianus, “Serve and accept the seal.” He replied, “I will not accept the seal: I already have the seal of my Christ.” Dion the proconsul said, “I will send you to your Christ right now.” He replied, “I wish that you would do so. That is even my title to glory.” Dion said to his staff, “Let him be marked.” And when he was resisting, he replied, “I do not accept the world’s seal, and if you give it to me, I will break it, since I value it at nought. I am a Christian. It is not permitted to me to bear the lead upon my neck after [having received] the saving seal of my Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, he whom you do not know, who suffered for the life of the world, whom God surrendered for our sins. All of us Christians serve Him. Him we follow as the source of life and author of salvation.” Dion said, “Serve, and accept the seal, so that you do not suffer a terrible death.” Maximilianus replied, “I will not die. My name is already with my Lord; I cannot serve in the military.” Dion said, “Have regard to your youth and serve; for this befits a young man.” Maximilianus replied, “My service is for my Lord; I cannot serve the world. I have already said: I am a Christian.” Dion the proconsul said, “There are Christian soldiers in the sacred retinue of our lords Diocletian, Maximianus, Constantius, and Maximus, and they serve.” Maximilianus replied, “They themselves know what is best for them. But I am a Christian, and I cannot do wrong.” Dio said, “What wrong do they who serve do ?” Maximilianus replied, “You know well what they do.” Dion replied, “Serve, lest, having scorned military service, you begin upon a terrible death.” Maximilianus replied, “I will will not die; even if I do depart the world, my spirit will live with my Lord Christ.”
3. Dion said, “Strike out his name.” And when it had been struck out, Dion said, “Because you have disloyally refused military service, you will receive the appropriate sentence in order to serve as an example to others.” And he read his decision from his tablet, “Maximilianus, since you have disloyally refused the military oath, it has been decided for you to be punished by the sword.” Maximilianus replied, “Thanks be to God.” He was 21 years, 3 months, and 18 days old. And when he was being led to the place [of execution], he spoke as follows, “Dearest brothers, with an eager desire, hurry with as much courage as you can so that it may befall you to see the Lord and that he may reward you also with a similar crown.” And with a joyous face, he addressed his father as follows, “Give that guard the new clothing which you had got ready for me during my military service, so that I may welcome you with a hundredfold reward and we may glory with the Lord together.” And so he suffered death shortly afterwards. And the matron Pompeiana obtained his body from the judge and, having placed it in her carriage, she brought it to Carthage, and buried it beneath a little hill near the martyr Cyprian and the palace. And so, after the 13th day, the same woman died, and was buried there. But his father Victor returned to his home with great joy, thanking God that he had sent on ahead such a gift to the Lord, he who was about to follow shortly afterwards.
As I wrote about this account last year:
Controversy surrounds the historicity of this account. However, what’s important about this story is not its historicity, but that the early church would celebrate the protagonist of such a story as a martyr. Declaring someone a saint is a political act, and the canonization of Maximilian as a saint in the eyes of the church also tells us something about the orientation of the early church to questions of war and violence. Interestingly, the author of the above-linked article debunking the historicity of the martyr story dates its composition to C.E. 384-439, during the time when the militarized Constantinian version of Christianity was supplanting the earlier anti-violent incarnation.
Today is also the anniversary of Fr. Rutilio Grande’s murder in El Salvador in 1977. Grande was a close friend of Archbishop Oscar Romero and an outspoken opponent of the abuses of the U.S.-backed government. The speech that probably got him killed was his “Apopa sermon,” delivered on February 13, denouncing the expulsion of a fellow priest from the country. He said:
“I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God, the prototype of man, of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. …Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.”
One month after delivering the Apopa sermon, Grande was gunned down, and the local government authorities refused to order an autopsy. The Jesuits hired their own physician to conduct an autopsy, which determined that Grande had been shot by the same type of automatic rifles used by the police. This was only one of several signs of government complicity in the murder.
Grande’s death was a crucial moment in Romero’s life, and triggered his move to openly oppose the Salvadoran government. He canceled all future attendance at state events and meetings with the president pending the fulfillment of his demands for an official investigation, and that investigation never took place.
H/t to Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, for reminding me of these anniversaries.
The Pentagon wants you to ignore some inconvenient facts about the failure of the escalation strategy in Afghanistan.
The latest Petraeus/Gates media tour is under way in preparation for the general’s testimony to Congress next week, and they’re trotting out the same, tired spin they’ve been using since McChrystal was replaced in disgrace last year. Despite the most violent year of the war so far, despite the highest civilian and military toll of the war so far, and despite the continued growth of the insurgency, they want you to believe that we’re “making progress.” While they spend this week fudging and shading and spinning, we’ll waste another $2 billion on this brutal, futile war, and we won’t be any closer to “victory” than we are today.
Let me make a couple of predictions about Petraeus’ testimony based on experience. He will attempt to narrow the conversation to a few showcase districts in Afghanistan, use a lot of aspirational language (“What we’re attempting to do,” instead of, “What we’ve done“) and assure the hand-wringers among the congressional hawks that he’ll be happy to suggest to the president that they stay longer in Afghanistan if that’s what he thinks is best. Most importantly, he will try to keep the conversation as far away from a high-level strategic assessment based on his own counterinsurgency doctrine as possible, because if Congress bothers to check his assertions of “progress” against what he wrote in the counterinsurgency manual, he’s in for a world of hurt.
Here’s what Petraeus’ own U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual says about the main goal of a COIN campaign:
“I-113. The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.”
Even if the Karzai regime where a glimmering example of the rule of law, the military campaign under Petraeus would be utterly failing to achieve what counterinsurgency doctrine holds up as the primary way in which a legitimate government wins over support from the people: securing the population. From the COIN manual:
“5-68. Progress in building support for the HN [“host nation”] government requires protecting the local populace. People who do not believe they are secure from insurgent intimidation, coercion, and reprisals will not risk overtly supporting COIN efforts.”
Petraeus and Gates like to talk around this blatant break in his own strategic doctrine by narrowing the conversation to what they call “security bubbles.” In his recent remarks following his trip to Afghanistan, Gates spoke of “linking zones of security in Helmand to Kandahar.” But those two provinces have seen huge spikes in violence over the course of the past year, with attacks initiated by insurgents up 124 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Today’s New York Times explains one of the main reasons for these jumps in violence as U.S. troops arrive in new areas:
“[G]enerals have designated scores of rural areas ‘key terrain districts.’ The soldiers are creating, at cost of money and blood, pockets of security.
“But when Americans arrive in a new area, attacks and improvised bombs typically follow — making roads and trails more dangerous for the civilians whom, under current Pentagon counterinsurgency doctrine, the soldiers have arrived to protect.”
The military escalations in Afghanistan have failed their key purpose under counterinsurgency doctrine, which is to secure Afghans from insurgent violence and intimidation.
While the U.S. government is failing to achieve its military objectives in Afghanistan, it’s also failing to make good on the other components of counterinsurgency strategy, especially the civilian/political component. Here’s what The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual says on p. xxix, emphasis mine:
“Nonmilitary Capacity Is the Exit Strategy
“The [counterinsurgency] manual highlights military dependence not simply upon civilian political direction at all levels of operation, but also upon civilian capabilities in the field. ...[T]he primacy of the political requires significant and ongoing civilian involvement at virtually every level of operations.”
To meet this prerequisite for a successful counterinsurgency strategy, the administration promised a “civilian surge” to accompany the military escalation. But the March 8, 2011 edition of The Washington Post shows that the civilian surge has so far been a flop that’s alienating the local population:
“Efforts to improve local government in critical Afghan districts have fallen far behind schedule…according to U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the program.
“It is now expected to take four more years to assess the needs of more than 80 ‘key terrain’ districts where the bulk of the population lives, based on figures from Afghan officials who said that escalating violence has made it difficult to recruit civil servants to work in the field.
…
“…Of the 1,100 U.S. civilian officials in Afghanistan, two-thirds are stationed in Kabul, according to the State Department.
“‘At best, our Kabul-based experts simply reinforce the sense of big government coming from Kabul that ultimately alienates populations and leaders in the provinces,’ a former U.S. official said.”
As with the military side of the equation, the civilian side of the strategy is so badly broken that it’s actually pushing us further away from the administration’s stated goals in Afghanistan.
The costs of this pile of failure are huge. It costs us $1 million per troop, per year to maintain our occupation of Afghanistan. That’s $2 billion every week. Politicians at the federal level are contemplating ugly cuts to social safety nets, while politicians at the state level are already shredding programs that protect people suffering in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In this context, the admonitions from the White House and the Pentagon to be patient while this misbegotten strategy limps along the progress-road-to-nowhere seem perverse. The American people have been patient for roughly a decade now, but that patience has run out.
Petraeus and Gates want to you to ignore the ugly truths of the Afghanistan War: it’s not making us safer, and it’s not worth the costs. The escalation strategy isn’t working. It’s not going to work. Enough is enough. End it now.
I’ve often said that I think the Christian religion could benefit from a shift away from emphasizing a set of beliefs to an emphasis on daily practice. Take, for example, the practice of meditation.
“The [newly released] study, published last month in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, suggests that meditating for just 30 minutes a day for eight weeks can increase the density of gray matter in brain regions associated with memory, stress, and empathy. …These brain changes may suggest that meditation improves people’s ability to regulate their emotions, control their stress levels, and feel empathy for others, says Britta Hölzel, the study’s lead author and a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Geissen in Germany.”
It would be interesting to see if there are any similar alterations in the brain arising from anything in typical Christian worship services in the U.S. Given that in recent history, frequent church-goers in the U.S. were found to be more prone to support torture, I doubt it. That points to a severe deficiency in Christian spiritual life in the area of empathy development that church leaders should be working urgently to address. But, until that happens, we individual Christians should be adopting practices like daily mediation on our own.
Return Good for Evil 