Yes, Trump’s gratuitous Twitter insult to newswoman Mika Brzezinski was horrible. But US cable news and even a lot of print news are falling down on the job by focusing on these clashes of personality that Trump provokes.

In contrast, corporate news is not doing a good job of covering Trump’s planned tax cuts for the rich at the expense of middle class Americans (Time Warner, Viacom, Comcast and the other media giants would benefit from the tax cuts). They won’t say a word about climate change, even though we only have two or three years to swing into very substantial action in order to prevent climate chaos. They do talk about health care, but their he said-she said model muddies the waters on how all our oxen are about to be gored by Mitch McConnell for the sake of his billionaire buddies.

So here’s what we ought to be talking about.

1. Trump and the GOP Congress are coming for Medicaid.

Anyone who tells you #Trumpcare isn’t cutting #Medicaid is full of it. pic.twitter.com/mBkoDDJN5R

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) June 29, 2017

Medicaid is for low-income and disabled patients. Trump and the GOP are going to kick 15 million people off it and cut $772 billion out of it over 10 years. That is, he is going to leave 15 million people without the care they need to give a tax break to the super-rich. Some of them will suffer. Some of them will die. (Yes.)

Plus they are going to kick 22 million people who have coverage under the ACA off of health insurance by ensuring it is too expensive. They are going to raise your deductibles. Again, hundreds of billions will instead go to the super-rich (I mean mainly to the 600 billionaires in the US. Most of what the GOP does is for those 600 people, and a handful of them don’t even want it). And, again, millions of people will be sicker than they need to be and some will die.

Trumpcare will kill 20,000 people a year by 2025.

Through summer of 2016, ISIL had killed 1200 people outside Syria and Iraq, i.e. in Europe and elsewhere in South Asia and the Middle East.

That is, Trumpcare is 20 times more dangerous in the West than the terror threat of ISIL.

2. Trump has literally taken away the right to clean water.. He is fine if it is full of mercury (a nerve poison released by burning coal) and lead (which causes permanent damage to IQ and attention span in children).

3. Not to mention that he is trying to roll back limitations on toxic carbon dioxide emissions, which because it is a greenhouse gas, are poisoning our planet. Climate change could reduce GDP by 3% a year and plunge the US into a permanent Great Recession. It will hit Texas and the southeast especially hard.

4. Trump would like to kill America’s scientific and technological advantages in the world by slashing funding for science and science research, reducing us to a fourth world country.

5. Trump has deeply endangered US national security by making us a laughingstock and reducing by orders of magnitude the likelihood that any other powers will partner with us in world affairs. The US needs allies and partners, but Trump has told them to jump in a lake, and anyway they can see how flaky he is. Imagine him calling up Emmanuel Macron in France and asking him to join in a military operation! Yet George H. W. Bush was able to call up the Socialist president of France, Francois Mitterand, and convince him to join in the Gulf War to rescue little Kuwait from the clutches of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. When a president now cannot do things on the world stage a president could do only 27 years ago, that is a sign of deep and worrisome decline.

——

Related video:

Al Franken: Trump tax cut for top 400 would fund Medicaid for 750,000

It began with an electrifying text message from a Yazidi member of a network dedicated to freeing Yazidis (an ancient people from Northern Iraq who adhere to a faith rooted in old Iranian religion and influenced by Sufi mysticism). The message was stark and simple, “We have a fourteen year old girl whose ISIL captor is willing to sell her for 17,000 dollars. Her name is Fayza Murad from the northern Iraqi town of Siber.” If we could get to Iraq with the required sum we could save one of the thousands of Yazidi girls who had been dragged off and sold into slavery by the ISIL fanatics who conquered their remote homeland in Northern Iraq in August of 2014. If we did not obtain the money there was a high probability that Fayza would never be seen again as the ISIL “Caliphate” was beginning to collapse under the assault of the Kurds, Iraqi Army and U.S coalition bombing.

Thus began a frantic search for money that led myself and a brave group of multinational volunteers led by a fiery English woman named Anne Norona from the safety of our homes to the sprawling refugee camps in the burning deserts of Northern Iraq. For me it was to be the culmination of a long journey to explore the history of a dying people whose origins lay in the mists of time.

Lailish: An Entry into the World of a Dying People

My journey to comprehend this fascinating people that had endured on and off persecution for centuries by their Muslim neighbors who defined them as, “Devil worshippers” began while researching a history of America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (Counter Jihad: The American Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.). In the winter of 2016 I was invited by two prominent Kurdish generals leading the assault against ISIL, whose territory in Mosul and Northern Iraq lay perilously close to their own capital, Erbil, and their mountainous homeland known) as Kurdistan. As a platoon of brave Kurdish Peshmerga fighters (those who face death defined as a volunteer fighting force that defended the Kurdish sanctuary in the mountains of North Eastern Iraq. As we looked across the valley at ISIL positions facing them I was introduced to my first Yazidi.

He enthralled me with stories of the ancient rituals of his people who the world gravely misunderstood as “pagans” and brought to life the epic story of his long persecuted people. It was this fascinating narrative that inspired me to travel Northward from our fire base at the newly recaptured Mosul Dam to the ancient heart of the Yazidis, their remote mountain temple located dangerously close to ISIL’s frontlines in Iraq. There I was provided with a rare opportunity to access a stone temple built in a bygone era and see Yazidis solemnly praying, dipping their hands in a sacred pool of Azrael, the Death Angel, and even given the extraordinary opportunity to meet their second highest priest, Baba Chavush. As I sat with this holy man who blessed myself and my fellow companion, Adam Sulkowski, he spoke of centuries of genocide as well as his hopes for peace for his people and all of humanity. With a gold peacock next to him, the peacock being a figure that represents the Yazidi’s primary god, Malak Tawus (The Peacock Angel) he lamented the fate of thousands of Yazidi girls who had been dragged against their will from their families into ISIL captivity and forgotten by an uncaring world.

I flew back to my own safe home in Boston feeling both blessed for having been given such a rare entry into the mystical world of one of the most ancient traditions in existence, but at the same time troubled by the pain in Baba Chavush’s voice as he described the unimaginable and horrific fate of Yazidi slave girls living in the clutches of their fanatical ISIL captors. Their story moved me to write articles about the Yazidi plight, but there was not much more I could do, after all I was just one man living far away from the warzones of the Middle East.

Little did I know there was, however, another person on the planet far braver than myself, who had decided that she would make that difference. It was my discovery of Anne Norona that was to take me from Boston and once again launch me into the maelstrom of the Middle East just as ISIL’s greatest triumph, Mosul, collapsed under the assault of a vast array of armies and militias bent on revenge.

Anne Norona. Single Mother, Nurse, and “Angel of Sinjar.”

Following my field research in the embattled mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, I began to connect with a growing network of Yazidis who I had met on Facebook. They spoke of their dreams for the liberation of their homeland, a return from their refugee camps to their holy mountain haven, Mount Sinjar, and most painfully of the plight of thousands of daughters and sisters living as Sabbiya (Koran endorsed slave girls). I was even shown a horrific video some Yazidis had acquired of black clad, heavily armed, bearded ISIL fighters waving the black banner of Jihad and shouting “Allah u Akbar!” (God is Greatest) as they triumphantly dragged screaming girls as young as eleven from the pleading hands of their terrified mothers. I was nauseated when I heard that ISIL members considered raping “Pagan infidels,” to be an act of worship. I was moved by online interviews of members of this peaceful people who spoke of the horrors of enslavement by the men who had ritualistically slit the throats of their fathers and brothers, gunned down woman over the age of 40 in trenches and blown up their ancient temples with their priests still inside of them.

Some of the most impactful images I had ever seen in my life were of a Yazidi girl named Nadia Murad who had escaped captivity and told the world of the horrors she had endured during her time as an ISIL slave.

It was as I burned with a sense of helplessness, fury and desire to help that I received an unusual Facebook message from someone identifying herself as Anne Norona. Her initial messages were guarded and she wanted to know where my interests in the Yazidis came from. When I explained I was a Welshman/American who had dedicated his life to performing fieldwork amongst various persecuted ethnic minorities ranging from the isolated Kalash Pagan’s on the Afghan Pakistan border, to the embattled Chechen highlanders of the Russian Caucasus, to the dying Crimean Tatars of Ukraine/Russia, to the Kosovo Albanians and Bosnians she began to open up to me and ,in the process, I got to know someone whose life dream was to “grow flowers in my garden and save Yazidis.”

It soon became apparent that Anne was a fascinating English globe roamer of the sort that had marched out and conquered much of the world and provided us such names as Lawrence of Arabia, Gertrude Bell (wonderfully played in a recent movie starring Nicole Kidman), and Dr. David Livingston (who disappeared in the depths of Africa in the 19^th century). Anne similarly burned with the desire to get out into the world and help others, but instead of writing books and articles, as I did, she put boots on the ground and worked as a volunteer nurse in places ranging from Haiti to the Greek Island, Lesbos, located just off the Turkish coast. Having myself spent thirteen summers in Turkey living South of Lesbos with my ex-wife Feyza’s family in the beautiful costal village of Cesme, I had myself witnessed the flow of desperate Iraqi and Syrian refugees fleeing through Turkey in a desperate attempt to reach the Greek Isles and obtain asylum in the European Union. Lesbos was the frontline on the largest immigration of humans since World War II and tens of thousands of refugees were living in squalor in makeshift refugee camps on the island.

It was while Anne and a team of volunteers working as Health Point Foundation under Dr. Hadia Aslam in the medical tent in the city of Moria, in Lesbos that she came across her first Yazidis. Much of the volunteers work consisted of online communication between an amazing group of core humanitarians from around the world who worked tirelessly and remotely to ensure the refuges received help in every way, from legal to medical to boat rescue to basic assistance and supplies of food and clothes. These volunteers were doing the job that the big NGO’s were so negligently failing to do.

For Anne, a single mother who had run away from home as a rebellious teenager and explored much of the world from Africa to the Orient, her meeting with the Yazidis was in many ways a fulfillment of what the Arabs call kismet, “Fate.”

The Yazidis Anne encountered were different from all of the other Muslim Arab refugees in the Lesbos camps. They were physically smaller, were more shy, were often embarrassed to receive assistance and sadly faced continued persecution from Arab /Muslim refugees who mocked them by chanting “Allah u Akbar’’ or even attacked them. They had in many ways been deprived of much of the assistance going to the Arab /Muslim refugees as a result of their shyness and continued persecution. It was while working that it became obvious to Anne and her medical team, who she dubbed, “The Mosquitos” that the Yazidis needed special care and that is how Anne’s life was changed forever.

Anne and her then Yazidi counterpart and friend Shaker Jeffery became involved in the personal cases of Yazidis, realizing that they had the best of both worlds, Anne having all the contacts in Greece and Shaker all the Yazidi contacts. It was the perfect match. With this combination they were able to help cases, such as a young woman who urgently needed an eye operation to save her from certain blindness to finding emergency rescuers to help Yazidis petrified and surrounded by violent smugglers in Macedonia, to alerting the Greek coastguards when Yazidi boats were crossing the Mediterranean Sea and encountering difficulties.

Anne’s instinct to side with the underdog and to fight in their corner propelled her determination to defend these much persecuted people. Ultimately, this burning sense of mission drove her to Iraq itself where she and a trusted team of Yazidi key workers and doctors who joined with her to provide emergency support to the most vulnerable in any given situation. She soon became known throughout the Yazidi community as someone to be contacted in moments of need and remained available 24 hours a day online. She would utilize ‘Crowd funders’ on Facebook to raise money for desperate cases, providing emergency assistance, for ISIL survivors, orphans and medical cases.

When Anne made her way back home to Britain, to her self constructed home which she calls “The Shed” situated in a flower covered field near the cliffs of Penzance in remote Cornwall, England, she continued her work to assist Yazidis in obtaining passports, supporting survivors and orphans, providing access to medical treatments, and on occasion even helping to free one of the poor Yazidi girls trapped in ISIL slavery.

While Anne would make desperate pleas for help online and among her local community her mission to provide multifaceted assistance to a people that found itself scattered in refugee camps far from their home and facing extinction went largely unnoticed by an uncaring world that was more interested in things like Donald Trump’s latest Twitter storm or Kim Kardashian’s weight gain.

Operation Fayza: A Mission to Free One Slave

The mission to free Fayza actually began in May of this year when I was carrying out fieldwork in Bosnia for the defense in a Federal terrorism case. It was at this time that Christopher Natola, one of my brightest students who had assisted me in writing my book Counter Jihad, suggested that I actually go to scenic Cornwall, England to meet Anne while I was in Europe. Spurred on by his words, I took a flight from Sarajevo to London (sadly arriving on the night of the terrorist attack on the pop concert in Manchester) and took a wonderful five hour train ride across England, down to the cliff side town of Penzance to meet the woman who so fascinated me.

I was welcomed at the train station overlooking a scenic bay and was driven by Anne to the famous “Shed” in her amazing garden. For a few days I did an “embed” with Anne and got to see her in action. Living with Anne was like being in the center of a one person global enterprise that saw her communicating via Facebook with Yazidis who had found asylum in Germany, members of her network in Iraqi Kurdistan trying to free a sex slave, hosting fundraisers in her local community, and in between taking time to tell me personal stories and showing me pictures of all of the Yazidis her and her network of “Mosquitos” ( As her team were called in their secret Facebook group) had helped.

Anne did all of this while single handedly raising a wonderful son and working as a nurse in a doctors surgery. I was in awe of her. Anne, a single English mother was making a difference in a world dominated by war, fanaticism, cynicism and apathy. Her story was almost Hollywoodesque in its beauty. Anne demonstrated that nothing is impossible, that one person can make a tremendous difference.

I flew home back to Boston inspired to tell her story and it was at this time that the now famous text message arrived, “We have a girl named Fayza, her ISIL captor is asking 17,000 dollars for her release or she will disappear into the burning black hole that is Mosul, Iraq.”

We needed money and we needed to get it to a smuggler, who would take most of the profits for going into the heart of darkness, to evacuate Fayza out of besieged Mosul. I was deeply touched by the fact that a young Yazidi girl who had the chance to be liberated had the same name as my former wife Feyza. I lost no time in contacting Feyza and she instantly offered her support to our cause. Together we collected funds to assist and with Feyza’s blessing and prayers for protection, I decided to join Anne and her team which included; K.P. a Canadian Sikh optometrist, Juliet an English woman from Devon and Baderkhan and Khairi, Yazidi friends and members of The Mosquitos.

In early June I flew from Boston to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan with the raised funds. There I reunited with Anne, who by now I had dubbed the “Angel of Sinjar” (Sinjar being the Yazidi’s sacred mountain). With Baderkhan and Khairi as our local guides, we drove northward parallel to the frontlines of the ongoing war with ISIL towards the northern town of Duhok. As Anne’s contact kept us updated by the hour, we waited anxiously to see if the money we delivered would actually free Fayza and reunite her with her family.

While we waited for news in 110 degree heat we visited various Yazidi refugee camps where we met with girls who had been recently liberated from slavery. There I watched as Anne, Juliet, and K.P. gave each girl several hundred dollars (A small fortune for these, the poorest and most traumatized of refugees who had returned from slavery with only the clothes on their backs).

Apart from those whom we met who had literally just escaped captivity, Anne knew all of her cases and their families intimately and was greeted with hugs and tears as she met with one Yazidi woman who had the sad fate of having lost her husband to ISIL and had suffered for 3 years with a prolapsed/herniated disc in her back with 11 children to care for and no way of making a living stuck in a tented camp in Kurdistan. Anne and her team went from tent to tent reuniting with people who had become well known to them. In the process, money was given to a woman who needed surgery, toys were given to children of a former ISIL slave, Anne met with UN High Commission for Refugees representatives to discuss a Canadian resettlement program and we all awaited anxiously for word on Fayza.

Then came the news we had been waiting for; the smuggler sent a triumphant cell phone photo of himself driving Fayza, who we had only seen in ISIL photographs nervously wearing a headscarf, being driven from Mosul to her parents in the refugee camp. At the last minute, the ISIL captor had lowered his demands and we had rescued Fayza from certain death in Mosul and reunited her with her family.

Anne Norona

The images of Fayza being embraced by her weeping father and her mother were for me in many ways a rare image of joy in a land defined by death, misery, fanaticism and slavery. Our team did not probe Fayza on her personal details or the horrors she experienced, it was not our place to do so. Sadly, there is rarely consistent psychological counselling for Yazidi girls or child soldiers freed from ISIL. Depression and post traumatic stress syndrome are sadly extremely common. We knew that their lives had been shattered and picking up the pieces would take many years, but we all took consolation in the fact that our small group had made a difference. One beautiful young Yazidi girl now had something that so many other sex slaves did not have, freedom and a chance to live her life. Although Fayza is now out of the reach of her ISIL tormentors, her future is still vaguely uncertain as she is living in tent 16 of the Chem Misko refugee camp amongst tens of thousands of fellow refugees in the town of Zacho. While it is difficult to know what sort of demons, nightmares or PTSD Fayza is suffering from, I took some consolation from the last imagine I saw of Anne enveloping Fayza in her loving arms and saving one more of her “Children”.

I am now safely back in Boston once more, and I guess some of my own demons and sense of guilt that long haunted me have been exorcised by the freeing of just one fourteen year old girl from the horrors of slavery at the hands of brutal terrorists. But I, like Anne, have been touched to my soul by the plight of the Yazidis, and particularly of those young girls still languishing in captivity. I cannot help but wonder how much more we Americans or Europeans would care if we had saved one American or British girl from slavery.

It is the images of Fayza sitting in Anne’s arms smiling at the camera, still in shock, that inspire me now to make this plea. If you have long felt that you cannot make a difference in the world, overcome your apathy and doubt in order to believe that you can. And you can start by reaching out to Anne and assisting her in her mission through funds, online activism, or who knows perhaps traveling to the wind swept deserts of sun blasted Northern Iraq to help one determined English woman save Yazidis… one person at a time.

To assist Anne please be sure to visit the following Facebook group page –Y.E.S – Yazidi Emergency Support group.

Brian Glyn Williams Full Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and former lecturer at the University of London; http://www.brianglynwilliams.com

Christopher Natola Masters Degree in Education and currently studying for a Masters Degree in Homeland Security at Boston’s Northeastern University; https://twitter.com/Cnato14

We walked in a single file. Not because it was tactically sound. It wasn’t — at least according to standard infantry doctrine. Patrolling southern Afghanistan in column formation limited maneuverability, made it difficult to mass fire, and exposed us to enfilading machine-gun bursts. Still, in 2011, in the Pashmul District of Kandahar Province, single file was our best bet.

The reason was simple enough: improvised bombs not just along roads but seemingly everywhere.  Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Who knew?

That’s right, the local “Taliban” — a term so nebulous it’s basically lost all meaning — had managed to drastically alter U.S. Army tactics with crude, homemade explosives stored in plastic jugs. And believe me, this was a huge problem. Cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to bury, those anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, soon littered the “roads,” footpaths, and farmland surrounding our isolated outpost. To a greater extent than a number of commanders willingly admitted, the enemy had managed to nullify our many technological advantages for a few pennies on the dollar (or maybe, since we’re talking about the Pentagon, it was pennies on the millions of dollars).

Truth be told, it was never really about our high-tech gear.  Instead, American units came to rely on superior training and discipline, as well as initiative and maneuverability, to best their opponents.  And yet those deadly IEDs often seemed to even the score, being both difficult to detect and brutally effective. So there we were, after too many bloody lessons, meandering along in carnival-like, Pied Piper-style columns. Bomb-sniffing dogs often led the way, followed by a couple of soldiers carrying mine detectors, followed by a few explosives experts. Only then came the first foot soldiers, rifles at the ready. Anything else was, if not suicide, then at least grotesquely ill-advised.

And mind you, our improvised approach didn’t always work either. To those of us out there, each patrol felt like an ad hoc round of Russian roulette.  In that way, those IEDs completely changed how we operated, slowing movement, discouraging extra patrols, and distancing us from what was then considered the ultimate “prize”: the local villagers, or what was left of them anyway.  In a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign, which is what the U.S. military was running in Afghanistan in those years, that was the definition of defeat.

Strategic Problems in Microcosm

My own unit faced a dilemma common to dozens — maybe hundreds — of other American units in Afghanistan. Every patrol was slow, cumbersome, and risky. The natural inclination, if you cared about your boys, was to do less. But effective COIN operations require securing territory and gaining the trust of the civilians living there. You simply can’t do that from inside a well-protected American base. One obvious option was to live in the villages — which we eventually did — but that required dividing up the company into smaller groups and securing a second, third, maybe fourth location, which quickly became problematic, at least for my 82-man cavalry troop (when at full strength). And, of course, there were no less than five villages in my area of responsibility.

The author, plotting coordinates for an airstrike during an ambush in Pashmul, Afghanistan, 2011.

I realize, writing this now, that there’s no way I can make the situation sound quite as dicey as it actually was.  How, for instance, were we to “secure and empower” a village population that was, by then, all but nonexistent?  Years, even decades, of hard fighting, air strikes, and damaged crops had left many of those villages in that part of Kandahar Province little more than ghost towns, while cities elsewhere in the country teemed with uprooted and dissatisfied peasant refugees from the countryside.

Sometimes, it felt as if we were fighting over nothing more than a few dozen deserted mud huts.  And like it or not, such absurdity exemplified America’s war in Afghanistan.  It still does.  That was the view from the bottom.  Matters weren’t — and aren’t — measurably better at the top.  As easily as one reconnaissance troop could be derailed, so the entire enterprise, which rested on similarly shaky foundations, could be unsettled.

At a moment when the generals to whom President Trump recently delegated decision-making powers on U.S. troop strength in that country consider a new Afghan “surge,” it might be worth looking backward and zooming out just a bit. Remember, the very idea of “winning” the Afghan War, which left my unit in that collection of mud huts, rested (and still rests) on a few rather grandiose assumptions. 

The first of these surely is that the Afghans actually want (or ever wanted) us there; the second, that the country was and still is vital to our national security; and the third, that 10,000, 50,000, or even 100,000 foreign troops ever were or now could be capable of “pacifying” an insurgency, or rather a growing set of insurgencies, or securing 33 million souls, or facilitating a stable, representative government in a heterogeneous, mountainous, landlocked country with little history of democracy.

The first of these points is at least debatable. As you might imagine, any kind of accurate polling is quite difficult, if not impossible, outside the few major population centers in that isolated country.  Though many Afghans, particularly urban ones, may favor a continued U.S. military presence, others clearly wonder what good a new influx of foreigners will do in their endlessly war-torn nation.  As one high-ranking Afghan official recently lamented, thinking undoubtedly of the first use in his land of the largest non-nuclear bomb on the planet, “Is the plan just to use our country as a testing ground for bombs?” And keep in mind that the striking rise in territory the Taliban now controls, the most since they were driven from power in 2001, suggests that the U.S. presence is hardly welcomed everywhere.

The second assumption is far more difficult to argue or justify.  To say the least, classifying a war in far-away Afghanistan as “vital” relies on a rather pliable definition of the term.  If that passes muster — if bolstering the Afghan military to the tune of (at least) tens of billions of dollars annually and thousands of new boots-on-the-ground in order to deny safe haven to “terrorists” is truly “vital” — then logically the current U.S. presences in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen are critical as well and should be similarly fortified.  And what about the growing terror groups in Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Tunisia, and so on?  We’re talking about a truly expensive proposition here — in blood and treasure.  But is it true?  Rational analysis suggests it is not.  After all, on average about seven Americans were killed by Islamist terrorists on U.S. soil annually from 2005 to 2015.  That puts terrorism deaths right up there with shark attacks and lightning strikes.  The fear is real, the actual danger… less so.

As for the third point, it’s simply preposterous. One look at U.S. military attempts at “nation-building” or post-conflict stabilization and pacification in Iraq, Libya, or — dare I say — Syria should settle the issue. It’s often said that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Yet here we are, 14 years after the folly of invading Iraq and many of the same voices — inside and outside the administration — are clamoring for one more “surge” in Afghanistan (and, of course, will be clamoring for the predictable surges to follow across the Greater Middle East).

The very idea that the U.S. military had the ability to usher in a secure Afghanistan is grounded in a number of preconditions that proved to be little more than fantasies.  First, there would have to be a capable, reasonably corruption-free local governing partner and military.  That’s a nonstarter.  Afghanistan’s corrupt, unpopular national unity government is little better than the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam in the 1960s and that American war didn’t turn out so well, did it?  Then there’s the question of longevity.  When it comes to the U.S. military presence there, soon to head into its 16th year, how long is long enough?  Several mainstream voices, including former Afghan commander General David Petraeus, are now talking about at least a “generation” more to successfully pacify Afghanistan.  Is that really feasible given America’s growing resource constraints and the ever expanding set of dangerous “ungoverned spaces” worldwide?

And what could a new surge actually do?  The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is essentially a fragmented series of self-contained bases, each of which needs to be supplied and secured.  In a country of its size, with a limited transportation infrastructure, even the 4,000-5,000 extra troops the Pentagon is reportedly considering sending right now won’t go very far. 

Now, zoom out again.  Apply the same calculus to the U.S. position across the Greater Middle East and you face what we might start calling the Afghan paradox, or my own quandary safeguarding five villages with only 82 men writ large.  Do the math.  The U.S. military is already struggling to keep up with its commitments.  At what point is Washington simply spinning its proverbial wheels?  I’ll tell you when — yesterday.

Now, think about those three questionable Afghan assumptions and one uncomfortable actuality leaps forth. The only guiding force left in the American strategic arsenal is inertia.

What Surge 4.0 Won’t Do — I Promise…

Remember something: this won’t be America’s first Afghan “surge.”  Or its second, or even its third.  No, this will be the U.S. military’s fourth crack at it.  Who feels lucky?  First came President George W. Bush’s “quiet” surge back in 2008.  Next, just one month into his first term, newly minted President Barack Obama sent 17,000 more troops to fight his so-called good war (unlike the bad one in Iraq) in southern Afghanistan.  After a testy strategic review, he then committed 30,000 additional soldiers to the “real” surge a year later.  That’s what brought me (and the rest of B Troop, 4-4 Cavalry) to Pashmul district in 2011.  We left — most of us — more than five years ago, but of course about 8,800 American military personnel remain today and they are the basis for the surge to come.

To be fair, Surge 4.0 might initially deliver certain modest gains (just as each of the other three did in their day).  Realistically, more trainers, air support, and logistics personnel could indeed stabilize some Afghan military units for some limited amount of time.  Sixteen years into the conflict, with 10% as many American troops on the ground as at the war’s peak, and after a decade-plus of training, Afghan security forces are still being battered by the insurgents.  In the last years, they’ve been experiencing record casualties, along with the usual massive stream of desertions and the legions of “ghost soldiers” who can neither die nor desert because they don’t exist, although their salaries do (in the pockets of their commanders or other lucky Afghans).  And that’s earned them a “stalemate,” which has left the Taliban and other insurgent groups in control of a significant part of the country.  And if all goes well (which isn’t exactly a surefire thing), that’s likely to be the best that Surge 4.0 can produce: a long, painful tie.

Peel back the onion’s layers just a bit more and the ostensible reasons for America’s Afghan War vanish along with all the explanatory smoke and mirrors. After all, there are two things the upcoming “mini-surge” will emphatically not do:

*It won’t change a failing strategic formula.

Imagine that formula this way: American trainers + Afghan soldiers + loads of cash + (unspecified) time = a stable Afghan government and lessening Taliban influence.

It hasn’t worked yet, of course, but — so the surge-believers assure us — that’s because we need more: more troops, more money, more time.  Like so many loyal Reaganites, their answers are always supply-side ones and none of them ever seems to wonder whether, almost 16 years later, the formula itself might not be fatally flawed.

According to news reports, no solution being considered by the current administration will even deal with the following interlocking set of problems: Afghanistan is a large, mountainous, landlocked, ethno-religiously heterogeneous, poor country led by a deeply corrupt government with a deeply corrupt military.  In a place long known as a “graveyard of empires,” the United States military and the Afghan Security Forces continue to wage what one eminent historian has termed “fortified compound warfare.”  Essentially, Washington and its local allies continue to grapple with relatively conventional threats from exceedingly mobile Taliban fighters across a porous border with Pakistan, a country that has offered not-so-furtive support and a safe haven for those adversaries.  And the Washington response to this has largely been to lock its soldiers inside those fortified compounds (and focus on protecting them against “insider attacks” by those Afghans it works with and trains).  It hasn’t worked.  It can’t.  It won’t. 

Consider an analogous example.  In Vietnam, the United States never solved the double conundrum of enemy safe havens and a futile search for legitimacy.  The Vietcong guerillas and North Vietnamese Army used nearby Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to rest, refit, and replenish.  U.S. troops meanwhile lacked legitimacy because their corrupt South Vietnamese partners lacked it.

Sound familiar?  We face the same two problems in Afghanistan: a Pakistani safe haven and a corrupt, unpopular central government in Kabul.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, in any future troop surge will effectively change that.

*It won’t pass the logical fallacy test.

The minute you really think about it, the whole argument for a surge or mini-surge instantly slides down a philosophical slippery slope.

If the war is really about denying terrorists safe havens in ungoverned or poorly governed territory, then why not surge more troops into Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan (where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin-Laden are believed to be safely ensconced), Iraq, Syria, Chechnya, Dagestan (where one of the Boston Marathon bombers was radicalized), or for that matter Paris or London.  Every one of those places has harbored and/or is harboring terrorists.  Maybe instead of surging yet again in Afghanistan or elsewhere, the real answer is to begin to realize that all the U.S. military in its present mode of operation can do to change that reality is make it worse.  After all, the last 15 years offer a vision of how it continually surges and in the process only creates yet more ungovernable lands and territories. 

So much of the effort, now as in previous years, rests on an evident desire among military and political types in Washington to wage the war they know, the one their army is built for: battles for terrain, fights that can be tracked and measured on maps, the sort of stuff that staff officers (like me) can display on ever more-complicated PowerPoint slides.  Military men and traditional policymakers are far less comfortable with ideological warfare, the sort of contest where their instinctual proclivity to “do something” is often counterproductive.

As U.S. Army Field Manual 3-24 — General David Petraeus’ highly touted counterinsurgency “bible” — wisely opined: “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.”  It’s high time to follow such advice (even if it’s not the advice that Petraeus himself is offering anymore).

As for me, call me a deep-dyed skeptic when it comes to what 4,000 or 5,000 more U.S. troops can do to secure or stabilize a country where most of the village elders I met couldn’t tell you how old they were.  A little foreign policy humility goes a long way toward not heading down that slippery slope.  Why, then, do Americans continue to deceive themselves?  Why do they continue to believe that even 100,000 boys from Indiana and Alabama could alter Afghan society in a way Washington would like?  Or any other foreign land for that matter?

I suppose some generals and policymakers are just plain gamblers.  But before putting your money on the next Afghan surge, it might be worth flashing back to the limitations, struggles, and sacrifices of just one small unit in one tiny, contested district of southern Afghanistan in 2011…

Lonely Pashmul

So, on we walked — single file, step by treacherous step — for nearly a year.  Most days things worked out.  Until they didn’t.  Unfortunately, some soldiers found bombs the hard way: three dead, dozens wounded, one triple amputee.  So it went and so we kept on going.  Always onward. Ever forward. For America? Afghanistan? Each other? No matter.  And so it seems other Americans will keep on going in 2017, 2018, 2019…

Lift foot. Hold breath. Step. Exhale.

Keep walking… to defeat… but together.

Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Danny Sjursen

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

AP: ” Afghan soldier wounds 7 US troops in camp attack”

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – When Saudi Arabia – which has been spearheading a coalition of Arab states in a devastating war against Yemen since 2015 – was accused of bombing civilians, and particularly children caught up in the conflict, the government in Riyadh threatened to cut off humanitarian funding to the world body.

As a result of the looming threat, Saudi Arabia was de-listed from the “offending” annex to a UN report last year, by then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, largely in order to appease the Saudis.

But the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein of Jordan, with close links to the Jordanian royal family, has cited a report that nine Arab states – the Saudi coalition fighting the Houthi/Saleh rebels in Yemen – made the “unprecedented threat of a withdrawal from the UN if they were listed as perpetrators in the annex of the Secretary General’s report on children and armed conflict.”

The new revelation by Zeid– a former Jordanian Permanent Representative to the United Nations and a former Ambassador to the United States – has shed new light on a hitherto unknown threat by the Arab coalition, coordinated perhaps by the Saudis.

Besides Saudi Arabia, the nine-member Arab coalition includes Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Kuwait and Qatar (whose role in the coalition has been suspended since the emergence of a new crisis among Gulf nations early this month).

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics & Coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS “this threat by Saudi Arabia and its allies may indeed be unprecedented. Personally, I say call their bluff.”

“It’s important to stick to principle, particularly in regard to international humanitarian law. The reason more countries haven’t actually withdrawn is that they recognize that being part of the United Nations is on balance to their advantage, so it would be their loss and they would eventually return,” declared Zunes.

He said that “countries have threatened, and at times actually pulled out of certain US committees and agencies in protest, but pulling out of the UN itself is almost unprecedented.”

He pointed out that Indonesia pulled out of the UN in January 1965 in protest of Malaysia being elected to the Security Council, but resumed participation after the coup later that year.

Technically, there are no provisions for withdrawal, so the President of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) simply referred to it as a “cessation of cooperation” and allowed for Indonesia’s return with little fanfare, said Zunes whose areas of specialization include the United Nations and the Security Council.

He said some right-wing elements in Israel and the United States have threatened to pull out over criticisms of Israel and there are periodic attempts by Republicans for a pullout (currently there is an “American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2017” (H.R. 193) introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers, but won’t be going very far.)”

In a statement last year, Amnesty International (AI) said the credibility of the United Nations was on the line “after it shamefully caved in to pressure to remove the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition from the UN’s list of states and armed groups that violate children’s rights in conflict.”

The statement followed an announcement by the spokesperson for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon about the change to the list published as part of an annual report by his Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

“The move was a direct result of diplomatic pressure from Saudi Arabia, angry at the UN’s conclusion that coalition operations had led to the death and suffering of children in the armed conflict in Yemen”, AI said.

“It is unprecedented for the UN to bow to pressure to alter its own published report on children in armed conflict. It is unconscionable that this pressure was brought to bear by one of the very states listed in the report,” said Richard Bennett, Representative and Head of Amnesty International’s UN Office.

Speaking before the Law Society in London June 26, Zeid also said the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the Inter-American Court, the Southern African Development Court, and the International Criminal Court have also not been spared such threats.

“Fortunately, in almost all these cases, either the threat of withdrawal has fizzled out, or, even if one or two countries did withdraw, no chain reaction ensued. But the regularity of these threats means it is increasingly probable the haemorrhaging will occur someday – a walk-out which closes the book on some part of the system of international law,” he warned.

Martin S. Edwards, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, told IPS that even he had I’ve not heard of the threat, he would suspect that “this is going to get more common, not only with autocracies under duress, but with countries getting inspired by this White House’s maddening inconsistency with multilateralism.”

“I’m no expert on Saudi foreign policy, but I’d be surprised if it was actually couched in this way. After all, how can the Saudis speak for other countries? I’m sure the Saudi’s own threats to rethink any financial contributions would have been potent enough as it is,” said Edwards who monitors the politics of the United Nations.

Zeid also told the meeting in London that the US is weighing up the degree to which it will scale back its financial support to the UN and other multilateral institutions.

“It is still deciding whether it should withdraw from the Human Rights Council and there was even talk at one stage of it withdrawing from the core human rights instruments to which it is party,” he added.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Licensed from Inter Press Service

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Al Jazeera English: “Cholera cases in Yemen may rise up to 300,000 – UN”