If nothing else, the Wikileaks release of the Afghanistan War Diaries has had the positive effect of focusing public attention back of Afghanistan. Of course, there has increasing coverage this year, as the surge of troops ordered by President Obama last fall has been implemented. But the war there has not received nearly the coverage it deserves, given the intensified fighting and increased brittleness of American strategy and goals.

Let there be no mistake, the costs are high. The United States, as this Congressional Research Service report details will, most likely, suffer more killed and wounded this year, than in any year since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. As of July 12 that was 218 killed and 2000 wounded. In 2009, by comparison the numbers were 311 killed and 2,131 wounded. Total U.S. military deaths thus far from Oct. 11, 2001 are 1,154 and wounded is 6,773.

We should note that the deaths of at least 66 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen have made July the deadliest-ever month for American troops in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. The tally includes six American service members who died in four separate attacks in southern Afghanistan last Thursday and Friday.

One of the salutary effects of the Wikileaks documents is to illustrate the incoherent response of the federal government when it comes to dealing with the reality of its policies. As the Project On Government Oversight noted:

There is no doubt this episode also exposes the ridiculous problems created by the overclassification of government information. The Administration cannot have it both ways—they claimed that there was nothing important in the 92,000 documents, then also claimed that this was a terrible breach of national security. There is no doubt that the release produced a better-informed populace about one of our most important public policy issues, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. But at what cost?

This, by the way, is a realistic appraisal of Wikileaks, as opposed to the predictable hysteria from such rightwingers as Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute.

Maybe people think that much of this is moot; that come next year the U.S. will redeploy its troops back home from Afghanistan. If so, they should ponder this exchange from the interview that ABC’s This Week with Christine Amanpour did with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on August 1: (more…)

It has been nearly two months since I last wrote about the health of American military personnel and veterans so let’s look at it again. The news, unfortunately, isn’t any better.

First, let’s look at the past. Today the Los Angeles times reports that researchers have found that soldiers who suffered brain injuries can develop seizures decades — as long as 35 years — after the initial injury. A study published in the journal Neurology found that among a group of 199 Vietnam veterans, about 13% developed post-traumatic epilepsy more than 14 years after they had suffered a penetrating head wound, such as a gunshot injury or shrapnel that entered brain tissue. Penetrating head injuries are generally linked with a higher risk for epilepsy than other types of head injuries, such as concussions.

It is unclear how the study relates to combatants returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today, the authors said. The Vietnam veterans in the study suffered from penetrating brain injuries, which are rarer in soldiers fighting in the current conflicts because helmets have improved. Today, closed-head injuries (where the brain is not penetrated) are more common, in part because of the helmet improvements and partly because of a change in the weaponry used in modern warfare. (more…)

I was out of town when the kerfuffle about the article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine became public.

Now that I am back and have read the article I am amazed at how little it takes to get a general fired. I mean, for pity’s sake, this was not something on the order of Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur. It was not as if McChrystal was seriously criticizing Obama’s war strategy, like MacArthur did about Truman. How could he? This was the strategy, after all, that McChrystal had successfully persuaded Obama to sign off on and one that McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus has pledged to continue.  I venture to say one hears more venomous remarks around the average office water cooler than what I read in the article.

Contrary to what some in the media write this was not a sign of a “dysfunctional civilian-military relationship.” To me it is a sign of posturing on the part of President Obama and, perhaps, an attempt to burnish his hawk credibility, and to sweep under the rug, at least for a little bit longer that his Afghanistan strategy is not working. (more…)

With the dismissal of General McChrystal and the appointment of General Petraeus to lead the effort in Afghanistan, there has been much speculation about how this change might affect the conduct of the war.  There has been a consistent message from many American troops in Afghanistan – the rules of engagement are putting them at risk and they must be changed.  It is important that such concerns of the troops be examined.  They are bravely risking their lives every day.  However, at the same time, we must recognize that the broader principle of civilian protection will not change under Petraeus.  Because civilian protection is a key component of Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, if we were to toss this out the door, it would undermine the entire Afghan strategy.

This is not to say that the manner in which civilian protection is carried out shouldn’t be reviewed and modified.  I was encouraged by Petraeus’s comment today in his Senate hearing when he said,

….I am keenly aware of concerns by some of our troopers on the ground about the application of our rules of engagement and the tactical directive. They should know that I will look very hard at this issue. (more…)

In a room full of computer screens, a US civilian with a joystick on the console kills a man thousands of miles away. Having aced a course on drones with ferocious names like Reaper, Hunter, and Tigershark, he is competent to take down a target — a dangerous terrorist, a drug lord connected with the Taliban, a farmer planting IEDs, or, accidentally, an innocent civilian, as the drones are liable to targeting errors. The drones often save American lives and tax dollars at the expense of the lives of innocent civilians: just last month, an air strike mistake led to 23 civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

However, instead of addressing the targeting failures or keeping the drones in the combat zone, the United States sometimes dismisses problems by defining its enemies as “unlawful combatants” and keeping the drone operations secret. If Washington continues to excuse itself from the rule of law in this manner, the use of armed unmanned vehicles may create more problems than it solves.

Last week, a 29-page report to the United Nations Human Rights Council called on the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of drones outside of war zones because the use of drones undermined global constraints on the use of military force.  The report stressed that the drone technology is changing the rules of conflict and undermining the foundations of humanitarian behavior in war. Here are just some grounds on which the US use of drones could be challenged. (more…)

As Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Washington yesterday for a visit let’s look at Afghanistan. If Presidents Obama and Karzai were a couple they might well be seeing a marriage counselor. There has been much baggage between them in recent months. As diplomats might say, their relationship has been strained; what one might call tough love. Indeed, so much so that President Obama has instructed his national security team to treat Afghan President Hamid Karzai with more public respect. President Obama should remember the old military saying that respect can’t be ordered, only earned.

Just last month Karzai said in a meeting with Afghan lawmakers that he would consider joining the Taliban. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said some of Karzai’s comments were “troubling” and the White House would re-evaluate whether his trip to Washington would be constructive. Subsequently Karzai denied that he ever made the comments.

Officially, of course, things are getting better. According to the latest Congressionally mandated Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,  released April 28, stability  in Afghanistan is no longer on the decline, and most Afghans believe that despite increased violence, security actually has improved since this time last year.  (more…)

Two years after my discharge from the Navy in 1977 I was doing undergraduate work at the University of Oregon. While there I was a member of a campus veterans group. We did a lot of advocacy on behalf of Vietnam and Vietnam era veterans, on issues that back then were still unknown, such as Agent Orange exposure and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

One thing I took away from that was that while most people were happy to talk about the sacrifices of veterans it was, in the end, mostly talk. When it came to actually doing something or putting their money where their mouth was, most people, rather like Dick Cheney’s famous excuse for avoiding the draft, had better things to do.  In short, as the classic mordant military humor puts it, nothing is too good for our boys in uniform so that’s what we’ll give them, nothing.  (more…)

Increasingly one can’t go a day without reading more news about private military and security contractors. Actually, private military and security contractors (PMSC), a catch all phrase encompassing, broadly speaking, two categories – logistics workers and armed guards – is a bit of a misnomer, as in the United States context it generally refers to just those working under State or Defense Department contracts. But that excludes contractors working for the intelligence community, or Department of Homeland Security or numerous other departments and agencies. But for the sake of convenience, as it is such a widely sued and recognized phrase, I’ll continue to use it.

Whether one likes the idea of using PMSC or not the inescapable fact is that U.S. reliance on them has grown so much in the past few decades that trying to stop using them is literally impossible. They are now far too intertwined with the clients they work for to be removed. To attempt to do so would like the scene in the first Alien movie, where the crew of the Nostradamus attempt to remove the Alien creature from Executive Officer Kane after it attaches itself to its face.  And no, I’m not saying that PMCS are parasites.

But until that magical day comes when the country actually has a serious soul-searching discussion on whether it is in the U.S. interest to maintain a global military presence contractors are here to stay.  Put another way, to paraphrase the classic Spencer Tracy movie, it’s a mad, mad, contracting world now.

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This is my last post for 2009 I thought I would write about Afghanistan but on second thought I will, no doubt, be doing that quite a lot during 2010. Thanks to the Obama Administration’s surge strategy Afghanistan will, from a blogging viewpoint, be the gift that keeps on giving.

So, as we contemplate whether 2010 will be better or worse let’s take a moment to consider 2009. In the spirit of Dave Barry’s classic annual year in review column let’s acknowledge, albeit with some poetic license commentary by moi, a few of the significant events that made, however briefly, the headlines.

Although it started on Dec. 28 2008 the month of January saw massive Israeli air strikes and a ground force invasion of the Gaza Strip. Heavy fighting took place in Gaza City between the Israeli forces and Hamas. At least 1300 Palestinians were killed. On Jan. 17 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced a unilateral ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, declaring that Israel has achieved the goals it set when launching the military operation. On Jan. 21 Israel completes its troop withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Also that month President Barack Obama signed executive orders closing the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year; closing the CIA’s secret prisons; requiring a review of military trials for terror suspects; and requiring all interrogations to follow the non-coercive methods specified in the Army Field Manual.

Of course, nobody knew back then that the camp would end up in Illinois. One can only hope that the inmates are not too acclimated to the Caribbean climate to adjust to a midwest winter.

On Jan 27 Hama declared that it previously was just kidding and broke the ceasefire by attacking an Israeli frontier patrol. Israel immediately responded that it lacks a sense of humor and renewed its air strikes on the Gaza Strip border with Egypt.

On Feb. 3 Iran launched its first domestically built satellite into orbit. Iran stated that the satellite is meant for research and telecommunications purposes, but Western states express concern that the technology could be used in the development of ballistic missiles. The U.S. intelligence community, estimating that Iran will show the same swift progress with its missiles that it did with its nuclear program, predicted the next flight will be in 2040.

On Feb. 6, renewing their classic rivalry, a British and a French nuclear submarine collided in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Political leaders from both countries sighed in relief that it was merely submarines and not their respective football fans that collided. (more…)

President Obama has now presented the nation with a sober, solemn assessment in explaining the need for an additional 30,000 troops for Afghanistan: Al Qaeda remain in “common cause” with the Taliban; they have metastasized into Pakistan; they have again infiltrated our shores.  Answering those who have grown complacent, the President reminded America that “this is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat.”

Yet many are unconvinced.  Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), for instance, responded to the President’s address that more troops would not make America more secure because ”Al Qaeda can go any place. They don’t have to be in Afghanistan.”   Senator John Kerry stated that many members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chairs, “either don’t see the nexus or don’t accept” that al Qaeda and the Taliban remain in league with one another.

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