Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 488

Russia Wields the Kurdish Weapon

An incoherent American strategy is allowing Putin’s Russia to drive wedges into American alliances and disrupt what little strategy the U.S. has left in Syria. The latest example: Russia’s clever move to back the Syrian Kurds—key allies in what passes for America’s anti-ISIS strategy—against the Turks, America’s NATO allies and the keystone of any serious policy to restore order to Syria without the use of American troops.

As the Turks pound the Syrian Kurds and the Syrian Kurds turn to Russia for help, the last fig leaf drops away from the pretense that the United States has a strategy against ISIS. If President Obama sits back as the Russians humiliate the Turks and perhaps drive them into a greater intervention against the Kurds in Syria, he will watch as Putin shreds what is left of the U.S.-Turkish alliance that has been a bedrock of stability in the region since the Truman Administration.The root of the problem is, as always in Syria, the inability of the Obama White House to define a realistic objective, and then to set about assembling the means to achieve it. An alarmed and enraged public opinion in the U.S. and Europe forced a reluctant White House to “do something” about ISIS. Given that the White House wanted to do this if possible without U.S. troops, that meant relying on local allies was the only way forward. The most obvious and potentially effective local allies would have been non-ISIS Sunnis, including the Turks, but their price for real cooperation against ISIS is and remains an effective U.S. commitment to deal with Assad. The Obama team has responded with a series of brave sounding but vacuous phrases about Assad needing to go, but any serious anti-Assad policy has been off the table. This is partly, it appears, because the White House simply didn’t want to add to its “to do” list in what is already an ugly and dicey situation, and partly because it fears being drawn into a conflict with Assad’s backers and enablers in Iran. The cornerstone of what the White House wants to think of as its Middle East policy is a move toward a rapprochement with Iran; it could hardly launch a proxy war against Tehran even as it lifted sanctions, giving Iran tens of billions of extra dollars to kill the very proxies it was sending into battle.So Obama has been unwilling to pay the basic price the Sunni Arabs want. With effective cooperation with Sunni Arabs impossible, Obama was left with the Shia forces aligned with Iran in Iraq, and in Syria he has the Kurds, a group who in self-defense is willing to fight ISIS. They’ve done pretty well, but the Syrian Kurds aren’t content to be sacrificial pawns in order to let the Obama White House look good. They intend, and have always intended, to use this opportunity to create an autonomous homeland for themselves like their cousins have carved out in Iraq. There is no way they aren’t going to look at the situation this way; as the Syrian Kurds see things, this is literally a matter of life and death—given what Assad would do to them if he succeeds in regaining control.But an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria is a deadly threat to Turkey’s own peace and stability. The Kurds in Syria are close—both geographically and politically—to the Kurds in Turkey, and there is no way to keep weapons and fighters on the Syrian side of the border. Moreover, given the geography in Syria, there is no way that a Syrian Kurdish region won’t involve Kurds pushing back against Sunni Arabs in areas of mixed population. (Though there are currently many such areas, there will be fewer as the war grinds on, and occasional episodes of mass murder and ethnic cleansing on both sides sort the region’s peoples into more homogenous units.) That’s not just a problem for Turks; it’s a problem for what’s left of the anti-Assad, anti-ISIS Sunni Arab forces in northern Syria, and their backers and paymasters in Ankara and the Gulf.Given all that, Putin doesn’t have to be a strategic genius to understand that simply by giving the Kurds some backing he can disrupt American alliances and inflect yet another of the serial humiliations that have marked his interactions with a dazed and confused White House ever since the war in Ukraine began. Worse—or, from the Kremlin’s point of view, better—Putin can reduce what’s left of America’s Syria policy into utter incoherence and strategic collapse. (Signs of Putin’s emerging strategy were evident as early as October, when a group of Syrian Kurds visited Moscow and announced plans to open a permanent mission there in order to foster cooperation with the Kremlin. The mission officially opened last week.)With refugees destabilizing the European Union, the Turks writing off the value of NATO, the Kurds considering a shift to Russia rather than the U.S., ISIS quietly rejoicing as its enemies turn against one another, the Sunni Gulf powers taking more risks and increasing their distance from the U.S., the situation in the Middle East is growing more dire and more dangerous by the week.Obama may not yet realize it, but if events continue on their current trajectory in Syria and the wider Middle East, the foreign policy concepts he holds most dear are likely to be discredited for decades to come as the consequences of strategic incoherence grow and the costs of failure mount. The President’s lack of strategic clarity and paralysis in the face of unpleasant choices has exposed him to extraordinary humiliation. Allies and enemies alike now consider him inconsequential. Putin and others see the opportunity not only to bully Obama and make him look even weaker; they believe that the remaining months of his term offer a golden opportunity to further weaken the strategic underpinnings of American power.Fortunately for President Obama’s short-term peace of mind, but tragically from the standpoint of Middle East peace, the plight of the Syrians and the President’s historical standing, the press is sticking to its standard “don’t connect the dots” approach when it comes to reporting on President Obama’s failures in office. That is, the mainstream, instinctively pro-Democratic media is reporting on the unfolding disaster in Syria as it must, but it isn’t doing to Obama’s Middle East failures what it did to George W. Bush’s. That is, while a growing number of well-respected reporters are becoming increasingly concerned by the evidence of strategic collapse, the press as a whole isn’t building up and relentlessly hammering home a picture of comprehensive strategic and policy failure and aggressively blaming the White House for the consequences of its fumbles. The White House isn’t facing the kind of national uproar a GOP president would face in a comparable situation of strategic meltdown, and so the President and the small clique of ultra-loyal aides who have gathered around him in the twilight of the second term can continue to shield themselves from the full awareness of the trouble they are in.That is too bad. If the White House faced the firestorm of criticism that its Syria policy deserves, there would be a better chance for the kind of reappraisal and regrouping that America’s Middle East policy so desperately needs. During his last year in office, Jimmy Carter reversed course on the Soviet Union after the Afghanistan invasion revealed the false premises on which his global strategy had rested; this was a painful decision to make but it was good for the country and good for his legacy. President George W. Bush also changed direction in his second term. That does not, yet, seem to be in the cards for President Obama; as a result the country he leads, those who depend on American success and his own historical standing continue to take heavy damage.

Ukrainian Government on the Ropes?

Ukraine’s government took another hit today when a senior prosecutor resigned because he believed the government had become too corrupt. Reuters:

The resignation, the second exit of a Western-backed reformer in under a fortnight, came a day before a possible no confidence vote in parliament that could topple Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk and lead to a snap election.

Failure to tackle endemic corruption has derailed a $40 billion aid program that keeps the war-torn country afloat. If Yatseniuk falls, it would further delay negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for the next tranche of money, $1.7 billion, which has been on hold since October.“Today, the General Prosecutor’s office is a brake on the reform of criminal justice, a hotbed of corruption, an instrument of political pressure, one of the key obstacles to the arrival of foreign investment in Ukraine,” Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko said in a televised statement.

When Vice President Joe Biden visited Kyiv in early December, he pleaded for the members of the ruling coalition to put aside their differences and work together. A few days later, a brawl erupted when a member of President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc tried to take Prime Minister Yatsenyuk away from the speaker’s podium by firmly grasping him by the crotch.

Though the government managed to pull together before the end of the month to pass a budget and a package of tax code reforms, dysfunction quickly set in again in the new year. Ten days ago, one of Ukraine’s most-respected reformists, Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius, resigned because of his concerns about unchecked corruption at the highest levels of government. After the resignation of Abromavicius, the IMF’s Christina Lagarde warned that it was “hard to see how the IMF-supported program can continue and be successful.”But the downfall of certain factions is an opportunity for others. Former Georgian President and current Governor of Odessa Mikheil Saakashvili clearly has his eyes on the Prime Ministership, and is trying to pull together a new reformist coalition made up of disillusioned activists from both the Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk camps in anticipation of early elections. Longtime Ukraine-watchers like Adrian Karatnycky, most likely reflecting attitudes within the Obama Administration, are troubled by the prospect of the mercurial Saakashvili ascending to power in Kyiv. And former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko was in Washington earlier this month, saying that she would be pushing for early parliamentary elections—”the sooner the better.” Trying to stake out a firm nationalist line, she said that she and her allies in parliament would oppose any constitutional changes mandated by the Minsk accords with Russia.During his December trip, Biden warned that the Maidan-inspired “Revolution of Dignity” was in danger of collapsing, not unlike how the Orange Revolution fizzled more than a decade ago amid oligarch tussles and dirty dealings. “The only thing worse than having no hope at all is having hopes rise and see them dashed repeatedly on the shoals of corruption,” Biden said. These snap elections, if they come to pass, may not necessarily lead to worse outcomes down the line. But they most certainly mean more instability for Ukraine in the immediate term, which can be nothing but unwelcome news for a struggling White House staff trying to grind out its last year in office.

Sometimes the Bad News is Also Good

Israel’s former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, starts a 19 month jail sentence today. The Washington Post reports:

Olmert is the first Israeli prime minister to spend time behind bars, a fact that commentators here acknowledged with a mix of both pride and shame.

Pride that the Israeli justice system in this case was both robust and impartial, that even the rich and powerful can be held to account. And shame that an internationally known Israeli leader could be exposed as a dirty politician who not only solicited bribes, but conspired to obstruct justice.Olmert was found guilty in March 2014 of taking money from real estate developers to build a massive luxury apartment complex in Jerusalem, called Holyland, when he was mayor of the city.[..]In a separate case, Olmert was also convicted of accepting campaign contributions from American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky in exchange for political favors when he was mayor.

This news is a useful reminder that Israel, with all of its problems and flaws, remains a country with a vigorous democracy, an independent judiciary, and a place where even the most powerful politicians are accountable to the law.

With the chaos in Syria to its north, and the repression in Egypt to the south, Israel looks more than ever like an island of calm in a stormy region. As its neighbors rip themselves to shreds in sectarian war and fanatical terror campaigns, Israel continues to be a global leader in tech innovation and continues to integrate immigrants in a way that much of Europe can only envy.Israel shares some of the problems of its neighbors. Israeli society is polarized between deeply religious and militantly secular groups. Ethnic tensions—between Jews and Palestinians, but also among Jews from such different places and cultures as Yemen, Ethiopia, and Russia—divide Israeli society. The dangerous regional climate forces the country to spend heavily on defense. The economy is dangerously exposed to a world system in turmoil.Yet unlike its neighbors, Israel somehow works. The Jews, most of whom arrived as penniless refugees and shell shocked survivors of persecution (whether from Europe or the Middle East), somehow managed to build a modern state, a successful economy and a national identity. Israel is one of the most successful postcolonial societies in the world; while its shortcomings deserve continued scrutiny and criticism, its successes and accomplishments should also be studied.

A Maine Childhood, Twice Told

“I was ten years old, a chubby little girl with a round face and two long braids of brown hair,” Helen V. Taylor writes in the opening chapter of her 1963 memoir A Time to Recall. The innocence of Taylor’s child-voice narration and her description of a horse and packed cart bring to mind Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie more than Pigs Can’t Swim, my own childhood memoir of growing up in Maine. Automobile-empty roads, undeveloped fields, woods, daily adventures of rowing around the lake, picking berries, swimming, sleeping in the hayloft, and climbing mountains all speak of a time that really seems like it was a pleasure for Taylor to recall, a time when the way of life in Maine was the way life should be: childhood, at its most idyllic.

Indeed, A Time to Recall shares with Wilder’s Little House memoiristic series the purity of a childhood unruffled by trauma, but very much ruffled with an unspoken certainty that the world is safe. My memoir shares few similarities with Taylor’s other than our first names and the state we grew up in. For her, an adults-are-always-right dictum reigns, and there is always a treat of “brown, crispy fried, salt pork”; for me, an adults-are-always-mixed-up dictum reigns, and there always seems to be a dead animal that was once my friend in the mind’s-eye picture. Even so, I recognize myself in her narrative now and again, and despite the differences in our times and circumstances, I feel a kinship with her all the same. Maybe it’s because, then and now, the men in a female child’s life go missing in one way or another.I could never have been described as chubby when I was a child, having little to eat after I learned that meat could be the cows I had sat with a week or so before in the pasture, or my rabbits that my father insisted with a grin were surely not the ones missing from the rabbit pen. I did have a round face—round, I suspected then, because my mother pinched my cheeks often in reprimand. And I sometimes had two longish braids of a dirty blond shade, the dirty more from the condition of my hardscrabble life than from my hair’s actual color.Helen and I are both eager to exit our houses at the opening of our stories. She is excited to leave her city home to begin a summer vacation in Waterboro, “I was happy to be leaving the red brick house on the quiet street in Saco. I was going to the country where a lake, a gentle mountain, and a big sunny house were waiting for me.” Her Saco home, the reader can with a bit of research, was on North Street in Saco. It was owned by her grandfather, Benjamin Leavitt, a prosperous merchant who also owned the summer residence in Waterboro Center where they vacationed. The Waterboro house was built by Benjamin’s father James in 1850; James bought farm produce locally and shipped it to Portland and Boston with much success. My summer and winter country residence was built in 1790 not by a savvy businessman, but likely by a dirt poor farmer who lived on the nearly impassable Cleaves Road with other dirt poor farmers, all of whom died with poor children, leaving their bones and the bones of some of their young descendants in a poor cemetery. All that remained was their poor homes, built into in rocky foundations loved by snakes and no one else. My memoir begins when I am leaving this chunk of ghost-filled Auburn, Maine, real estate for a brief vacation to a relative’s lake camp south of Waterboro:

On this day the car took us away from pulling weeds, shoveling manure, shelling peas, scraping corncobs, and mowing yards and took us toward rowing, floating on inner tubes, and swimming in the lake. But the most important things we left at home were tirades on how hateful and disagreeable we could be…. At my aunt’s camp my parents would laugh, play Spades and Hearts, swim and fish….

Ironically, almost as if the universe runs parallel and linear simultaneously, Taylor’s crammed buggy is similar to our crammed station wagon. She and her family head into Waterboro over the dirt-packed roads, robes over their legs to protect them from the discomfort of a breeze, while mine and my siblings’ bare legs stick to the burning vinyl car seats, our father ordering us to knock off the whining so he can hear to drive. Where Taylor’s family took four and half hours to be pulled from their winter to their summer home by an old horse named Nellie, it took us just over two hours as we stopped to steal a piglet in Taylor’s beloved Waterboro Center, and my brothers, used to stealing but not to thinking, named the baby porker after the town and then bragged to everyone they met about their free pig, Waterboro.

Helen Taylor’s father passed away when she was just seven, prior to the time-line of her memoir, and, although the reader understands there must be grief and stress in this event, it is not felt, likely because Taylor had only vague memories of her father when she wrote the book 55 or so years later. The reader deduces that he was a minister because the narrator mentions that she moved to the Saco house from a parsonage, and that her mother treasures 12 ornamental spoons engraved with ministers’ names that were a wedding present. “It was during a vacation our family had spent with Grandfather in that faraway time when my father was living. I was a very small girl and Father would let me sit in a little wire seat strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle. We often went to see sick people.”My own father didn’t like to be near sick people or church, and, never in my memory rode a bicycle anywhere. He refrained from visiting the ill or the injured at all times, even when they happened to be his children or were having children. Childhood memories of my father are sparse, like Taylor’s, but not for the same reason. Mine chose not to spend time with us even when we were healthy. Parenting was noisy and messy and my father had an aversion to both, so he left us to my mother who had even more aversions, ones she enjoyed sharing with us, especially on non-school days.I read of Taylor’s grandfather and mother with a certain envy and wistfulness. If I am to be honest, I even envied her younger sister, referred to as Susan in the book (her actual name was Ethelinda). My father tells me even now that no men had time to spend time with their kids back then, his “then” being the 1970s rather than the 1910s. Fathers worked. Mothers parented. Yet in the Brady Bunch and the Little House on the Prairie, and even in Bonanza, which I saw my father watch, the opposite of his parenting sentiment was clear, as was a casual count of the time he spent playing horseshoes and baseball with his sons-in-law. Although Taylor chooses not to disclose the actual date when she was ten years old, possibly to disguise her age as of 1963, the timeline of A Time to Recall must be the summer of 1911 because Taylor describes one of Waterboro’s two historic fires, the second being in 1947, when she was a mother three times over herself.Taylor describes how her father took her with him on his rounds, and her grandfather, although identified as stern, is a significant part of her daily life as well. She describes her mother’s gentleness and fairness in various ways and illustrates the same throughout her story. “Mother always spoke quietly. She had a kind, understanding manner toward everyone, but there was a spark inside her that made her fun to be with.” The “but” is intriguing, as if being kind and understanding somehow obviates also being fun. Taylor’s words contrast markedly with mine on page one of Pigs Can’t Swim, “My mother was able to make a face of venomous contempt with only slight adjustments to her mouth and eyes. She could go from speaking to my father with a pleasant, approachable expression to speaking to her kids as if pleasure never existed.”The children in my memoir weren’t allowed to use any form of address other than “Mamma.” She even insisted on the oddly un-phonetic spelling. “Mother,” she observed, her mouth a tight punctuated line of disapproval, was a flippant, hoity-toity form of address, and she took great pride in teaching us to never act smart or wise, emphasizing the point by dragging us around by our ears and ever rounding cheeks so that we never think we were too hi-falutin’ to weed and dig holes. As with Helen Taylor’s mother, my mother had “a spark inside her,” but it was of perhaps a slightly different nature. It was anyone’s guess on any given day what might trigger it. But she exercised control; she understood well the difference between what was acceptable in public and in the privacy of her home.Taylor’s mother did a bit of sewing, “though she found this hard to do.” This is the only actual touch skill the reader hears Taylor’s mother as not having, even though it seems that much of her mother’s education was spent at European boarding schools, not at the hearth with needle and thread. “Every fall Mother sent to Best & Co. [an upscale children’s clothing retailer in New York] for a special sailor suit for each of us, but all our clothes, as well as Mother’s dresses, were made by a dressmaker.” The girls went to Portland for boot fittings and hair ribbon purchases followed by an ice cream. Taylor doesn’t give the source of her mother’s income, but she does explain her own finances by telling the reader how her mother pays her and her sister a penny for each fly they kill, and her grandfather pays her in quarters for occasionally stripping vines of their leaves.In contrast, the children of my parents and grandparents labored, my mother lectured us, for the right to live under a roof and eat, which I didn’t much appreciate because her food involved cow tongues and major organs. The reader isn’t told, but it appears that even with the death of her husband, Helen’s mother, Louella Frey, and her daughters were well provided for. Having no businessmen-like ancestors, merchants or otherwise, in my family, I wore plastic bread bags over wool socks “fitted” to my legs with rubber bands. My clothes were not made by a seamstress named Mrs. Guptill, but by Mamma, and although Mamma demonstrated considerable skill with her sewing machine, she couldn’t sew boots or buy cloth that wasn’t often irregular. The child narrator of Pigs Can’t Swim doesn’t even know that such a person as a seamstress exists, or that children wear such a thing as sailor suits. Portland, to her, was a far off place cursed for its one-way streets.Taylor does allude to some clothing hardship when she describes how her mother tries her hand at sewing for fun, “I would have to stand for a very long time while she tried it on and fitted me,” and her mother’s reaction when she caught her new dress on a picket fence “that took her mother hours and hours to cut out.” No fear of trouble, no spankings, run through A Time To Recall as they do through Pigs Can’t Swim. “Mother was more sad than angry. She didn’t understand why I had to go over the fence instead of around.”Mother does all the cooking that summer for Helen, Susan, and Grandfather. She likes to experiment with recipes, and she buys meat from a butcher who comes to the house daily like milkmen used to do. Taylor recounts her ten-year-old self remembering her gentle mother and the failed calf-brain meal.

One time Mother said she would like to try cooking calves’ brains. When Mr. Day came the next week, he handed Mother a paper bag and said it was the calf’s brain. That morning without opening the bag, Mother spent some time reading the cookbook. I was putting away the breakfast dishes in the dining room cupboard when I heard her give a little gasp, as if she’d hurt herself. I could see that her face was very white and I started to call Grandfather. She was twisting the top of the bag shut. “Don’t come in here children,” she said. “Stay away. I have to bury this bag and I don’t want you to come with me.” . . . Grandfather was curious by now and when Mother came back he wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Mother put her hand to her eyes. “That was the whole head of the calf,” she said. “Its eyes were looking right at me.”

This type of anecdote is more of an aside in A Time to Recall’s primary focus of recounting a memorable summer vacation, but it is a main theme in my Pigs Can’t Swim. The reader is led to understand that if Mr. Day, the butcher, had delivered the calf’s brain absent its original container, that Mother would have opened the bag and continued on with her recipe. Her “seeing” the calf as it “saw” her unsettled the amateur chef in such a way that she not only threw away the food, an extraordinarily wasteful and really unthinkable act in my childhood household, but buried it. She told her children to stay away, wanting to protect them from seeing something so grisly as their uncooked food.

My not-so-gentle mother shares this contradiction of meat and its source with Taylor’s mother. Neither woman explores her ability to ignore the reality of the slaughtered animals they prepare and eat until they are “faced” with the evidence:

I trotted to my mother…. Bonnie and Jessie [cows] had been good friends…. I understood her pain because my father had killed my pet rabbits. The ending to my story was different, though, because my mother had cooked the animals I loved for supper. “Why do you eat cows if you love Bonnie and Jessie so much?” I whispered so my father couldn’t hear…thinking now the mystery would be explained. “I don’t love the ones I eat,” she wailed.

Taylor doesn’t comment on why her mother is so visibly repulsed by the raw and whole version of her ingredients. She ends the anecdote with, “It was a long time before she could speak of it again. Fortunately, Mr. Day was a quiet man and did not ask her about it,” as if there is some source of embarrassment and weakness in her mother’s failure to excavate and cook the brain.

I suspect this is the reflective adult Taylor’s observation, as the narrator then begins to describe the challenges of storing perishable food in a time without unlimited ice and refrigerators. I also suspect that the author might not have been completely honest regarding her curiosity. She doesn’t question Mother’s reaction or examine the reasons behind her horror. Even later, when ten-year-old Helen falls in love with a baby pig and wants it for herself, the adult writing from the memory of her child perspective doesn’t connect the piglet with the pork she also loves. “He was very clean, and his pink skin shone through his bristles…. I wanted that little pig very much. I thought Grandfather could make a pen for it beside the barn and I would feed my pig every day.” She isn’t able to have the pig and is heartbroken, one of the few times the reader sees her physically and emotionally distraught. Even her recounting of the 1911 fire doesn’t hold this much emotion. Grandfather sees her in tears and “listens quietly.” Then she puts her “wet hand into his big, warm one” and he takes her to a neighbor’s barn:

“Look here!” he said. I looked and saw three big dirty pigs, their bristles coarse and dusty, their feet muddy and a horrid smell coming from the pen. “In just a few weeks your little pig would be like this.” I knew he was right, but it didn’t make me feel much better…. ”Mrs. Stewart wants to give away the kittens,” Grandfather, “and I told your mother we might take one. We need a mouser for the barn.” I knelt down and with a sudden feeling of happiness picked up the little black kitten … it began to purr, and at that moment I forgot the pig.

That evening she eats July Fourth garden peas for supper, “Mother had made them especially delicious by mixing with them little pieces of brown, crispy fried, salt pork.”

That other Helen, from 1911, probably wrote the events in this order to illustrate her distress over the piglet as a child’s silliness, and may have purposely avoided questioning the love for the pig that directly opposes the love of eating pork hours later simply because it was something people didn’t question at the turn of the century. Vegetarianism was still viewed as a great oddity when I stopped eating meat in 1978. My arguments against the cruelty and abuse of animals were not welcomed in my household preceding my decision and forty years later still meet vehement opposition.Young Helen Taylor wasn’t without empathy, however, and she wants the reader to know this. She includes several instances of compassionate acts, “I found the best prize of all for my treasure box. It was a luna moth that had fallen into the water. It’s pale green wings were the most delicate color I had ever seen…. I picked it up carefully, feeling sad to realize how short its life had been.” She and her mother also save two baby rabbits that were almost killed by the scythe during haying.Interestingly, though, compassion is noticeably absent in another instance, “I asked Mother if I couldn’t come in my bathing suit someday and swim out to the lilies, but she said I must never do that. People who had too many kittens drowned them in this part of the lake and the water is not clean.” The narrator omits any thoughts on this common cruelty despite owning Pinkie, a cat they love. In the very next sentence, as mother and daughter sit together in a rowboat on Lake Ossipee and call the birds to them, Taylor shows her lack of opposition to anthropomorphism:

The mother loon called to her babies to duck under, and she herself went down beside my boat, but the fluffy goslings were too young to stay under…. The mother did not leave them, but called and called to them in a very frightened way, Her notes were broken and despairing. I could easily have leaned over and picked up the little loons…. But the mother’s brave, sad cries made me feel very sorry and I took two quick strokes beyond them.

I recognize myself in this observation, which is why when Taylor sees a dead loon later on a taxidermy table, I am surprised that she doesn’t think back to this moment on the lake in sympathy for baby loons. Those babies were possibly left behind after her neighbor, Mr. Newcomb, killed and stuffed an adult. Mr. Newcomb, she writes,

…led us into a backroom where there was a long table covered with old newspapers, nearly spread out, and on it were crowded several hundred birds which he had mounted. (At the time it did not occur us to wonder if he had shot the birds). We were excited to hunt out the ones we knew and were happy to recognize a thrush and a bluebird and a chickadee. At one end of the table was a loon.

In contrast but in a similar context, I describe my child self with chickens in Pigs Can’t Swim:

We sat in a circle around the pot and chicken pile, holding the birds by their bony legs as we dunked their limp, warm corpses repeatedly into the hot water…the smell of flesh and guts crept into my nose, and feathers stuck like glue to my fingers…. I ripped feathers with one hand while holding the chicken in my lap, its wet, headless neck flopping against my bare arm. “Do you think it’s sad for the live chickens to see us plucking the dead ones?” I asked. “Do you think they worry they might be next?” … My mother, whose job it was to protect my father from annoyance said, “Just pluck the chickens, Helen, and stop talking nonsense.”

Never would A Time to Recall’s author, in the years when she was still Helen Virginia Frey, have been asked to help pluck dead chickens. Perhaps she never saw an animal slaughtered in her youth, or possibly even in her adult life. Her mother, like the mother loon, protected her chicks (not “goslings” as Taylor writes), protected her two daughters from the harsh reality of their world, just as Mother had presumably been protected from having to see where calf brains come from. Helen’s mother is so sheltered from what those in the lower classes know all their lives that when she sees the truth of her food, she gasps and quickly buries it, not allowing her children to see or even speak about the horrific incident. Helen Frey’s class and economic status are so different from that of Pigs Can’t Swim’s child narrator, Helen Herrick, that the dissimilarities far outweigh the similarities of both growing up in southern Maine, of both growing up around animals, of both sharing a name. Indeed, it is not too much of stretch to conclude that Helen Taylor lived a more opulent life in the 1910s than I did in the 1970s, notwithstanding all the material progress that intervened in those sixty years, even in Maine.

The first pair of sentences that best describe this fundamental disparateness between these two Helens of rural Maine is when A Time to Recall’s Helen “shivered to think what would happen if the horse should suddenly kick” as she watches the blacksmith shoe a horse, and when Pigs Can’t Swim’s Helen “stood in awe of this horse who made me feel as if anything was possible.” The second pair is when each of us leaves the places we have anticipated with excitement. Helen Taylor writes of the melancholy younger version of herself on her last day in Waterboro, “Now it was time to go down to the boathouse and say goodbye to the lake and the mountain. . . . At the foot of the stairs I gently closed the door. The summer was over.” And in Pigs Can’t Swim, “The voices quieted, knowing that infinite work and potential punishment with switches and bars of soap were less than two hours away.” We would have passed through Waterboro, not far from its Center, but we would have been light years away from the Leavitt family’s way of life, from the way Maine was for some, and in some parallel universe, perhaps, should be for all then, now, and forever more.

The Court Controversy: Not Unprecedented

The passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—and Sen. Mitch McConnell’s prompt declaration that the Senate would not confirm anyone President Obama nominates to replace him—has set off a furious debate about the historical precedent for rejecting a late-term president’s Supreme Court nominees. So it seems like a good time to revisit Kyle Kondik’s 2014 American Interest essay, “Watch the Courts,” which considered this very question:

Only twice in the post-Civil War era has a President presented with a Supreme Court vacancy failed to fill it before leaving office. The most recent instance was nearly half a century ago, in 1968, when Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren announced his intention to retire upon the confirmation of his successor. Outgoing President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Justice Abe Fortas, his longtime friend and confidante whom he had appointed to the court in 1965, to replace Warren as Chief Justice. The Democratic-controlled Senate refused to confirm him, though, and Johnson withdrew his nomination in October 1968, along with the nomination of Homer Thornberry, a Federal appellate judge Johnson had nominated to replace Fortas. Warren stayed on as Chief Justice, and it fell to Johnson’s successor, President Richard Nixon, to fill the seat. Nixon picked Warren Burger as Chief Justice.

Prior to that, one has to go back to 1881 to find a court vacancy that was filled not by the sitting President but by his successor. President Rutherford B. Hayes made the controversial nomination of Stanley Matthews in 1881. The nomination came near the end of Hayes’s term, so the Senate did not act. New President James A. Garfield renominated Matthews, and he passed through the Senate by a slim 24–23 vote.

Kondik foresaw “a possible, and an historic, showdown over the Supreme Court” should a a vacancy open up during President Obama’s last two years in office, noting that a GOP refusal to consider any of President Obama’s nominees “would be just the latest escalation in a procedural arms race in the Senate.”

Ultimately, however, procedure and precedent—while important—are probably the wrong lenses through which to analyze the current situation. Due in part to Congressional polarization, in part to the weakening of the executive branch, and in part to the Supreme Court’s own increasing assertiveness, the nine Justices have more influence over American political life today than they have at almost any other time in our history. The stakes for replacing Justice Scalia could not be higher, and partisans on both sides understandably want to maneuver in a way that will increase their odds of achieving a favorable Supreme Court majority. Does anybody doubt that if Mitt Romney were president, Democrats held the Senate, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, Republicans and Democrats would be making very different arguments today?Though the debate in the coming months may be dominated by arguments about historical precedent and Senate procedure, it is ultimately a debate about power, and who gets to wield it.

Obama’s Failed Legacy in Afghanistan

Last year Foreign Affairs ran a special section on President Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy. The section included essays on the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, terrorism, Europe, Asia, and a pair of dueling assessments of the Administration’s overall performance. Curiously, the entire section was almost entirely silent about Obama’s single largest, longest, and costliest foreign policy initiative: the war in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is, frankly, boring to most Americans—not to say confusing and often depressing. Obama’s war has been overshadowed as other crises, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the rise of the Islamic State, competed for policymakers’ attention. Journalists, too, have largely moved on, knowing that because the war has lasted so long, stories about it get little air time and few mouse clicks. Yet America’s longest war is likely to have profound and long-lasting effects on global U.S. counterterrorism operations; Americans’ attitudes toward intervention; NATO’s willingness to consider out-of-area operations; U.S.-Pakistani and U.S.-Indian bilateral ties; the future of democracy in the non-Western world, and more. While there may be little appetite for revisiting an issue many have put out of mind, it will be a major part of Obama’s legacy.And that legacy in Afghanistan, like President Obama’s foreign policy record as a whole, is troubled at best. At points he had the elements of the right approach—more troops, more reconstruction assistance, and a counterinsurgency strategy—but he never gave them the time and resources to succeed. Obama came into office rightly arguing that the war was important but had been sidelined, and promised to set it aright. Yet Obama’s choices since 2009 reflect a more conflicted stance, and it is not clear he ever settled on a coherent strategy. He deployed more troops than needed for a narrow counterterrorism operation, but not enough for a broader counterinsurgency campaign. He initially increased reconstruction funding because he believed, rightly, that effective Afghan governance was an essential condition for victory, but quickly second-guessed himself and subsequently reduced civilian aid every year thereafter.Most damagingly, Obama insisted on the public issuance of a withdrawal deadline for U.S. troops, undermining his own surge—which eventually became so obvious that he finally reversed himself. Obama’s belated decision to sustain a small force of some 5,500 troops in Afghanistan beyond his term in office is likely to keep the Afghan army in the field and the Taliban from outright victory—but this is a low bar compared to what Obama once hoped to achieve there.The Good War: 2007–09President Obama’s legacy on Afghanistan must be measured against what he inherited from President George W. Bush. In late 2008, the war in Afghanistan was going poorly, and Bush knew it. He later wrote in his memoir that Afghanistan was “unfinished business” and said the project of bringing stability and democracy there “turned out to be more daunting than I anticipated.” Violence in Afghanistan eclipsed that in Iraq for the first time in late 2008. Bush made a few moves in the right direction: He doubled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan from roughly 20,000 in late 2006 to almost 40,000 when he left office, and massively increased aid to the Afghan army and police. In the closing months of his Administration, he ordered a strategy review led by Deputy National Security Advisor Doug Lute (which I participated in as one of the Directors for Afghanistan on Lute’s staff). Our report, as Bush described it, “called for a more robust counterinsurgency effort, including more troops and civilian resources.” Bush agreed with the report’s findings but calculated that the incoming Obama Administration would be more likely to act on it if it weren’t tainted by Bush’s name. Instead, the report became a transition document for Obama and his team.The report found a receptive audience because Obama had been making the same case from the earliest days of his campaign. He wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007, “We must refocus our efforts on Afghanistan and Pakistan—the central front in our war against al Qaeda—so that we are confronting terrorists where their roots run deepest.” In July 2008, in a major speech on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he rightly noted the situation in Afghanistan was “deteriorating” and “unacceptable.” He promised, “As President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.” He pledged to deploy at least two additional brigades and spend an additional $1 billion in civilian assistance every year.As Obama took office, he convened his own strategy review to chart the way forward. Obama’s National Security Advisor, James Jones, asked Lute and his staff to stay and provide continuity. That gave us the opportunity to support a second presidential strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama announced his policy in March 2009, echoing many of the same conclusions reached in the earlier review. He defined the goal clearly: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” His policy explicitly committed the United States to “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan,” which required “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.”Obama argued the war “is a cause that could not be more just. . . . The world cannot afford the price that will come due if Afghanistan slides back into chaos or al-Qaeda operates unchecked.” With the support of both parties, two presidential strategy reviews, and a strong majority of the American people, he ordered 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, quadrupled the number of U.S. diplomats and aid workers, and increased civilian assistance by an impressive $2 billion from 2009 to 2010. Obama was moving in the right direction and seemed ready to bet his presidency on the success of the war.The Turn: 2009Several events during 2009 sowed serious doubts within the Obama Administration about the feasibility of its new strategy. Violence worsened dramatically: Insurgent-initiated attacks in the summer of 2009 increased by a staggering 65 percent compared to the previous summer, including suicide bombings of NATO headquarters in Kabul in August and, later, a CIA base in Khowst in December. In 2009, 355 U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, more than double the previous year. The American public was increasingly pessimistic. In July 2009, 54 percent of Americans believed things were going well, compared to 43 percent who thought things were going badly. Five months later, that tenuous optimism had collapsed: 32 percent thought things were going well, compared to 66 percent who thought they were going badly.Bilateral relations with the Afghan government were also in free fall. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden made no attempt to hide their mistrust and disrespect for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The Administration failed to affirm the 2005 U.S.-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement, an oversight the Afghans likely interpreted as a deliberate attempt to walk back U.S. commitments to Afghan security. The Afghan presidential election that August was marred by fraud and widely seen as illegitimate by U.S. officials, while Afghans resented the perceived meddling in their election by Richard Holbrooke, then serving as Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. And in November U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry wrote that Karzai was “not an adequate strategic partner” for the United States in a cable that was quickly leaked and made public, further souring diplomatic relations.But the event that had the most dramatic impact on the new Administration’s view of the war was the initial assessment of the new Commander of the International Security Assistance Force, (ISAF), General Stanley McChrystal, in August 2009. His verdict was devastating. “The situation in Afghanistan is serious,” he warned: “Many indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating. We face not only a resilient and growing insurgency; there is also a crisis of confidence among Afghans—in both their government and the international community—that undermines our credibility and emboldens the insurgents.” McChrystal, taking seriously Obama’s words in March about a “resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,” called for 80,000 more troops to maximize chances of success; or 40,000, with medium risk. He also developed a third option: deploying just 20,000 more troops and abandoning counterinsurgency in favor of a leaner counterterrorism mission with high risk.McChrystal’s report, his request for more troops, and the cost of the war appalled the Obama Administration and triggered a major reassessment. But it is unclear why Obama reacted the way he did. The crises of 2009 would not have unsettled a more experienced Administration. The downturn in diplomatic relations was avoidable, while the spike in violence and McChyrstal’s assessment essentially validated what Obama had been saying on the campaign trail, and he could have claimed them as such. But the new Administration, distracted by the economic downturn and eager to move on to its signature health care initiative, seemed caught off guard when it learned that it had been more right than it knew about Afghanistan’s deterioration.The result was a third White House strategy review (I left the NSC shortly before this one started). This time, however, the result was different, and produced the three key strategic errors of Obama’s war.First was Obama’s attempt at compromise, which only led to strategic incoherence. The President faced a basic strategic choice between a lean, pared-down counterterrorism mission focused on al-Qaeda, or a larger and more ambitious counterinsurgency strategy to beat back the Taliban while improving Afghan governance. The second was by far the better option and had the backing of the two successive high-level strategy reviews because it articulated a clear end-state—a legitimate Afghan government capable of denying terrorist safe haven on its own—that would allow the United States to withdraw with its interests intact. But even the first option had some logic to it by limiting America’s investment and lowering its aims in South Asia.Instead, Obama chose neither option; he attempted to compromise, and got the worst of both. He achieved neither the economy of the first option nor the ambition of the second. On the one hand, Obama echoed the rhetoric he had voiced for years: “Our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak,” he warned. “And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al-Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al-Qaeda.” He also emphasized the need for a “more effective civilian strategy.” To that end, Obama ordered another surge, this time of 30,000 troops, bringing the total to more than 100,000 by mid-2010—far more than required for a narrow counterterrorism operation. Afghanistan, the third-largest military operation since Vietnam, had definitively become Obama’s war.Yet even as he doubled down, Obama began hedging. The crises of 2009 led Obama to a “reassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed,” according to New York Times reporter David Sanger.1 He came to believe that “progress was possible—but not on the kind of timeline that [he] thought economically or politically affordable.” He was concerned the war was a drain on the U.S. economy (although it cost less than one half of one percent of GDP in 2009). Despite the first two strategy reviews’ recommendations to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, the new approach “is not fully resourced counterinsurgency or nation building, but a narrower approach tied more tightly to the core goal of disrupting, dismantling, and eventually defeating al-Qaeda and preventing al Qaeda’s return to safe haven in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” according to an internal NSC memo.2 He deployed far fewer troops than McChrystal recommended for a counterinsurgency campaign. In contrast to his campaign rhetoric, Obama spent the rest of his presidency carefully avoiding saying that the United States aimed to “defeat” the Taliban or “win” the war. Rather like Lyndon Johnson 45 years earlier, the President escalated a war while simultaneously doubting whether it could be won.And because he decided against staffing and paying for counterinsurgency, he also backed off his commitment to promoting accountable and effective government in Afghanistan, his second major error. While he continued publicly to argue that improved governance was important to the overall mission, privately the same internal NSC memo states the U.S. government would only be “selectively building the capacity of the Afghan government with military [sic] focused on the ministries of defense and interior,” a move with major long-term consequences. Following the President’s guidance, a group of White House staffers convened starting in 2010 to search for an “Afghan Good Enough” solution and exit, an obvious effort to lower the goal posts and make it easier for the United States to declare victory and leave. Civilian aid to Afghanistan decreased every year after 2010. By eschewing investments in Afghan governance and reducing civilian aid while still deploying 100,000 troops, Obama abandoned any vision of a political end-state that would allow the United States to disengage with its interests intact. He also ended up with the most expensive, lumbering, and inefficient “CT-only” option imaginable.DeadlinesAnd, of course, Obama set a deadline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, his third major strategic mistake and the single most consequential decision of the war. The avalanche of criticism against the Administration for its withdrawal plans is fully justified, but it has also obscured some facts. Obama’s first mention of withdrawal, in December 2009, was only in reference to the surge troops, not the 68,000 who were already in country, and he only set a date for the beginning of the withdrawal, not its completion. The following year, in June, the Afghans and the international community agreed at the Kabul Conference to “transition” to an Afghan lead for security by 2014, which many interpreted, wrongly, as the withdrawal deadline. A year later, in July 2011, the President announced for the first time that he planned to begin withdrawing non-surge troops, and again affirmed a 2014 target for transition. It wasn’t until May 2014 that he finally set a deadline—by the end of 2016—to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.But these nuances were lost in the noise of public debate and lost in translation to Dari and Pashto. What most Americans and Afghans heard was that the United States was leaving Afghanistan—and this was the single most consistent message the Administration delivered about the war for almost six years.Obama publicly defended the withdrawal as a necessary tactic to compel the Afghan government to take responsibility for its security and implement needed reforms. But domestic political considerations also played a part. Obama felt compelled to begin talking about withdrawal because he was worried about the political sustainability of the war. “I can’t lose all the Democratic Party,” he reportedly worried, according to Bob Woodward’s account of the Administration’s deliberations, “And people at home don’t want to hear we’re going to be there for ten years…. We can’t sustain a commitment indefinitely in the United States. We can’t sustain support at home and with allies without having some explanation that involves timelines.”3 Perhaps the President thought that a deadline was necessary as well to compel the U.S. military to reexamine its own timelines with a mind to achieving more urgent progress. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates later argued in his memoir that, “with the deadlines Obama politically bought our military—and civilians—five more years to achieve our mission in Afghanistan.”Obama was right about one thing: The Democratic Party solidly opposed the surge and supported the deadline. In September 2009, 62 percent of Democrats opposed Obama’s impending surge decision, and 63 percent of Republicans supported it. Otherwise, Obama’s political worries were groundless, and Gates’s claim is false. The war in Afghanistan was never as politically unpopular as the war in Iraq. It never became unpopular until the President started to telegraph his disbelief in the mission. The public did not demand a withdraw deadline prior to Obama’s announcement of one.4 In July 2008 (when Obama gave his campaign speech), 57 percent of Americans supported sending more U. S. troops to Afghanistan. In February 2009, 65 percent of the public supported Obama’s deployment of more troops, and 70 percent believed Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban if the U.S. military withdrew. In July 2011, when the President first announced withdrawals of pre-surge troops, 59 percent were not confident the Afghan government could secure itself. In March 2012, 58 percent of Americans said they were worried that withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan too quickly would again make Afghanistan a safe haven for terrorists.The public did eventually express support for the withdrawal deadlines—after Obama announced them. In February 2009, 48 percent of Americans believed the U.S. government should keep troops in Afghanistan until the situation got better, while 47 percent believed the Administration should set a timetable for withdrawing troops. Throughout 2009 the public wavered, split evenly between surging and withdrawing. In July 2010, seven months after the President’s speech, 33 percent wanted to keep troops in for the duration, while 66 percent supported the timetable. Obama was not forced by public pressure to withdraw troops, and time was not running out on the Afghan mission. He could have sustained support for the war if he had been willing to reach across the isle and work with Republicans who supported his initial war plan. Instead, he allowed partisan considerations to interfere with strategic logic.Surge: 2010–12Because of Obama’s ambivalence and compromise, the U.S. government implemented a strange policy in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012. Obama deployed more troops than he needed for a counterterrorism operation, but not as many as his top commander recommended for a more robust counterinsurgency campaign. The surge showed some visible and positive battlefield effects, but Obama began withdrawing troops as soon as signs of success appeared. After having kept his campaign promise to increase civilian aid in the first year of his presidency, he reversed himself and decreased civilian aid every year thereafter. By 2011 the President “decided to exit even if the job was far from complete, even if there was no guarantee that gains made in the past decade could last,” according to Sanger. He solidified the withdrawal deadline without even consulting his military advisers.The surge worked. In October 2011, the Department of Defense reported, “After five consecutive years where enemy-initiated attacks and overall violence increased sharply each year (for example, up 94 percent in 2010 over 2009), such attacks began to decrease in May 2011 compared to the previous year and continue to decline.” The decline continued throughout 2012. Serious, non-partisan and non-governmental sources noted the improvements. The New York Times reported in March 2011, “The Taliban have been under stress since American forces doubled their presence in southern Afghanistan last year and greatly increased the number of special forces raids aimed at hunting down Taliban commanders.”RAND analyst Seth Jones, the foremost American scholar of the Taliban insurgency and author of In the Graveyard of Empires, wrote in May 2011, “after years of gains, the Taliban’s progress has stalled—and even reversed—in southern Afghanistan this year.” Even the UN noted progress, reporting in March 2011 that,

The number of districts under insurgent control has decreased…. As a result of the increased tempo of security operations in northern and western provinces, an increasing number of anti-Government elements are seeking to join local reintegration programmes…. In Kabul, the increasingly effective Afghan national security forces continue to limit insurgent attacks.

Steve Biddle later examined the record of U.S. operations in Afghanistan at the height of the surge and concluded that “the Afghan experience shows that current U.S. methods can return threatened districts to government control, when conducted with the necessary time and resources.”5

Fatalities of U.S. troops began to decline in 2011, and the number of Afghan civilians killed in the war declined in 2012 for the first time. Poppy cultivation appeared to be holding steady well below its 2007 peak, while opium production plummeted in 2012. The Administration doubled the number of Afghan soldiers and policemen from early 2009 to December 2011, throwing a significantly larger armed force at the enemy. Other indicators also suggested progress: Afghanistan’s rank in Reporters Without Borders Index of Press Freedom markedly improved after 2012. By 2012 Afghans were registering some optimism in public opinion polls. In 2013 the U.S. effort appeared to get the closest it ever got to opening formal peace negotiations with the Taliban when the group briefly opened an “embassy” in Qatar and, the following year, agreed to a prisoner exchange for U.S. serviceman Bowe Bergdahl.In July 2011, Obama rightly noted the gains made by the surge: “We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we’ve made, while we draw down our forces and transition responsibility for security to the Afghan government.” To that end, he promised to “build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures—one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government.” And in May 2012, during a visit to Kabul, Obama appeared to lock in the gains of the surge by signing a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan that tried to undo the damage to Afghans’ confidence in the United States after the Administration’s failure to reaffirm the previous 2005 agreement and its repeated talk of withdrawal. Obama reiterated, “We must give Afghanistan the opportunity to stabilize. Otherwise, our gains could be lost and al-Qaeda could establish itself once more.” Obama explained that the agreement, “establishes the basis for our cooperation over the next decade” and laid the groundwork to give the Afghans the “support they need to accomplish two narrow security missions beyond 2014—counter-terrorism and continued training.” The agreement was supplemented by a ten-year Bilateral Security Agreement signed in 2014, which most observers—including the Afghans—assumed came with a U.S. military presence on the ground.Transition and Withdrawal: 2013–14Unfortunately, the surge’s gains were undone by Obama’s insistence on withdrawing U.S. troops on a fixed timeline and by his underinvestment in governance and reconstruction. By the beginning of 2013, the withdrawal was well underway: There were 65,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the start of 2013; 40,000 in 2014; and just 9,800 in 2015. Afghan security forces were not ready to pick up the slack. Throughout 2013 and 2014, Defense Department officials warned repeatedly that Afghan security forces, though improving, faced capability gaps in logistics, intelligence, air support, and more, limiting their ability to undertake independent operations without U.S. support and training.As international military forces left, the Taliban regained the initiative. Because of the departure of U.S. troops, the Department of Defense was no longer able to compile the data to track the incidence of enemy-initiated attacks, but other indicators made clear the deteriorating security situation. According to the International Crisis Group in 2014, “Unpublished assessments estimated a 15 to 20 percent increase in violence for 2013, as compared with 2012. Escalation appeared to continue in the early months of 2014.” The Defense Department reported at the end of 2013 that, “the insurgency has also consolidated gains in some of the rural areas in which it has traditionally held power.” Real estate prices in Kabul fell and applications for asylum skyrocketed. Civilian fatalities, which had declined in 2012, rose to an all-time high in 2014. The number of internally displaced persons in Afghanistan exploded, nearly doubling from 352,000 in 2010 to 631,000 in 2013.At the same time, other indicators showed a stagnant, even regressing Afghanistan, a trend that accelerated as the international withdrawal gathered steam. According to the World Bank’s governance indicators, since 2009 Afghanistan made no significant progress on political stability or the rule of law and barely perceptible progress on government effectiveness, regulatory quality, or controlling corruption, reflecting the Obama Administration’s conscious decision not to invest in Afghan governance. The licit Afghan economy began to cool, growing by just 3.4 percent in 2013 and 1.7 percent in 2014, reflecting both the decreased international presence and the Administration’s reduced spending on reconstruction. Poppy cultivation achieved another all-time high in 2013. In 2014, 40 percent of Afghans said their country was headed in the wrong direction, up from 31 percent in 2012. The most successful part of the American intervention in Afghanistan was the creation of the Afghan army, but the underinvestment in governance yielded a foreboding net effect: the juxtaposition of a strong and popular army with a weak and unpopular state.Even as Afghanistan deteriorated from 2013 onwards, ever fewer American policymakers or journalists paid much attention, or believed it mattered. A Lexis-Nexis search shows roughly twice as much media coverage of Afghanistan from Obama’s inauguration through May 2012, when he signed the Strategic Partnership Agreement in Kabul, as during the three years afterwards. With his re-election campaign behind him, Obama no longer had to worry about the political ramifications of the war. The Administration’s attempt to “pivot” to Asia was a pivot to East Asia, and left South Asia in the same basket as the Middle East. Ukraine’s eruption into discord in late 2013, followed by Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in early 2014, stole the headlines—until the Islamic State seized Mosul a few months later, which in turn was supplanted by the Ebola panic in late 2014.An air of unreality settled over the war in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014. Presidents from both parties had repeatedly stressed the vital importance of the war, devoted tens of thousands of U.S. troops to it, and spent many billions of dollars on it. The war had already been rescued from the brink once. Now, because of the withdrawal of U.S. troops, it was teetering again, putting more than a decade of investment and sacrifice on the line—and few, including the President, seemed to notice or care. In May 2014, in the face of mounting evidence that Afghanistan was lurching toward failure, Obama announced his plans to complete the withdrawal of all U.S. troops. America’s longest war had lingered too long: most Americans had simply changed the channel.Epilogue: 2015–16In an unfortunate coincidence, President Obama announced the final pullout from Afghanistan just one month before the Islamic State seized Mosul and reminded the world of the dangers of failed states and jihadi groups who find safe haven in them. Within months, the United States was essentially back at war in Iraq—and it was easy to draw the obvious lesson for the war in Afghanistan. The sea change in political opinion in the United States about Afghanistan was firm and swift. In March 2015, dozens of former U.S. officials, including Obama’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy, signed an open letter to the President calling on him to repudiate his Afghanistan withdrawal policy and keep U.S. troops there past 2016. Later that year, dozens more, including two of his former Secretaries of Defense, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel, endorsed an Atlantic Council report with the same message. It is impolite to say so, but the rise of the Islamic State was a boon—a temporary one, at any rate—for Afghanistan’s future.Obama bowed to the pressure this past autumn, shortly after the Taliban seized the northern city of Kunduz, scrapping his plans to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of his term. Unfortunately, much damage has been done in the meantime. The stay-behind force of 5,500 troops is necessary to prevent the Taliban’s further advances, but it cannot undo six years of uncertainty and second-guessing, and the number of troops is almost certainly too few for the mission they have been given.President Obama spent nearly his entire presidency talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan. He intended the withdrawal deadline to pressure the corrupt and intransigent Afghan government to reform, but critics argued, rightly, that it would instead incentivize hedging behavior as our local allies, in the face of uncertainty, became preoccupied with securing their personal interests instead of their country’s. And clearly, the deadline emboldened the Taliban and undermined the surge. Six years later, the Taliban is resurgent, but the Afghan government has not cleaned up its act: The withdrawal incurred the costs critics feared without accomplishing the goals its advocates intended—and the withdrawal will not end up actually happening, making the entire exercise profoundly futile.The withdrawal illustrates a broader problem with President Obama’s handling of the war: remarkably poor messaging about the war and its importance. In contrast to his strident campaign rhetoric, throughout his presidency Obama was remarkably reticent to talk about the longest and most significant U.S. military deployment under his command and a centerpiece of his foreign policy. Since December 2009, all of his major presidential addresses on Afghanistan have been about withdrawing troops. Obama has exuded uncertain, even disinterested, wartime leadership.This is unfortunate, because the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath are likely to have far-reaching consequences for the United States and the world. Americans are likely to be far more wary about intervening in other countries or volunteering troops for peace-building missions abroad—unjustifiably, since the under-resourced and deadline-constrained American intervention in Afghanistan is hardly an ideal test case for the principle of intervention. NATO has been strained badly by the war and almost certainly will not attempt another out-of-area operation for the foreseeable future. Ongoing instability in Afghanistan risks spilling over into Pakistan, a highly dangerous scenario. The war has inflicted irreparable damage on U.S.-Pakistani relations, but without the benefit of having actually won the war and pacified Pakistan’s western border. The failure to foster effective governance in Afghanistan means that transnational drug traffickers effectively have free run of a large swath of South Asia. The U.S. and Afghan failure to reign in corruption has tarnished democracy’s reputation both in the country and beyond it. The project of liberal order-building, which the United States has spearheaded since World War II, took an unnecessary hit because of Obama’s poor wartime leadership in Afghanistan (and Iraq).But even that is not the most damning consequence of Obama’s legacy in Afghanistan. The war was, first and foremost, the frontline global U.S. counterterrorism efforts against the transnational jihadi movement. In 2011, Leon Panetta, then serving as Secretary of Defense, claimed that al-Qaeda was near strategic defeat. The same year President Obama assured Americans that the “tide of war is receding.” Both statements were false, as critics argued at the time and as later events proved. The Administration failed to understand the essential conditions of victory in war: the creation of an alternate just political order. Without a stable and legitimate political order in Afghanistan, there will be no end to political violence there.Five years ago I warned, “the single greatest strategic threat is the weakness of the Afghan government” and called for “a dramatically more ambitious capacity-development program.” Some critics, in their eagerness to highlight the flaws in President Bush’s handling of the war, argue the U.S. government had unrealistic ambitions for democracy and good government in Afghanistan. But this criticism misses the point and fails to explain what the alternative should be. Whether or not Afghanistan is ready for democratic government—and we should note that Afghanistan’s first democratic constitution was ratified in 1964—it needs an effective government. Competent, functioning institutions are the precondition for any sort of future stability in Afghanistan. Obama did nothing to address this strategic deficit. This, his greatest failure, is why the President was forced to re-engage in both Iraq and Afghanistan, against his wishes, and why he will be handing off both conflicts to his successor, unfinished and uncertain. In that, Obama failed to surpass even the low bar set by his predecessor. Bush got many things wrong, but he at least had a vision of an alternate just political order toward which he wanted to move the region. Obama has lacked even that.

1Sanger, Confront and Conceal, pp. 29, 56, 128. See chapters 2, 5, and 10 for the broader narrative of Afghan policy.

2Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 387.3Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 336, 230.4Again the parallel with Vietnam is uncanny. An analysis of the polls, best done by John E. Mueller in War, Presidents and Public Opinion (1973), shows that there was never a majority in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam until President Johnson’s famous speech of March 31, 1968, in which he made clear that the U.S. government would no longer try to win the war, but instead would seek a negotiated withdrawal.5Stephen Biddle, “Afghanistan’s Legacy: Emerging Lessons of an Ongoing War,” Washington Quarterly (April 2014), and see Daniel Byman, “Friends like These: Counterinsurgency and the War on Terrorism,” International Security (October 2006).

His Friends Called Him Nino

Justice Antonin Scalia was a titan of American jurisprudence, one of those rare figures in public life who combined an enormous intellect with persuasiveness and accessibility. The changes he wrought on American jurisprudence were visible within his own lifetime; his influence will reverberate for generations of jurists. As we frequently point out around here when matters concerning the Supreme Court come up, we are not lawyers, and we will leave the extended appreciations of Scalia’s professional career to those who are better qualified.

However, Scalia was one of the few Supreme Court Justices (along with his ideological bete noire but close personal friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg) to develop a following—it would not be too much to say a fan base—outside of the courtroom. His personality and wit had become part of the nation’s public life.Five years ago, I had the chance to meet the Justice. He was coming up to Oxford to give a speech at the Union, and as it was Ash Wednesday, he’d asked to attend Mass beforehand. My friend who was organizing his visit asked me, as a practicing Catholic (as well as an American and a conservative) if I’d like to come along. Due to a mix-up, we all showed up an hour early, at the grey crack of dawn, and so Justice Scalia, my friend, and I sat through two hours of prayer with a dozen Benedictine monks—after which he was kind enough to buy us all breakfast. His warmth, deep faith, and intelligence were on ample display.Scalia was an opera buff, and in the last year of his life he had what must the the fairly unique pleasure of seeing himself portrayed in one, a comic opera appropriately entitled Scalia/Ginsburg. The two eponymous Justices coauthored a preface to annotated libretto (which was published in the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts), and Scalia only missed the premiere because the proud Italian-American jurist was lecturing in Rome. As I wrote in a review for TAI  this summer:

Our story in brief: Scalia (sung by tenor John Overholt), working late in the court one night, has had enough of his fellow judges’ loose attitude toward the Constitution. But just as he’s working up yet another impassioned dissent, one of the court’s statues bursts into life, proclaiming that it is a “celestial bureaucrat” (bass-baritone Adam Cioffari) sent to weigh Justice Scalia’s worth against the annoyance of his incessant dissenting. The chamber is sealed and the trial is about to start when Justice Ginsburg (Ellen Wieser, in a powerful yet lucid soprano) drops in, literally—not the first time in her life, as she points out, that she’s broken through a ceiling. Her stubborn refusal to leave prompts the otherworldly judge to try them both, first by making them defend their legal philosophies, and then (the harder challenge by far?) by forcing them to remain silent as he attacks them. Both hold their peace, though twitchily, as they are assailed with the usual charges—you only did what was convenient, you’re making it up as you go along, you hypocrites! Eventually the judge starts simply chanting  “Bush v. Gore, Bush v. Gore, Bush v. Gore…” and Scalia bursts from his seat singing, “Oh, get over it!” (This brought down the house, though I doubt it would have ten years ago.) The Judge condemns him to a place where “words have no meaning.” (Wang updated his libretto as recently as June to reflect the new Obamacare and gay marriage rulings). Scalia refuses to repent, but Ginsburg proclaims that she too must be sent there if Nino is to go: as they’re both members of the court, they can speak with one voice. (So that’s what it takes to get Ginsburg to join a Scalia dissent—actual hellfire.) They join in a duet, “We are different. We are one”, reflecting on how their seemingly opposing strands of thought actually keep the Court going and uphold the American way. Impressed, the judge rewards them for their friendship with actual operatic talent, something that both justices have lamented, in real life and in the script, that they lack.

[..] When the celestial judge challenges Scalia, he replies, “My friends call me Nino” to the tune of Si, mi chiamano Mimi—timid, doomed, little Mimi’s aria from La Boheme. Then, when the Judge asks, “And I?”, he replies in a harsh tone, “… Call me Justice Scalia.” […] And then there are the legal references: fans of Scalia’s dissents will know where he’s coming from when he describes the celestial bureaucrat’s opinions, mid-aria, as “pure applesauce” and, as for the judge himself, “this wolf comes as a wolf.”

Oh, those dissents: they made conservatives roar with delight, and even his ideological opponents recognized him as the master of the genre. But the friends that called him Nino sat on both sides of the ideological divide.

There will be ample time to examine the political repercussions of Scalia’s death, which will likely test the already-attenuated standing of the legislative branch and deepen gridlock in D.C. But today, many will be mourning their friend, the opera buff, grandfather of 28, devout Catholic, and a great American. Requiescat in pace.

Update: Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking of Scalia/Ginsburg today following Justice Scalia’s passing. So too was Justice Ginsburg:

RBG's statement on late friend, Justice Antonin Scaliahttps://t.co/m1ImFrWEz4 pic.twitter.com/SDpmx3fMCr

— Notorious R.B.G. (@NotoriousRBG) February 14, 2016

Venezuela Burns as Court Entrenches Gridlock

The Venezuelan Supreme Court late this week ruled in favor of the country’s President, Nicolas Maduro, in his dispute with Venezuela’s National Assembly over a move Maduro made last month to increase his control of the country’s finances and economy. The WSJ:

At issue was an executive decree by Mr. Maduro in early January that gave him broader powers over the economy, which is suffering its deepest collapse since the Great Depression. But the new assembly, dominated by the opposition after December mid-term elections, rejected the decree.

Both Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, had packed the court with government allies who have long supported the leftist administration in their rulings, and the court sided with Mr. Maduro.Mr. Maduro said he can now enact a series of measures to deal with the country’s severe crisis. “This really helps our work,” he said on state television.

Yes, this indeed helps Maduro in his ongoing project to completely destroy his country. For a sense of the kind of hole Venezuela finds itself in, look no further than this piece from the Financial Times, which lays out the case that Venezuela is overwhelmingly likely to default this year if oil prices remain depressed:

If Venezuelan oil prices remain at current levels of about $25 a barrel, the country’s export revenues will fall to $22bn, according to BofA calculations. Minus bond payments, that would leave about $12bn to pay for imports — less than a third of last year’s import bill. On top of that Venezuela has to repay $6.2bn of loans to China.

Unless something is done, Mr [Francisco] Rodríguez [of Bank of America] warns, the scarcity of basic goods will drastically worsen and fuel “major social tensions”.In the latest blow to suffering consumers, shopping centres have begun cutting their opening hours due to electricity rationing.Later this month Venezuela must make a $2.4bn bond payment. The government has been raiding its dwindling foreign reserves, which now stand at $15.4bn. That is almost half those of Argentina, which is already in default but appears to be attempting a return to economic normalcy.

Meanwhile, for many ordinary Venezuelans, life has become very grim, as the WSJ reports in a separate piece on the situation in the country:

In a hospital in the far west of this beleaguered country, the economic crisis took a grim toll in the past week: Six infants died because there wasn’t enough medicine or functioning respirators. […]

Rosalba Castellano, 74 years old, spent hours this week in what has become a desperate routine for millions: waiting in long lines to buy whatever food is available. She walked away with just two liters of cooking oil.“I hoped to buy toilet paper, rice, pasta,” she said. “But you can’t find them.” Her only choice will be to hunt for the goods at marked-up prices on the black market. The government, she said, “is putting us through savage suffering.”The National Assembly, now controlled by the opposition, declared a food emergency on Thursday—an attempt to spur the government of President Nicolás Maduro to, among other things, ease price controls that have created shortages of everything from medicine to meat.“The people are being left without the ability to feed themselves,” said lawmaker Omar Barboza.Inflation in this oil-rich country is expected to hit a world’s-worst 700% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The economy shrank by 10% last year and is expected to decline another 8% this year, according to the IMF, the worst performance in the world. And there is no end in sight.

On Friday, the opposition’s leader Henry Ramos announced that he would announce concrete steps for setting up a referendum to remove the “national disgrace that is the government” in the coming days. The opposition had previously said that it planned to call a referendum within six months, but on Friday Ramos said that six months would clearly be too long. Maduro told his supporters “not to underestimate the threats Henry Ramos made today against peace and stability of the Republic.” No one should underestimate the chances for political violence erupting in the coming weeks and months.

 

How Anti-GMO Activists Hurt the World’s Poorest

The campaign against genetically modified crops is holding back the developing world from more accelerated growth, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Activists in the developed world have worked hard to fight GMOs in both the West (19 European nations recently restricted GM imports after Brussels allowed for an “opt out”) and in the developing world (especially in Africa). Fear-mongering in the developing world has lead to a number of bans that prevent those countries from capitalizing on the higher yields GM crops provide, but as the ITIF report explains, bans in the developed world also hurt poorer countries that might otherwise export those crops to the West. From the ITIF report:

Campaigns against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), originating primarily in Europe, have created significant obstacles to the development and adoption of genetically modified crops . . . [The campaigns] disproportionately hurt those nations with the greatest need for more productive agriculture—particularly the developing nations of sub-Saharan Africa. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimates that the current restrictive climate for agricultural biotech innovations could cost low- and lower-middle-income nations up to $1.5 trillion in foregone economic benefits through 2050. In short, anti-GMO activists have erected significant barriers to the development of the poorest nations on earth. [. . .]

[GMO] restrictions lower farmers’ productivity and raise food prices—not just in the countries where the campaigns originate, but in nations that avoid GMO crops so they can export to countries with policies banning or limiting GMOs. Experience and data show that crops improved through biotechnology provide significant benefits for farmers, and restrictions on biotech crops slow the growth of agricultural productivity. This is particularly acute in low-income nations where farmers have less ability to mechanize production and where biotech-improved seeds offer a low-priced way to boost yields and rural incomes. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, annual farm household income in 2012 was approximately $3,000.

GM opposition is the most foolish stance taken by the modern environmental movement, and that’s saying something. Not only can GMOs help feed more people with less inputs and on less land (which would help foster biodiversity), but they can also do so in more extreme weather—the kind greens promise climate change is bringing. And per this report, GM crops can also foster faster growth in the developing world.

Their benefits are manifest, so what reason can environmentalists possibly offer up to dismiss them out of hand? Many would tell you that these crops are unsafe, but scientific studies have exposed that claim to be baseless. Most greens would then fall back to the feeling that genetically modifying crops is somehow “unnatural,” despite the fact that we’ve been modifying crops (perhaps not in labs, but certainly through selective growth) for millennia. And, if the only argument you have against a technology that could boost global food security and help the planet’s poorest move out of poverty quicker is some glib line about fearing “frankenfoods,” perhaps you ought to reevaluate your position. GMOs can do a tremendous amount of good for the world, if only greens would get out of their way.

Soros: Putin Bigger Threat Than ISIS

Russian President Vladimir Putin should worry Europe more than ISIS does, according to a piece by George Soros published on Thursday in the Guardian. A taste:

The leaders of the US and the EU are making a grievous error in thinking that president Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a potential ally in the fight against Islamic State. The evidence contradicts them. Putin’s aim is to foster the EU’s disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood Europe with Syrian refugees.

Russian planes have been bombing the civilian population in southern Syria, forcing them to flee to Jordan and Lebanon. There are now 20,000 Syrian refugees camped out in the desert awaiting admission to Jordan. A smaller number are waiting to enter Lebanon. Both groups are growing.

It’s a compelling and important argument. As we noted in a previous post:

Putin is no fool: He can see how the refugee crisis is destabilizing Europe in general, and the authority of Mrs. Merkel in particular. This morning, the head of the Bundestag’s Committee on Foreign Relations speculated openly that Mr. Putin was inflaming the refugee crisis in Aleppo deliberately to topple the Chancellor. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds: Certainly, the Kremlin’s disinformation programs have been riling up Germany’s domestic debate (not that it needs much help there, after Cologne), and Putin must have been aware of the strategic value of the refugees since he first entered Syria.

If you haven’t already, you should read the whole Soros piece.