Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 206

Algeria is strangely quiet—at least for now

By J. Dana Stuster

Best Defense office of Arab seasonal affairs 

In the earliest days of the Arab Spring, Algeria appeared
poised to join Tunisia in its revolution. Protests swept through the country
weeks before the first stirrings in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya or Syria. According
to The Economist's tongue-in-cheek attempt to quantify the factors
generating the unrest ("the shoe thrower's index"), Algeria seemed less likely to
be stable than its revolutionary neighbor and far outpaced Bahrain in factors
contributing to potential unrest.

Algeria isn't stable now, but it has managed to avoid
reaching a critical mass of domestic upheaval through a measured police
response that has been severe without being so brutal that it incites more
anger, as well as economic concessions that reduced the cost of staple foods
and legal reforms that include the repeal the country's twenty-year-old
emergency law. While it remains to be seen whether these concessions will stick
in the long-term, they seem to have bought some time for the Algerian
government.

The next potential crisis will be the country's legislative
elections, scheduled for May. The country is only dubiously democratic; true
power resides with a cabal of political and military officials informally know
as Le Pouvoir, and there are concerns that, if a truly democratic election
is held, the military may intervene to prevent an Islamist landslide in the
parliament. The last time the military stepped in was 1992; what followed was a
military coup, the institution of the emergency law, and an ugly civil war. The
Algerian government is only now walking back the many effects of 1992, and if Le
Pouvoir intervenes in May it would be a significant setback for the
country, but so too could be a polarizing election.

Speaking at CSIS recently, Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad
Medelci expressed his full confidence that the military will support the
results of the election and downplayed the significance of a potential Islamist
election, pointing out that an Islamist party (condoned by the government) has
participated in the parliament since the late 1990s. Listening to Medelci, it
is easy to get caught up in his optimism for Algeria. He boasts about his
country's progress toward meeting the United Nations' Development Program's
Millennium Development Goals and speaks eloquently about the political and
economic reforms underway. Speaking to a collection of Arab media,
businesspeople, think tank experts, and diplomats, he touted the increasing
privatization of the economy, the large college-educated population (the
majority of which are women), the proliferation of trade agreements, and the
government's attempts to diversify the economy, including a large solar array
to reduce Algeria's reliance on oil exports. He tied the new flurry of reforms
to Algeria's efforts over the past decade to better incorporate minority
groups, though he didn't go into detail on these. He seemed pleased with the
new reforms, which include expanded press freedoms, a new quota system for
women's representation in the parliament, an increased role for the judiciary
in elections to make them more independent from the administration, and an
upcoming revision of the constitution.

It all sounds very promising, and if done right, it could be
precisely the sort of gradual reform that the United States has encouraged the
monarchies in the Gulf to embrace. But even ignoring the questions about how
healthy Algeria's economy truly is (only last year, Issandr El Amrani called Bouteflika's economic policy "an unmitigated
disaster"), Algeria has only a of opportunity for this to succeed -
Bouteflika's term expires in 2014, but he is physically ailing and there is no
clear means of succession if he passes while in office. If Algeria cannot
prepare its democratic institutions for this essential transition, it will face
a two-front struggle: a crisis within Le Pouvoir, and also the
remobilization of the disenfranchised and disheartened public that took to the
streets in January 2011. Eurasia Group's James Fallon pointed to Algeria for a potential renewal of upheaval last
November, and while the protesters in Algiers had difficulty expressing a set of common grievances, they will
no doubt learn from the successes in Egypt and Tunisia.

While Algeria's problems are far from solved and new unrest
may arise between now and then, for now, its role in the Arab Spring is
restricted to its participation in the Arab League delegation to Syria. Medelci
distanced his government from Anwar Malek, the Algerian monitor who resigned from the
delegation and called it a "farce." Medelci has pointed out that Malek was
representing a non-governmental organization and not the Algerian government,
which remains committed to the mission in Syria. Justifying this commitment
involved some verbal hurdles. Pressed by Ellen Laipson of the Stimson Center to
reconcile Algeria's involvement in the Arab League's involvement in Syria with
its policy of non-intervention, Medelci explained that he considers the Arab
League mission as less a matter of interference, but an effort to prevent broader interference through providing an option for
third-party mediation.

Medelci was nothing if not positive in his
assessment. Speaking of its revolutionary neighbors in North Africa, he told
the audience, "We hope that these countries now control their destiny and can
join us as stronger partners. We need stronger partners, but we are not in a
position to be hegemonic. We don't have lessons to teach but we share a
revolutionary heritage." This July will mark the fiftieth anniversary of
Algeria's independence from France, and while, for now, Algeria's
non-interventionist intervention in Syria may be the center of attention, it is
shaping up to be a dramatic year domestically as well. Here's hoping it lives
up to the foreign minister's optimism.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs on how to win arguments, and also on W.B.Yeats

I was struck by Gen. Martin Dempsey's observation of what prevails
in policy and planning discussions: "when I go into a meeting to discuss
policy, discuss strategy, discuss operations, plans, whatever it happens to be,
he who has the best context generally prevails in the argument, not necessarily
who's got the best facts. There's a difference. It's who has the best
context in which those facts exist."

I think Dempsey is right, and the implication is that the
way to successfully develop policy is to develop a framework or even a
narrative. In other words, you say, "you all know about X, Y and Z. Here is
what I think those facts mean, how they are connected."

In the same speech, delivered recently at Duke University,
he also made a comment on the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats that
actually is related: "he was probably one of those poets
unique in that he changed; he allowed himself to change and to reflect about
that change as he moved through his life. Now, he did some really bizarre
stuff at the end of his life but, that said, he was always a man who could understand
his time and himself, and he understood in that regard the context in which he
was living." Dempsey didn't offer an example of Yeats understanding his time,
but for starters, I'd recommend "An Irish Airman
Foresees His Death," one of my favorite poems ever, and one of the first I
ever memorized. Next, read "Easter 1916."  

Yeats also wrote these lines that I kept thinking
of back in 2003, as the Iraq war began:

Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The last two lines kept ringing in my head as I watched
pundits on TV back then.

Was there academic freedom at Annapolis during the Israeli ambassador's visit?

When the Israeli ambassador visited
the U.S. Naval Academy last week, students were instructed not to bring up the USS Liberty incident, reports one
midshipmen.

That may sound like simple
courtesy -- except that the diplomat's subject apparently was the history of
friendship between the American naval service and his country. "His speech was
primarily aimed at convincing a group of young midshipmen that Israel was their
eternal and greatest ally," the midshipmen says. "Drawing on historical anecdotes,
he was able to create a sense of kinship between not just America and Israel,
but the U.S. Navy and Israel." 

The midshipmen says the pre-visit
instructions were along the lines of, "It is not appropriate, in a setting like
this, to bring up any major points of contention during conversation, current
or historical. It is okay to talk about issues like Iran or the two state
solution, where our nations have a largely common view. But it's not okay to
bring up grievances like the
USS Liberty, if you are familiar with that incident."

Comment of the day: Quiggle on what kind of sh*t is going down in Afghanistan

Tom: I believe this is a Best Defense first, an
author commenting
on the comments posted in response to his
original column and being promoted to comment of the day.

"As the author scans these responses, he's
struck by how truly their tones of anger, frustration, and, especially, disgust
echo the same tones of anger, frustration, and disgust he heard so often and so
eloquently expressed by his students at FOB Fenty. Outrage and just plain-old
RAGE toward Afghans, toward the war in Afghanistan, and toward those running
the war in Afghanistan often erupted into our classroom discussions. (Most of
the time, however, we laughed our relatively clean butts off. The gift of
laughter is something that those students at Fenty gave in abundance to each
other and to the classroom. Laughter, it often seemed to me, was the only
possible human response to what the students described of war's innumerable
inhuman absurdities.) As one responder notes, such discussions were nothing but
"navel-staring." Where else does one begin a discussion about the treatment of
shit, if not by re-examining the essential nature of one's own core values?
Navel staring and even sphincter sniffing-indeed!

"Cleanliness," as another responder rightly
notes, is a core military value. And shit really is the great leveller. It
demands self examination. But after all, our own shit smells like roses,
doesn't it? Or, as one student put it, "this type of war is anything but
clean."

Behind my student's outrage was his legitimate
perception of an injustice. He smelled a turd in the milk. And it was my duty
as a professor to encourage him roll up his sleeves and fish around for that
turd. As many responders have noted here, there IS something fundamentally
unjust about U.S. soldiers being forced to use toilettes made filthy and
unsanitary by their ANA counterparts and vice versa. Like many responders here,
some of my students suggested that that student's outraged sense of justice
points to and emerges from the underlying injustice of the war in Afghanistan.
(Or, as they put it, "What the hell are we really doing here?") Others
suggested, like a few responders here, that that injustice stemmed from
unintelligent, lazy, or incompetent military leadership. ("Give the ANA
separate latrines," as one responder put it. Separate but equal?) Still
others suggested that that injustice is rooted in the purportedly barbaric
cultural habits of Afghans.

(To the responder who distrusts historical
canine analogies, the Alexander "meme" was brought forward spontaneously in
response to the student's outrage, as what we might call a "teaching moment,"
because that class happened to be Greek mythology, and I happened to have
prepared a lecture on the history of Alexander's invasion of Bactra. You make
an excellent point, though, and it would make more sense, especially right now,
to give a detailed lecture about the final days of Mohammed Najib's rule, such
as Peter Tomsen performs in The
Wars in Afghanistan.)

That the situation U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan
face right now is fundamentally unjust cannot be denied. As recent events in
Afghanistan demonstrate, U.S. soldiers are increasingly likely to be shot by ANA
even within the supposed safety of the FOB. Fobbits must watch their backs in
Afghanistan today.

All of my students were suffering in one way or
another from multiple-deployment fatigue. And all expressed (or vented) serious
doubts about the value of our mission in Afghanistan. Morale there, as compared
to that of AFRICOM where my students held their head very high, is low.

My intention in posting the essay was to draw
attention from an increasingly indifferent civilian U.S. population to the tragic
predicament in which our servicemen and women find themselves in the war in
Afghanistan.

The trickiness of their predicament was
mirrored by what I was also hearing from my Afghan tent mates at Fenty, which
were exactly the same tones of anger, frustration, and disgust-only, they aimed
their outrage and RAGE at U.S. soldiers. Quartered in a "transient" tent that was supposed to be exclusively designated for local-national Afghan interpreters, Pashtun, Nuristanis, and Pashais, I was the only non-Afghan living in this tent. And I admit that I was not especially comfortable in that tent, chiefly because a few of them told me they didn't want me there. They didn't want any of us there, as one fellow put it. So, I asked him what would happen to Afghanistan if we were to go home immediately, as he claimed he wanted. What about Pakistan? What about the Taliban? What about the Uzbeks? And Tajiks? He responded by saying, "Afghans are not afraid to die." When I heard that, I didn't know whether to shit or go blind.

One responder rightly notes that to get compliance at the macro-level you need to gain it at the micro-level, first. I can only wonder how you gain compliance at any level from a people who are not afraid to die?

And if compliance be impossible in Afghanistan, then I very well may have been sent, as another responder put it, on a "fool's errand." I most certainly did feel like a fool much of my time in Afghanistan, but not when I was in the presence of those students. Despite the impossibility of the many tricky situations they confront daily on behalf of a nation that has largely forgotten this war; despite the frustration, the disgust, the outrage and the rage, despite shit in their showers and in their sinks, despite their deployment fatigue, they demonstrated daily the mental resiliency that General Petraeus believes is essential to becoming a competent war fighter. "We cannot," Petraeus argues, "be competent warfighters unless we are as intelligent and mentally tough as we are aggressive and physically rugged." Fool's errand or not, my students did, on the whole, demonstrate that their core values are strong and resilient enough to "take their shit."

But perhaps the really difficult part for many of my students will be leaving the shit of Afghanistan behind when the time comes to make the long odyssey back home to a nation of civilians who largely do not understand the nearly imponderable nature of the task our servicemen and women were asked to perform in Afghanistan."

How did the 9/11 wars change the Army?

That was the question a friend posed the other day. Here,
slightly edited for clarity and further reflection, is what I wrote back to
him:

My impression is that
the Army is kind of all over the place these days. It reminds me a bit of the
years in the mid-1950s before the Pentomic Army.

The looming budget
cuts are the biggest thing shaping today's force. The Army may be going into
what Eliot Cohen once called "the Uptonian hunker,"
waiting for the budget cuts to hit.

The second biggest
thing is the dog that isn't barking. As far as I can see, there is very little
interest in turning over the rock to figure out what the Army has learned in
the last 10 years, how it has changed, what it has done well, what it hasn't.
More than a Harry Summers, where is the intellectual equivalent of a
self-evaluation such as the 1970 study on Army
professionalism? Shouldn't the Army be asking itself how it has changed,
and looking at  the state of its officer corps? We have seen some terrible
leadership but very little official inclination to examine its causes. A couple
of years ago, I noticed in reviewing my notes for my book Fiasco that, to an extent I hadn't noticed while writing it, it was
the battalion commanders' critique of their generals.  

We have seen had huge
changes in the way the Army fights. It isn't just the flirtation with
conventional troops doing COIN. ( U.S. troop-intensive COIN has indeed gone out
of intellectual fashion, but not I think a more FID-ish COIN.) It also is:

An Army that does
indeed win first battles but still doesn't believe that war termination is its
business. (See the Bacevich piece in the
Moten volume.)


An Army whose
generals frequently do not seem to be able to think strategically, and treats
those who do as outliers.


An Army that cannot
fight without the presence of thousands of mercenaries on the battlefield,
subject to neither local law nor military justice, and so polluting American
efforts.


An Army that
has fought our first sustained overseas war (and in fact, 2 of them) without a
draft. (The all-volunteer force has proven remarkably cohesive and resilient
under the resulting stress.)  


The one area where
the Army seems genuinely comfortable is the technological, with information
systems rapidly advancing, especially the use of drone aircraft for
reconnaissance.

What are your
thoughts, grasshoppers? What am I missing?

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: Marines save one of their own

By
Rebecca Frankel

Best
Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

When
it comes to the on-the-job dangers MWDs and their handlers face on the
frontlines from IEDs, Taliban sniper fire, it's easy to forget that some of the
most lethal hazards are not the far-away extremes of combat zones, but much
closer to home. For Dingo,
a five-year-old Marine Corps working dog, the lethal enemy that almost got the
better of him was a snake hiding in the grass of his own backyard.

It
was an unseasonably warm afternoon in early December. Handler Cpl. Stacy K. Chester and were running training drills
along the edge of the woods in Cherry Point, NC when Chester noticed a red mark
on the German Shepherd's leg.

"When I saw the swelling begin to rush up Dingo's leg and I
knew it was a snake bite, I thought the worst," said Chester.

The
veterinarian at the air station quickly determined that Dingo had suffered two
punctures and the rapid swelling told him that there was a great and lethal
amount of venom in Dingo's system. Chester quickly called around but no
antivenin could be found -- the nearest supply that they could find was in
Norfolk, VA hundreds of miles away and the window of opportunity for treatment
was closing fast.

When
the higher-ups at the station heard of Dingo's dire situation word from top
came through: "Do whatever it takes to get that dog
treatment." The search and rescue team was contacted and they transported Dingo
to the Norfolk naval station, saving his life. "If we had to drive him to get
the antivenin I wouldn't have Dingo here with me right now," Chester said. "They saved my best friend."

There are a few things we can takeaway from Dingo's brush
with death. For the vet clinic at Cherry point, it's knowing where the
locations of local antivenin (which they now do). But for the rest of us it's
knowing that among these teams there is an immediate call to action - that they
do rally around their working dogs. There was no hemming and hawing over
resources, no measuring of value. According to the pilot who flew Dingo to
Norfolk, they were just saving one of their own.

My first thoughts when briefed by our
operations section was, 'Wait a dog?' After being told that it was a working dog
I said, 'Hey we have a Marine bitten, let's get moving.' Those dogs are just as
important to this base as the Marines. They protect us and detect bombs that
could kill hundreds of Marines. I was happy to fly him."

A Hidden Battlefield -- Inside the Barracks

By Donna McAleer

Best Defense giant slalom correspondent

Forget the creepy guys in trench coats -- the Penn State University and the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals remind us that it's harder than you might imagine to identify sex offenders inside institutions. Put that perpetrator in military uniform or clerical apparel and we want to deny it is even possible. Be it renegades, robes or uniforms, rape is the betrayal of trust manifest.

U.S. servicewomen are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a solider than they are likely to be killed in the line of fire. The new battlefield is the barracks.

The Invisible War, a documentary film premiering at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, is an investigative and enraging emotional analysis of the epidemic of rape and sexual assault within the U.S. military. If the term "epidemic" seems strident or alarmist, the facts chillingly reveal that sexual assault and rape are prevalent and that the military justice system presently in place is an enabler that shockingly perpetuates the crime. It is not an abberration. In fact, the closed military justice system is a target-rich environment for a sexual predator.

The 2010 Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military indicates that 3,158 cases were officially reported. A Department of Defense survey of active duty members revealed that only 13.5 percent of sexual assaults within the services were reported. The Pentagon itself estimates that more than 19,000 incidents of sexual assault actually occurred in 2010, not the 3,158 officially reported.

Invisible War vividly portrays the intense and extreme personal and social consequences that result from these brutal crimes. This is not only a woman's story, it is a man's story. Rape is a crime of power and violence. Within the military, this is a troop welfare issue. Within society, this is human rights story.

The academy-award winning team of Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering and Geralyn Dreyfous deliver an powerful film that makes a strong call for fundamental change in the way the violent crimes of rape and sexual assault are handled. Fully aware of the explosive nature of the topic, the filmmakers' overriding agenda is to provide a positive portrait of our armed forces and a balanced account showing how the services, through addressing the issue of rape and sexual assault within its ranks, could better realize and support the men and women who proudly wear our nation's uniforms.

The film treats this traumatic and highly charged issue in as balanced a manner as possible. The crimes are real and their consequences are devastating, but this documentary is not a hatchet job. The producers and directors have done an admirable job getting on-screen interviews with a number of civilian experts in the field, politicians, and retired officers up to and including the rank of lieutenant general.

Through the drama of the survivors of rape and sexual assault, The Invisible War offers a possible solution to the epidemic-a change to the military justice system in how cases of rape and sexual assault are investigated, prosecuted and punished. The call is to take them out of the survivor's chain of command. Canada and the United Kingdom along with most of our NATO allies, no longer allow military commanders to determine the prosecution of sexual assault cases.

Today military law requires that the officers directly in charge of the offenders decide how these cases are handled. This creates a clear conflict of interest and as a result, in the vast majority of sexual assault cases charges are not proffered. Only 8 percent of sexual assault cases are prosecuted and only 2 percent are convicted. [[BREAK]]

When women and men put themselves at risk to serve their country, they deserve to know that their chain of command and a grateful nation have got their backs. They deserve a basic guarantee of safety within our own Armed Forces. It is so ironic that the very forces we rely on to defend our country, and its pillar principles of freedom and equality, is the same group of forces that threatens women (and men) in its own ranks. It show what dangerous animals we are at heart.

It is not surprising that nearly 80 percent of these crimes go unreported. This is a profession, a culture and an environment in which strength, both physical and emotional, is paramount. Strength is a proxy for leadership.

Rape in any circumstance is violent, brutal and a heinous crime. In the military the effects are exacerbated. Victims are often ignored, their wounds (physical, emotionally, and spiritual) are left untended, and the psychological damage festers silently, poisoning lives. The scars, physical, emotional and professional, persist. Survivors are expected to carry on, facing their attacker on a daily basis. And each day they relive it-again and again. These crimes have robbed the survivors of their pride, confidence, esteem, dignity, physicality and voice.

In both peace and in war, the military has to exist and operate as a team. This is part of the entire socialization and culturalization process. We are taught this and buy into from our first day in basic training. We are a unit. And a unit implies unity. When someone is raped and violated by someone within the unit and others within the unit do not take it seriously, unit cohesion fragments.

The importance of unit cohesion, "the bonding together of soldiers in such a way as to sustain their will and commitment to each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment, despite combat or mission stress" was first established in the founding our Nation. "My first wish would be that my military family, and the whole Army, should consider themselves as a band of brothers, willing and ready to die for each other," wrote George Washington to Henry Knox on 21 October 1798. As that excerpt from George Washington's letter to the first secretary of war of the United States illustrates, cohesion has been a fundamental objective for military leaders since the founding of the institution. Yet current case disposition of rape and sexual assault virtually overlook the importance of unit cohesion.

It is no wonder that 33 percent of female soldiers did not report their rape because the person to report to was a friend of the rapist or that 25 percent of female soldiers did not report their rape because the person to report to was the rapist.

And there are financial consequences. The Veterans Administration spends approximately $10,880 on healthcare costs per military sexual assault survivor. In 2010 alone, adjusting for inflation, the VA spent $872 million dollars on sexual assault related healthcare cases. The Department of Defense (DOD) estimated that legal expenses that result from military sexual assault cases average $40,000 per case. With 481 sexual assault-related courts-marital cases in 2010, DOD legal expenses totaled more than $19 million dollars. Those are known costs. Who knows what the true costs are giving all the unreported cases.

The Invisible War does not just present the drama of the survivors, most of whom did not see their assailants punished and in some cases actually saw him promoted, but it presents a possible solution to the end the problems with sexual violence. It shows us that these survivors are not invisible.

The solution proffered is a radical overhaul in the military justice system making it similar to the civil system where a survivor can report to the police, and the crime is investigated and prosecuted by an impartial judicial system.

While this is a painful, poignant and devastating film and the subject matter is controversial, it will have a lasting impact.

Donna McAleer of Park City, Utah, is a West Point graduate, a former Army officer and the author of Porcelain on Steel: Women of West Point's Long Gray Line (Fortis Publishing, 2010). Providing full disclosure, Donna was an interview subject in The Invisible War.

Ahmed Rashid explains Pakistan: The military isn't plotting a coup, but it won't give up its economic stake and privileges

His take
makes sense to me. So I am less worried by the prospect of a military coup, but
no less concerned about the general drift of Pakistan.

Since the 1950s every political crisis Pakistan has faced
has been a result of civilians trying to wrest power and control from the
military. This crisis is no different except for one important aspect -
the military has no intention of seizing power. Instead it has allied with
the
Supreme Court in an attempt to get rid of a government that is widely
perceived to be corrupt and irresponsible.

But in an era when hope of democracy is spreading
through the Arab Muslim world and powerful armies in countries such as Thailand
and Turkey have learnt to live under civilian control, Pakistan is an ongoing
tragedy. Its military refuses to give up power, its huge stake in the economy and
its privileges, while its politicians refuse to govern wisely or honestly and
decline to carry out basic economic reforms such as taxing themselves.

Of Alexander, gods and bathrooms: Why the Afghans can't 'get their shit together'

By Doyle Quiggle

Best Defense department of classical
studies

A few minutes before the beginning of a Greek mythology
class at FOB Fenty, Jalalabad, for which I'd prepared to lecture on Alexander
the Great's swift invasion but treacherous occupation of Afghanistan, my best
student stomped into the classroom, slammed his M4 down on the table, and
announced, "I can't take their shit anymore!"

After his classmates and I had calmed him down,
he explained that the walls, stall door, and floor of the toilet he'd just used
were smeared with feces. They were always
smeared with feces, he complained. He was furious about being forced daily to
use facilities that were, as he put it, "Inhumanely, barbarically unhygienic
and filthy." He and his unit shared their toilet with the ANA, as they had been
ordered to do by their commanding officers-"hearts and minds." And it was the
custom of the ANA to wipe themselves with their hands, smear their excrement on
the walls of the toilette, and rinse their hands in the sink, which left the
sinks reeking, a reek made especially acrid and pungent by the Afghans' high
intake of goat meat and goat milk. While brushing his teeth, my student often
had to struggle to keep down his gorge.

The outraged student, who, despite TSIRT, knew dangerously little about the
cultural habits of any of the many Afghan tribes, had begun to take the ANA's
toilette habits personally. I wanted to get my student to explore the source of
his outrage. But I did not want to relativize or dismiss his outrage because I
have learned that outrage always points toward a perception of injustice. It,
therefore, also implies a healthy and intact sense of justice, which is
something I encourage in students. So, I suggested to him that he was being
faced (in the toilet customs of the ANA) with what Alexander's Macedonian
Greeks would have called "borborygmus," a word that Plato and Aristophanes and
Homer used to describe the filthy, excremental sewage of the underworld of
Hades. For was he not in a kind of underworld (Hades or hell) on deployment in
an Afghanistan he barely understood? Borborygmus not only means "shit." It also
connotes "shit fearing." Borborophoba was known as the Goddess of the realm of
death. She had the power to keep shit from flowing, but she also possessed the
power to make it flow in the face of mortal fear and threat of death. Every
combat soldier has been struck by her bowel- and bladder-releasing powers at
least once in his life.

We then recalled what we'd read of David Grossman in On Killing, "the physiology of the fight: the body's role in combat
and the skill to kill," where he explains in the modern language of physiology
what the Greeks described in the metaphorical language of myth:

"Homeostasis is the balance struck between SNS and PNS during normal
routine behavior, and can be thrown completely out of synchronicity when confrontation
occurs, with PNS systems largely shutting down. One result of this can be the
body 'blowing the ballast', that is the dumping of unnecessary bodily
substances which are of no benefit in combat - urine and feces, a rather
unseemly but wholly natural bodily response to confrontation. This loosening of
muscles which would be potentially drawing energy without contributing to the
immediate task of survival is associated with the recession of PNS systems as
the SNS is in the ascendancy."

Now, the smeared feces that my student had been dealing with daily in his
ANA-USA shared toilet was not the result of a loss of homeostasis due to
threat, but it did point to the realm of Borborophoba, and it pointed most
directly to the underlying cultural void between soldiers like my student and
the Afghan Army. As every anthropologist or mythographer knows, shit is the
great leveler. It marks a psychic and cultural border. How a culture treats
excrement, waste (all of that which it discards) speaks volumes about that
culture. And when we are confronted with another culture's treatment of
excrement, we are often pushed to the threshold and outer border of our own
most deeply held, highly cherished values.

On the day of my student's enraged expression of borborophoba, I asked him and
his classmates to link his I-can't-take-their-shit-anymore outrage to that of
Alexander and his men when they arrived in Bactra where they discovered dogs
roaming the otherwise highly civilized city, dogs feeding upon human bodies. According
to the religious practices of the Bactrians, they threw not only their dead to
the dogs but also their sick, lame, and invalid elderly-anyone considered
social excrement or waste. Alexander and his men observed that the normal,
healthy citizens of Bactria went about their daily business even as dogs
devoured human bodies in the streets. An upstanding Bactrian merchant might
walk past a pack of dogs feasting on a corpse as nonchalantly as a Greek
merchant would walk past a fish stand.

Although Alexander and his men had been exceptionally tolerant of the strange
cultural and religious practices of the many tribes they'd conquered since
defeating Darius at the Battle of Granicus, the use of devouring dogs was one
cultural bridge too far for the Macedonian Greeks. They simply could not
imagine disposing of the dead in any form other than a tomb or a funeral pyre.
Their invention of a Goddess like Borborophoba itself speaks to how ornately
and vividly they'd imagined the world after life. Alexander and his men could
not imagine anything more barbaric than encouraging dogs to devour the dead.
Contrariwise, the Bactrians could not imagine anyone being barbaric enough not
to do so with their dead.

The devouring dogs brought Alexander to a classic cultural impasse. And here
Alexander drew a strict line. He would no longer tolerate what he viewed as a
barbaric practice. He'd arrived at an I-can't-take-their-shit-anymore point of
outrage, and he banned the use of devouring dogs from Bactria. At this historic
moment, Alexander's real epic struggle began, the struggle to civilize
Afghanistan. And by civilize we mean simply that he enacted policies that
sought to force Afghanistan's tribes out of the bronze age and into the iron
age.

We spent the rest of the class drawing analogies from Alexander's occupation of
Bactra to the current ISAF mission in Afghanistan. That discussion involved our
detailing as many incompatible differences between the primary cultural habits
of US soldiers and those of the ANA, as well as the cultural habits of Afghans
that US soldiers had observed on off-base patrols. We discussed everything from
the treatment of excrement to the treatment of women. Many of my female
soldier-students could not see any difference between the two as far as Afghan
men were concerned. In order for our anthropological discussion to make any
difference whatsoever to my students, we had to "keep it real," as they would
say. To bite into the marrow, our discussion had to begin with harsh
differences, like the handling of shit in latrines, that had evoked an acute
emotional response from the soldiers. Only thereafter could we move on to the
academic observations made of Afghanis by such notable authors as Thomas
Barfield or Maratine van Bijlert or Antonio Giustozzi.

In other words, the professor treated his own students as if they were an alien
culture, working from within their value system and emotional matrix,
oscillating between their perceptions of an alien culture (Afghans) and that
culture's perceptions of them. I'd assiduously gathered the latter perceptions
from many chai-tea conservations with my tent mates, who were Afghan
interpreters, Pashtun, Nuristanis, and Pashais.

My pedagogical aim for my students was to encourage cultural intelligence
toward Afghans without encouraging any kind of soft-minded, limp-wristed
relativism of values (cultural relativity) in which their own commitment to
classical military core values such as loyalty, courage, selfless service,
integrity, moderation, and justice might be diluted or weakened. On the
contrary, my goal was to help them strengthen their commitment to those core
values by showing them that they can withstand the outside challenge of culture
to which they are wholly alien; they can, so to speak, "take their shit."

Doyle Quiggle taught oratory, rhetoric, and the
classics to U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in two different war
zones, at Camp Lemonnier (Djibouti, Africa) and at Forward Operating Base Fenty
(Jalalabad, Afghanistan). The honor of contributing to the education of war fighters on the battlefield was granted to Quiggle by the U.S. Army through a
contract with the University of Maryland, University College. Quiggle received
his PhD from Washington University.

Walter Kretchik's history of Army doctrine

You've got to be pretty wonky to look forward to an evening of
reading a history of U.S. Army doctrine, so I am coming out with my hands up to
confess: When my copy of Walter
Kretchik's book arrived in the mail, I couldn't wait to dig in. (For those
scratching their heads, my pocket definition of military doctrine is: How a
military thinks about what it does.)

When I put it down, I was not so happy. Kretchik's argument
is that "the American Army has been far more adaptive and innovative than
scholars have acknowledged." I wasn't persuaded.  

This book is not a narrative history of how each version of
the manual came to be. It doesn't explore the clashes over doctrine, nor even
much the personalities involved. I found it more a once-over-lightly trot
through what the changes to each edition of 100-5, as the Army's capstone
manual was known for years. I think I learned more from Robert Doughty's history
of the evolution of Army tactical doctrine from the end of World War II to
the end of the Vietnam War.

Even so, the book is useful as an overview for people trying
to track how Army doctrine has changed over the centuries, and especially since
the Vietnam War. It usefully summarizes the contents of each edition of the
Army's operations manual, highlighting differences and changes. 

Bottom line: This one is only for the hard-core
fan of American ground forces doctrine. The rest of youse who are only
occasional doctrinal dippers would be better off sticking to the
selected papers of General DePuy.