Deathworld

One of the best sci-fi novels of my youth was Harry Harrison's Deathworld series. Usually out of print the first of the series is a cautionary tale about imperialism and colonialism and, I always thought, about the settlement of Israel. Harrison describes a world, Pyhrus, that was settled by hopeful immigrants who found nothing but plants and animals and dreamed of a utopian community. Unfortunately for them the plants and animals of the planet were more or less sentient and fight back against the new immigrants by evolving, rapidly, to become deadly specifically to the human invaders. Without realizing it, the humans end up in an evolutionary species war--they must adjust their society, economy, culture, and child-rearing practices to deal with a planetary environment which is entirely hostile to them--everything from the local molds and ferns to the birds and mammals continuously evolve to kill them and pretty soon the humans can't leave their fortress homes without themselves being programmed from birth to kill or be killed. The story of what happened, and why, is discovered not by the Pyhrrans themselves, who are too caught up in the war to grasp its nature, but by a visiting rogue who pieces together the history of the planet and realizes that the very anger, fear, and rage of the humans is creating the permanent state of war with the planet. Unable to ratchet back their anger and fear or come to a truce with the planet and its flora and fauna, the humans are (eventually) forced to abandon their home and become wandering mercenaries. In other words, even when they finally grasp that the planet is simply reacting violently to their own violence, the Pyhrrans are unable to back down the evolutionary war path to their original intentions and their original peaceful society.

Basically, the same thing is happening in Afghanistan. We, like other states, have treated the Afghan people as though they are not sentient and have no real understanding of, or stake in, what we are doing for them (or to them.) And we are constantly surprised by the fact that they don't seem to be properly grateful to us, or able to protect us in their villages, or even able to spend our donations and our money responsibly. Well, why should they? Or more importantly, how should they? Afghan society has its own structures and its own institutions through which money, power, and culture flow. And it is only through those institutions that a redirection of Afghan energy from warfare to development can happen. Warfare, and specifically war with invaders, happens because there's nothing much else good going on and the immiediate necessity of attacking the enemy, or stealing his stuff, is more urgent and attractive than continuing to hack out a miserable existence farming or goat herding.

I don't know why this isn't incredibly obvious. We are a foreign invader--I don't care how nice we are, or how well intentioned, or how much money we spend. If the Mexicans started dropping bombs that combined shrapnel and money onto the streets of Brooklyn tomorrow, or tried a more targeted approach and handed out money to a few random people on the street, or to the garbage collectors, or to the odd person who spoke Spanish, we wouldn't really expect that that money would be used successfully to develop a parallel school system, or health care system, or anything else...would we? Graft, confusion, inability, and a total lack of local investment in the process would militate against actually achieving those goals, wouldn't they? Why is Afghanistan though of any differently?


If I had a goal in Afghanistan it would be to curtail the power of the warlords, educate the women and children, bring peeance and freeance to the villages, and to see the US not spend billions and billions of dollars blowing shit up. Also, I'd like to see the Taliban stop flowing over the border into Pakistan. Our problem in Afghanistan, in re the Taliban, is a problem that is not amenable to a military solution because the Taliban, ultimately, are a problem of Afghan cultural and political struggle over a rubble strewn economic backwater. The Taliban will continue to exist as long as young men can get more respect and money fighting than working their own fields. And the Taliban, as an anti woman and anti education force, will continue to exist as long as the education and empowerment of women and children are seen as destructive of local power relations and religious purity. Remove the threat of foreign interference and imperialism and you remove half the temptation to destroy schools and lives.

To get from this Afghanistan to a better Afghanistan we need peace, but our military can't get us peace. Only the Afghans themselves can get to peace. And they Afghan people will choose peace, and development, and education and protect those things when they control them just as they will only protect a new school when they have built it and own it.

So my gentle suggestion for the President, if anyone had been able to listen, would have been to withdraw from Afghanistan entirely and to inform the Afghan government and its local ministries that all further development monies would come only in the form of civilian contractors, doctors, teachers, books, etc... when the local Afghan authorities themselves requested it and guaranteed the safety of the mission. Its not that that would have been easy--its just that that is the way that anything gets done in a place like Afghanistan. Basically, villages, elders, political leaders decide what gets done and they make it happen/protect the process or they don't. If they want their daughters to be educated, they'll educate them. If they don't, they won't permit someone else to do it. And trying to force the process is a recipe for disaster.

That isn't to say that the way forward is closed. But the way forward has to be through local pathways. If opium is the main crop don't destroy it--buy it. If another crop could bring in more money, help people choose it and plant it and create a market for it. If young men don't have enough money and land to get married and settle down create off farm employment for them. Needless to say all this could be better done through non military means. Not because if we withdraw Afghanistan will be miraculously de-militarized, but because we don't know who to kill and the Afghans do. Just as we don't know what the Afghans want, the Afghans do.

aimai

My Reaction:

BUFFY: No! You guys are going to have a prom. The kind of prom that everyone should have. I'm going to give you all a nice, fun, normal evening if I have to kill every single person on the face of the earth to do it.

XANDER: Yay?

I'm too old to get excited and happy watching my president throw good lives and money after doomed to save Afghanistan from the Afghans. Fafblog had it about right.

Another Friedman Unit Down the Drain:

A U.S. military official used the term "decisional" to describe Monday evening's meeting among Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Gates, Clinton, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Eikenberry and senior U.S. military commanders.

The administration's plan contains "off-ramps," points starting next June at which Obama could decide to continue the flow of troops, halt the deployments and adopt a more limited strategy or "begin looking very quickly at exiting" the country, depending on political and military progress, one defense official said.

"We have to start showing progress within six months on the political side or military side or that's it," the U.S. defense official said.

That's it? Well, all righty then!

Ah, well. I hoped Obama would be courageous enough to take the bull by the horns rather than "letting us down easy" by throwing another 34,000 troops x 1 million dollars down the drain. I take it that this is part of the long projected "declare something and get out" strategy that never really pans out. It reminds me of the old joke: A Drill Sargent must inform a recruit that his mother has died. He lets the kid down easy "son, your mother is very sick but she's going to get better..." Next week "son, your mother is very sick, its not looking good..." Week after "son, your mother is very sick, she may not make it..." and so on and on and on until the kid has been so thoroughly broken to the news that it doesn't come as any surprise. Well, its funnier when someone else tells it. Not the President.

aimai

The Earth Never Stands Still:


Yesterday, apparently, President Obama began to give hints that he might consider taking “none of the above” as his approach to America's latest quagmire in Afghanistan. Forgive me if I'm not too hopeful. I believe that Obama is smart enough to grasp that America's confused love affair with its abusive husband, Aggressive War, is not going to be ended easily and without more therapeutic intervention than one President can offer. If Obama were willing to take one for the team and have a single term in office he could get up tomorrow and explain directly to a sobbing populace that war is never going to change, and never going to be able to make us happy, and never going to stop killing people, and never stop destroying. In real speak: that the only way to get out of Afghanistan is to...well...leave. We can achieve nothing there in the long or the short term and that we could better use the money at home. Then he would just do it, and devil take the hindmost. Of course it would be bad for his electoral prospects in 2012. No one ever likes the friend who steps forward and explains that the relationship is not working out. And it might be bad for the Democratic Party who will be blamed for being so weak and faithless and not having the will to win. But it wouldn't be a bad bargain with history or with the American people (or, if we are counting them, the Afghan people).

I don't really expect that level of self sacrifice from Obama. No one gets to the White House without an extra-ordinary sense of their own importance in the scheme of things. And Obama and a democratic president are important in the scheme of things. There are so many big and little fires to put out. So much work to be done. But life by life and death by death? If that's in the accounting I'm not sure that being the man to end two wars wouldn't outweigh those imagined future goods.

But what I think doesn't really matter—what Obama thinks is what is important. And here its clear that none of us, certainly not our leaders, can escape the myopia induced by the narrow focus of the day to day decisions. In The Day The Earth Stood Still Hollywood proposed a situation in which a direct and apparent threat to humanity—in the form of the end of electrical and other power—would bring about a changed consciousness that would enable political actors to transcend petty differences of viewpoint (language, culture, history, politics, interest). The other thing that forced local actors to think beyond petty local considerations was the immediacy, the primacy, of the threat.

War, as it turns out, is not such a threat. And neither is mass death. The everyday, grinding, political realities of the big board and negotiations among “important” political figures always take precedence over the little lives and the petty suffering of ordinary civilians and soldiers. This is nowhere more clear than in reading the account of the intersection between an “important” war and an important plague—World War I and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. It turns out to be the case that despite a massive, short, sharp, crisis of international proportions and gruesome local fall out that the war machine kept grinding on. The political necessities of winning the war far exceeded the ability of any of its participants to call even a truce to consider whether in the light of the crisis among civilians and troops perhaps war itself was not a viable activity?

To give you a sense of the scope of the crisis:

“In four years, three months, and five days, World War I claimed some ten million lives. In ten months, Spanish influenza killed between twenty-one and forty million people.” (Influenza 1918:204)

Second, the nature of the deaths:

“Men were choking to death, gagging on the bloody regurgitations of their fluid-filled lungs. Faces turned grey, purple, then brown. Labored breathing produced a weird, duck-like quack...the blood of the dying soldier was black and gummy, as viscous as tar...The pain began behind the eyes, spread to the ears, the neck, the spine, and the legs. A soaring fever, chills, and delirium made for a painful, mind numbing, ordeal...”

“Doctors often could not diagnose the mysterious disease, let alone cure it. The first cases at Camp Devens were treated as cerebrospinal meningitis; the illness was simply too explosive, and too violent, for “flu.” From all over the world—Australia, Russia, India, South America—reports were coming in of weird, sinister complications. Influenza patients were developing cataracts, vertigo, enlarged spleens, gangrene of the sexual organs. Purple blisters appeared on blue, oxygen-starved skin. Some autopsies revealed the cause of death as asphyxia of the alveoli: bloody lungs had literally suffocated from lack of oxygen. There were other findings too, pathologic findings never before associated with influenza: leucopenia—where the blood becomes deficient in white cells; deafness; blindness; and coma.” (Influenza 1918:50)

Thirdly: the location and demographic scope of the deaths. Its not surprising that the fact that men were dying in record numbers in the field should escape attention or concern. Once in the field soldiers are merely numbers, after all. But the deaths from Influenza on the various home fronts and around the world were of an entirely different order. Whole families died, and within days of catching the disease. Towns closed down to all "outsiders" and people still died--because their postal clerks delivered mail and the disease on their rounds. Pregnant women died, by the score. People died so rapidly that theft of coffins became common—even after they'd been used. Young people could be married the morning and dead at night. It was impossible to dig private graves in many cases. Bodies were described as “stacked like cordwood.”

This was all happening in a time of war—and not just in a time of war, but because of the war. The draft, the movement of young men and women from the hinterland to the city/camp/port--the close quarters of military life, and the places where military life crossed the civilian world (railways, ports, restaurants, military celebrations, public weddings, public funerals) were all locations where the disease throve and spread.

Eventually the reality of the death toll in the US among soldiers crashed right into the needs of the Allied War Machine:

“Now, an invisible enemy—the shadowy Spanish Lady—was proving deadlier even that Erich von Ludendorff's dogged German legions. In one week in the Argonne alone, sixteen thousand American soldiers had come down with influenza, joining the seventy thousand already sick. German troops, decimated by influenza's spring wave, seemed, for the moment, immune to this more lethal, fall strain, a strain which was devastating Pershing's fresh American divisions. Still, Marshal Foch continued to pressure Pershing. More doughboys were needed. Only fresh, energetic American troops could smash through the Hindenburg Line and secure an Allied victory. Pershing cabled Washington: “Influenza exists in epidemic form amongst our troops. Request fifteen thousand members of Army Nurse Corps. RUSH RUSH RUSH.” Then he cabled for more men. But this time, Pershing's plea hit a stone wall.”

Why the stone wall? Because the troop boats themselves were a vector for the illness--bringing it to the US, and then back to Europe:

Meanwhile “Cables from Brest, France, tersely accouned that American convoys were arriving with overwhelming numbers of sick and dead.” (Influenza 1918: 57) “On October 7, the Leviathan, America's mightiest transport, arrived in Brest with an equivalent number of corpses...seven hundred fell sick on the Leviathan after only a single day at sea...the number of sick swelled above two thousand...orderlies picked among the dying for the dead...when the vessel arrived in France 969 influenza victims were taken to Brest's already crammed hospitals. For two hundred doughboys, the Atlantic journey on America's mightiest troopship ended in a French cemetery in Labezellec...” (Influenza 1918: 98).

Back at home:

The Provost Marshall General of the Army, General Enoch Crowder, had spent much of the month of September charged with the onerous task of identifying and rounding up draft dodgers. Spanish influenza, however, soon eclipsed even the compelling, thorny issue of America's “slackers.” Nearly all army camps in the United States were under quarantine. Conditions in Europe were even worse. Only a few weeks earlier, the Chief Surgeon of the Port of New York had declared, “We can't stop this war on account of Spanish or any other kind of influenza.” He turned out to be wrong. Influenza now had higher priority than the war. On October 7, Crowder canceled the army's October draft for 142,000 new recruits. An additional draft of 78,000 men, scheduled for late October, was canceled as well.

But the War itself was at an inflection point:

President Woodrow Wilson faced a crucial and agonizing decision. On October 6, Max, Prince of Baden and Imperial Chancellor of Germany, had appealed to the President to begin negotiations for an armistice. Neither Marshal Foch nor General Pershing nor Wilson himself trusted the efficacy of Max's plea. Germany was in turmoil. Could an imperial ruler guarantee the response of the German people? Was it consistent or even correct for Wilson—democracy's most vocal and eloquent advocate—to deal with a government which was not a government of the people? Like Foch and Pershing, Wilson sensed only a decisive military victory was a truly secure one. On the other hand, the war was fueling the deadly pandemic. To consign fresh recruits to army camps or crowded troopships would mean sending thousands of men to their deaths. A few days earlier, Dr. Victor Heiser, an eminent sanitarian had stated, “It is more dangerous to be a soldier in the peaceful United States than to have been in the firing-line in France. Is there a military or other emergency that would justify so great a sacrifice of life?” The numbers were truly staggering. At U.S. Army camps, one in every four soldiers was sick. On the day Crowder canceled the October draft, 6, 139 more soldiers fell ill. In Hoboken, New Jersey, and other ports of embarkation for Europe, deaths from influenza-related pneumonia had reached a stunning 20 percent...


At 9:40 P.M. on Tuesday, October 8 [Wilson made the decision.]...Everything possible was being done to control the spread of the disease. “Despite all this,” [Army Chief of Staff Payton] March conceded, soldiers continued to get sick. “But,” he affirmed, “every such soldier who has died [on board ship] has just as surely played his part as his comrade who has died in France.” March continued: “In the face of the German Chancellor's appeal, think of the effect on a weakening enemy if they learned that American divisions and replacements were no longer reaching Pershing.” Every American who could bear arms must be shipped to Europe “as a show of strength.” “The shipment of troops should not be stopped for any cause,” the General concluded emphatically.

Years later, Paton March remembered: “President Wilson turned in his chair and gazed out the window. The sacrifice of the lives of all these fine Americans distressed him to the soul. He gave a faint sigh and nodded. Then his eyes twinkled and he said 'General, I wonder if you have heard this limerick: 'I had a little bird and its name was Enza...'” (ellipses in the original.)

Wilson made his decision. Shipments of troops to Europe would continue. March cabled Pershing: “If we are not stopped on account of influenza, which has passed the 200,000 mark, you will get replacements by 30 November.” (Influenza 1918: 102-104.)

Well, we “won” the First World War, so perhaps it was the right call? I can't say. I don't think its necessary to say. But essentially this is the decision that Obama and our Generals face right now. Not because of any pandemic, but because the stark choice always remains the same. Fight on with casualties abroad (among the fighters and the civilians in the war zone) and at home (among those neglected and impoverished by the war) in order to conclusively “win” a given war. Or shut down the war machine and tend to our own dead and dying at home.

Some wars are so necessary that we can't afford that choice. I don't think that WWI was that necessary—and I'm really sure that Afghanistan isn't. Sometimes the choice is so stark that it becomes obvious that we simply can't sustain the military losses. Again, Afghanistan isn't one of those wars. And neither is the obvious parallel to the 1918 pandemic: our broken health care system, our damaged economy, our dying ecology. There's really no clear gallows hanging nearby, no piled up American corpses at home or abroad so high and so vast as to make that choice stark enough for Obama and his advisors. And when there was such a gallows “concentrating his mind” Wilson found himself believing that the end justified the means or at least that we were too far gone—too many sunk costs—to count the cost further.

Hard to see how this ends well.

There Are Known Knowns, and Unknown Unknowns, and then there's WTF?

From a reported exchange of views on Afghanistan:

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) said everyone at the table in the State Dining Room shouldered part of the responsibility for the decision.

A Senate aide told TPMDC that Kerry said, "Mr. President, this is your ultimate decision, but it's shared by the Congress because together we have to hold together the consent of the American people for this policy, that's one of the lessons of Vietnam."

McCain later said he disagreed with his colleague. "This is your decision - your sole decision," he told Obama.

Lately our political discourse seems to me to have become not merely more opaque but ultimately insane. Its partly the abymsmal reporting and editing. But its partly because people like McCain don't mind acting out like toddlers having a sugar induced meltdown. I can't even figure out what this exchange is supposed to mean. McCain is supposed to have urged Obama to quick, decisive, action because after 8 years the next five minutes are always "of the essence." To me this is like the fat man on the elevator screaming at the skinny guy who gets on last that he is responsible if the elevator falls. Kerry seems to have done the gracious and logical thing and pointed out that every single person in that room, who has been around for the last eight years, bears some responsibility to think this through carefully. McCain seems to be stuck on using an actual war, and the deaths of thousands of people, as a manly way of sobbing that he would, too have been a better president than Obama.

aimai