Afghanistan II

[photo: Jim Huylebroek, New York Times]

 

“On the afternoon of October 9, 2009, President Barack Obama met with his top generals, Cabinet officials, and his vice president to hash out strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, along with much of the military brass, were pushing for a troop increase of 40,000 to 85,000 in Afghanistan. Advocates for an expanded war found their most nettlesome opponent in Joe Biden.

“‘As I read your report, you’re saying that we have about a year,’ Biden said to McChrystal. ‘And that our success relies upon having a reliable, a strong partner in governance to make this work?’

“McChrystal said yes, that was the case. Biden turned to Karl Eikenberry, a former general who was now ambassador to Afghanistan. ‘In your estimation, can we, can that be achieved in the next year?’

“Eikenberry told Biden no, it was not possible. ‘Right now, we’re dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government,’ he said.

“Biden cut in: ‘If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?’ he asked.

“Woodward’s next lines are the most telling: ‘No one recorded an answer in their notes.’

“Again, Biden asked: ‘If the government doesn’t improve and if you get the troops, in a year, what would be the impact?’

“Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, chimed in with a reality that was largely kept from the U.S. public. ‘Our presence is the corrupting force,’ Holbrooke said. It’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.’”

—Ryan Grim, “Biden’s basic question in a 2009 White House meeting exposed the folly of the Afghanistan war,” The Intercept, Sep 2 2021

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“In the name of preventing deaths from political violence at home, the United States has fueled a generation of political violence abroad—some 46,000 civilian deaths and 69,000 national military and police deaths in Afghanistan, at least 185,000 civilian deaths and at least 45,000 national military and police in Iraq. However, support for the Afghanistan withdrawal has equally reflected a belief in the ‘smarter’ use of US military might. This entails raining death and destruction on terrorist networks (and civilian bystanders) through air wars and drone strikes while redirecting personnel and material towards Russia and China. When Fareed Zakaria frames a US commitment to Afghanistan as ‘imperial overextension,’ his problem seems to be with the overextension, not the imperial presence.

Andrew Leber, “Losing the wars,” Fellow Travelers, Sep 12, 2021

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“Ghani spent his formative years in the United States as both a student and professor. His children still live in the States; in fact, his son is a top aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and his daughter-in-law worked for now-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Ironically, Ghani was often at odds with the basic principles and values the United States were trying to promote in Afghanistan. His government and the strongmen linked to him pursued abuses with impunity. The targeted killing in November 2020 of my brother Yama Siawash, who was a prominent journalist and a staunch critic of Ghani and his strongmen, highlights this impunity. Yama was consistently threatened by Ghani’s supporters as he engaged in heated debates with senior officials on live television, seeking to hold his government to account through his journalism. The car bomb, which killed my brother, occurred in a vehicle owned by the Afghan government and was parked in the government’s parking lot in Kabul’s green zone, a heavily-surveilled premises with footage accessible to the U.S. government via the American army’s surveillance blimps.”

— Baktash Siawash, “Ashraf Ghani was an American mistake with a high price for Afghans,” Responsible Statecraft, Sep 14, 2021

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“We are shown tragic scenes from the Kabul airport on a loop and not the countless images of twenty years of suffering inflicted on the Afghan people by the war: night raids, scared faces, families torn apart, houses crushed by airstrike, children without limbs. Biden made sure to make it clear that the indefinite ‘war on Terror’ is here to stay. He clarified how the war is to be continued: ‘We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.’ The world witnessed the unfolding of this ‘new’ strategy already shortly before American troops left Afghanistan when US drone strikes in retaliation of the ISIS-K attack killed ten civilians, including seven children. Perhaps to the American public the phrase ‘over-the-horizon capabilities’ sounds like a new strategy. To us Middle Easterners, they are very well known.”

— Mir Ali Hosseini, “Why we shouldn’t congratulate Biden on Afghanistan,” Counterpunch, Sep 10, 2021

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“After having spent roughly half [my adult life] as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: ‘Stop resisting.’”

—Edward Snowden, “A hell of our own making,” Continuing Ed, Aug 17, 2021

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“The Afghanistan Papers’ greatest value is to provide an impressionistic portrait of the generational worldview and shaping illusions of an American elite—Democrats and Republicans alike on both sides of the civilian-military divide—who responded to a long public record of defeats, blunders, and missed opportunities in Afghanistan by doubling down. Numerous U.S. officials privately acknowledged believing that the war was unwinnable. ‘Your job was not to win; it was to not lose,’ one former member of the National Security Council staff said in 2014.

“‘There was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working despite hard evidence to the contrary,” recalls a National Security Council official quoted by the [Washington] Post. ‘Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,’ said Army colonel and senior counterinsurgency adviser Bob Crowley in a 2016 interview.

“The blob was a self-protecting vehicle for the ambitions of an American ruling class cut off from the consequences of its own policies. Evidence of failure often led to bitter intra-class recriminations along partisan lines, but it did not shake the broadly shared faith in this class’s right to rule by grand design.”

—Jacob Siegel, “Data-driven defeat: Information versus interests in Afghanistan,” American Affairs, Summer 2020 [a year before the collapse]

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“It stretches credulity to believe a nation that spent over $500 billion during 2001–13 on intelligence and $527 billion more during the next seven years was so utterly inept that it had no idea of Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban for over two decades. Logically, only two conclusions are possible: either the famed capability of U.S. intelligence is a hoax, or, finding itself mired in a faulty strategy in Afghanistan, Washington was left with no option but to ignore what Pakistan had been doing.”

— N.C. Asthanam, “Pakistan’s support of the Taliban is one of the greatest fears of covert intelligence,” The Wire, Sep 5, 2021

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“It was a dozen years into the war when I visited Camp Shorabak [where] we were taken to see NATO’s mission to train Afghan soldiers in the use of the new and alien U.S. weaponry that Congress had compelled them to adopt under the influence of the US military-industrial complex. The Afghan officers, unarmed, sat on the ground. The British instructor, with a pistol at his side, stood at the whiteboard, entirely reliant on an unarmed Afghan translator. In each doorway stood a Georgian soldier in full body armour, holding an automatic rifle poised with the safety catch off, the Caucasian nation displaying its eagerness to join NATO through its readiness to shoot our Afghan allies on the spot if they made a move to attack their teacher. If I didn’t know already that the Afghan campaign was doomed, I knew it then.”

—Anatol Lieven, “Nemesis: Why the west was doomed to lose in Afghanistan,” Prospect, Aug 27, 2021

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[Note the lack of human agency in the highlighted texts.]

“In hindsight, we can now see that 9/11 was a harbinger of what was to come: not the globalization of terrorism but the terrors of globalization. Nonetheless, 9/11 marked a historical turning point with a profound impact on US foreign policy in the two decades since. Although the attacks did not usher in an era of global terrorism, they did usher in the so-called Global War on Terrorism, which profoundly affected what the U.S. did in the world, how the world came to regard the U.S., and how many Americans came to see their country’s foreign policy.

“The Global War on Terrorism also led the US to launch a war in Iraq. Decisions to disband the Iraqi military and exclude from government jobs many of the Iraqis who had been associated with the previous regime exacerbated an already chaotic situation. In the end, the U.S. was forced to increase its military presence to nearly 170,000 troops to sustain the embattled successor government in Baghdad.

“Likewise, the push for war, together with the 2007–09 global financial crisis and its economic fallout, powerfully undermined Americans’ faith in elites, stimulating the rise of populist sentiment that, among other things, helped pave the way for the presidency of Donald Trump.”

—Richard Haass, “The world 9/11 made,” Project Syndicate, Sep 9, 2021

[Haass is a mega-blob-creature speaking for the war-making apparatus.]

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“After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the top U.S. commanders in Hawaii were summarily relieved of their posts, reduced in rank, and retired. Unless failure has consequences, further failures are all but guaranteed. Allow me to suggest a corrective action: a purge. Oblige all active duty three- and four-star generals (and admirals) to retire forthwith. Rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a younger generation willing and able to acknowledge the shortcomings of recent American military leadership at the top. I would suggest the following approach: The secretary of defense—not the current incumbent; as a former four-star he too should be purged—should personally interview one- and two-star officers deemed to possess particular promise. The interview need not be long. Indeed, it should consist of a single question: ‘On a scale of 1-to-10, where 1 is lousy, 10 excellent, and 5 mediocre, how would you rate U.S. military performance over the past 20 years?’”

“Those replying with a number above 5 should be immediately excused and denied consideration for further promotion. Those replying with a number of 5 or below should be invited into an adjacent room and given two hours to write an essay that addresses the following topic: ‘What is the problem and how do we fix it?’”

—Andrew Bacevich, “A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11 generals,” Responsible Statecraft, Sep 11, 2021 https://bit.ly/3Ad7d5Q

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“Now we can lure the Russians into the Afghan trap,” Brzezinski wrote Carter in a secret note of February 1979. Carter is still alive. The mainstream American press are not reporting that they have asked Carter for comment or that he has refused. Not even the alt-media investigators have pursued him. But it’s already clear what Carter thinks. He believes he scored one of the world’s great strategic victories; he is disgruntled that he has never received the public credit he thinks he deserves.”

— John Helmer, “The two Satans of Afghanistan—and Jimmy Carter’s lips are sealed,” Dances with Bears, Sep 5, 2021

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“You know what’s deadly misinformation? When the government drones a bunch of kids in Kabul and says there are no civilian casualties. Or when leaders go to war on false pretenses. I don’t see anyone calling for Internet bans of the Pentagon.”

—Matt Taibbi on Twitter

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“We came in through the Khyber Pass, risking the gunmen, or flew on small planes, soaring over the mountains before diving sharply to the runway. Landing in Kabul was dizzying even without the raw excitement of being there, hearts pounding as we taxied past the carcasses of old military planes, the backstory of the war we’d come to watch. Afghanistan opened for us like a movie, in which we—the journalists who covered this war—played multiple and sometimes conflicting roles. Many of us mainlined it, drawn back again and again to the place and the people, to the way it made us feel worthy by feeding the hope that we could do some good.

“Now I wonder what role I played in this disaster. How was I—how were we, the press on the ground—complicit? We wrote about America’s misdeeds, but the people back home must have missed those stories. The government listened for a while, then got tired of it. What was our role? How did we feed the war by serving as its narrators, its chorus, its riveted audience?

“However adversarial, however skeptical, we were there as a corollary of Western power. We made our careers in these places, fancied ourselves truth-tellers, documenting the doublespeak of our governments and the Afghans in power—but what did it matter if no one was paying attention?

“Moral injury is now, I believe, a national disorder. In our broken country, perhaps nothing connects us so powerfully as our rage, guilt, and failure to trust each other—all symptoms of this illness. Our leaders are morally compromised. By extension, we are liars, cheaters, not to be trusted.”

—Vanessa Gezari, “I reported on the war in Afghanistan. Was I complicit in the harm America caused?” The Intercept, Sep 2, 2021

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“Before he stole $169 million and fled his failed state in disgrace, Afghanistan’s puppet President Ashraf Ghani was formed in elite American universities, given U.S. citizenship, trained in neoliberal economics by the World Bank, glorified in the media as an ‘incorruptible’ technocrat, coached by powerful DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council.

“Indeed, Western governments and their stenographers in the corporate media enjoyed a veritable love affair with Ashraf Ghani. He was a poster boy for the exportation of neoliberalism to what had been Taliban territory, their very own Afghan Milton Friedman, a faithful disciple of Francis Fukuyama—who proudly blurbed Ghani’s book. Washington was thrilled with Ghani’s reign in Afghanistan, because it had finally found a new way to implement Augusto Pinochet’s economic program but without the PR cost of torturing and massacring droves of dissenters in stadiums.

“Ghani worked at the World Bank for a decade overseeing the implementation of devastating structural adjustment programs, austerity measures, and mass privatizations, primarily in the Global South, but also in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Ghani leveraged his experience implementing ‘pro-business’ policies from post-Soviet Russia to his own homeland to co-found a think tank called the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE). Any novelist seeking to satirize DC think tanks might have been criticized for being too on the nose if they wrote about such an ISE. The cherry on top of the absurdity came in 2008, when Ghani and Lockhart detailed their technocratic worldview in a book entitled Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.

“Highlighting their ideological zealotry, [coauthors] Ghani and Lockhart even went so far as to assert an ‘incompatibility between capitalism and corruption.’ Of course, Ghani would go on to prove just how absurd this statement was by selling off his country to U.S. companies in which his family members had invested, furnishing them with exclusive access to Afghanistan’s mineral reserves, and then bolting to a Gulf monarchy with $169 million in stolen state funds.”

—Ben Norton, “How elite US institutions created Afghanistan’s neoliberal President Ashraf Ghani who stole $169 million from his country,” Grayzone, Sep 2, 2021 https://bit.ly/3AdpCPN

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“In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—[warlord & U.S. ally] Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to ‘cover for’ the fact that Dado’s forces had been ‘involved with the ambush.’

“The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable. The United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort. In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A [Dado-linked] commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a ‘private-security company’ under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the commander engineered a hit that killed 15 policemen, and then recovered the contract.)

“In 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children. The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.”

—Anand Gopal, “The other Afghan women,” New Yorker, Sep 6, 2021

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“In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces to oust the Taliban from power. The Bush administration blocked subsequent efforts to investigate the mass murder even after the FBI interviewed witnesses among the surviving Afghans who had been moved to the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after human rights officials publicly identified the mass grave site where Dostum’s forces had disposed of bodies. Later, President Barack Obama promised to investigate and then took no action.

“Instead, Hollywood stepped in and turned Dostum into a hero. The 2018 movie, 12 Strong, a jingoistic account of the partnership between U.S. special forces and Dostum in the 2001 invasion, whitewashed Dostum even as his crimes continued to pile up in the years after the prisoner massacre. At the time of the movie’s January 2018 release, Dostum was in exile, hiding from criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards to rape a political opponent with an assault rifle. The movie (filmed in New Mexico, not Afghanistan) was based on a book that a New York Times reviewer called ‘a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.’

“One of the first things the U.S. did after gaining effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was nicknamed ‘The Darkness’ by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after being left shackled in frigid temperatures.

“No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.”

—James Risen, “A war’s epitaph,” The Intercept, Aug 26, 2021

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[And finally, the original casus belli: 9/11]

“The 9/11 hijackers did not act alone. They had a substantial support network that was deeply embedded inside the United States and abroad for nearly a decade prior to, on, and after the 9/11 attacks. It is my understanding that this support network spanned several states including California; Arizona; Nevada; Washington; Minnesota; Oklahoma; Illinois; Florida; North Carolina; Virginia; Massachusetts; Maine; New York; New Jersey; and Texas. The support network also included several countries like Germany; Spain; France; the U.K.; Egypt; Kenya; Tanzania; Sudan; Yemen; Saudi Arabia; the United Arab Emirates; Qatar; Pakistan; Malaysia; Thailand; Iran; and Afghanistan.

“Known and lethal terrorists openly and freely operated inside the U.S. for years before the 9/11 attacks, and yet authorities failed to prevent the cold-blooded murders of our 3,000 loved ones. More than 14 U.S. local and federal jurisdictions had law enforcement agencies that brushed up against the 9/11 hijackers and their supporters. Moreover, more than 18 foreign law enforcement counterparts also investigated some of those involved in the 9/11 attacks. They unearthed evidence, wrote reports, monitored activities, watched money wires, and investigated stock sales, arms and weapons shipments across borders, eyebrow-raising passports and visa documents, and lethal operatives roaming the world, planning murder with impunity. These people remain fully aware of the truth and how their one part of the damning puzzle fits together. Yet none speak out.

“It would seem implausible that not one individual, entity, bank, or business has been fully prosecuted and found criminally responsible as a co-conspirator for the crime that took place. And yet our nation has not found, and will not ever find, it necessary to hold any co-conspirator of the 9/11 hijackers accountable in a court of criminal law.

“Without any standing indictments or prosecutions meted out by the Department of Justice against the other identifiable co-conspirators, the job of seeking out accountability and justice has fallen on the shoulders of the 9/11 families, who were left to take matters of justice into our own hands through the second-rate route of civil litigation. This leaves us alone and with a stark disadvantage as we try to hold terrorists and their co-conspirators accountable for the murder of our loved ones in federal civil court.

“Year after year, Department of Justice lawyers, attorneys general, and prosecutors willfully choose to not help the 9/11 families as we fight the terrorists in court; they nastily refuse to share or declassify the information and evidence they have in their files so that we can nail terrorists and terrorist supporters. Instead, horrifically, some U.S. prosecutors literally sit on the side of the defendants (in this case, Saudi Arabia) and help the key evidence we need stay secret.”

—Kristen Breitweiser, “My husband died on 9/11. I am still waiting for a trial of his killers,” The Intercept, Sep 4 2021

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Episode 1, Page 1, Upper Left-Hand Corner: Afghanistan

“Any post-mortem on ‘what went wrong in Afghanistan’ that does not include a root cause of dysfunction within the United States government is missing the cause of the disaster that the Global War on Terror has become. Afghanistan is a political failure, it is a policy failure, it is a military failure, and it is a human failure. A United States that cannot conduct conflict resolution within its own government can neither project nor maintain a coherent foreign policy to the rest of the world.”

—Andrew Donaldson, “The rootcause of the Afghanistan crisis? U.S. domestic politics,” Diplomatic Courier, Aug 21, 2021 

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“There is a more important question that keeps coming up, whether it’s [Afghanistan], the Boeing 737 Max, opioids, Covid mismanagement, or anything else of social importance. Do we have the competence to govern ourselves anymore? Will this loss spur genuine reform of our McKinsey-ified elites who failed so spectacularly? None of these tens of thousands of Ivy League-encrusted, PR-savvy, highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do PowerPoints, or leak stories. But the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them. The people who are in charge of the governing institutions in our society are simply divorced from the underlying logistics of what makes them work.”

—Matt Stoller, “The war in Afghanistan is what happens whenMcKinsey types run everything,” BIG, Aug 27, 2021

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“Receiving less attention than this disaster, but also revealing an utter lack of senior leader accountability, is our surrendering a modern weapons arsenal to the Taliban. To date, the senior officials responsible for handing our enemy millions of dollars of weaponry have faced less adverse consequence than my soldiers and I received for losing an inert piece of plastic worth less than $100. In fact, if the past is precedent, many of the architects of this catastrophic failure will soon enjoy corporate board perches from which to make small fortunes while also making frequent guest appearances on cable news. In this breathtaking lack of accountability, our Afghanistan mission mirrors the society from which it emerged. There is a yawning disconnect between the accountability that we enforce on those occupying the lower rungs of society while our ruling class continues to show a remarkable ability to ‘fail up.’”

—Will Bardenwerper, “The breathtakinglack of official accountability in Afghanistan,” Responsible Statecraft,” Aug 25, 2021 

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“The Taliban have seized U.S. military biometrics devices that could aid in the identification of Afghans who assisted coalition forces. Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) devices contain iris scans and fingerprints as well as biographical information and are used to access large centralized databases.”

—Ken Klippenstein & Sara Sirota, “The Taliban have seizedU.S. military biometrics devices,” The Intercept, Aug 17 2021 

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“On a visit to Moscow in 2018, a high officer of the Duma told me that Russia’s post-Soviet recovery began with the decision in 1992 to cut military spending by 75%, clearing the way for eventual domestic reconstruction, and even for the creation of a military force that actually meets Russia’s contemporary security needs. A similar moment has arrived in the US. Given the current American mood and the truths now emerging, to accept the world as it is might also prove to be, of all things, politically astute. This is the moment to acknowledge that the country’s vast and expensive military power no longer serves any purpose that can justify its cost.”

—James K. Galbraith, “Afghanistanwas always about American politics,” Project Syndicate, Aug 20, 2021 

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“Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for. And what did we stand for? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, a government system where billionaires get to write the rules. In 2011 an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts.”

—former NPR reporter who then stayed in Afghanistan for 10 years Sarah Cheyes, interviewed on PBS, “The U.S. ignoredcorruption within the Afghan government. Did that lead to its fall?” PBS News Hour, Aug 20, 2021

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“That extremists were able to gain an early foothold in rural regions is also due in part to the massive corruption in the capital and the numerous military operations carried out by NATO and its Afghan allies. Drone attacks and brutal nightly raids regularly caused numerous civilian casualties in Afghan villages. Many survivors shifted their support to the Taliban as result.”

—Emran Feroz, "Why the West failed to understand Afghanistan," DW (Deutsche World), Aug 23, 2021

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“An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts. Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. ‘Two dollars for each of my family killed,’ she said.”

—John Pilger, “The story of US-led collusion in razingAfghanistan to the ground,” InDepthNews, Aug 25, 2021 

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“The U.S. government has now spent 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, its security forces, civilian government institutions, economy, and civil society. The Department of Defense (DOD) has also spent $837 billion on warfighting. The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose—though the definition of that purpose kept changing evolved over time. While there have been several areas of improvement—most notably in the areas of health care, maternal health, and education—progress has been elusive and the prospects for sustaining this progress are dubious.”

— Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “What we need to learn: Lessons from twenty yearsof Afghanistan reconstruction,” Aug, 2021 

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“On the weekend of August 14, German diplomats routinely driving through Kabul’s diplomatic quarter noted an oddity. US soldiers who usually keep guard had abandoned the compound. The Germans also noticed that the road to the international airport, normally secured by American troops, was also undefended. They called around to Western colleagues and learned that the US had withdrawn the forces to their own embassy. Only the next day did US diplomats inform their allies that they, too, should leave the so-called Green Zone and head to the airport, as the Americans were already doing.”

—Daniel Williams, “Biden’s US-first approach leaves NATO in thelurch,” Asia Times, Aug 23, 2021

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“The UK knowingly entered a subordinate military arrangement with the US in Afghanistan such that the final decision to withdraw wasn’t even contingent on any ‘consultation’ with UK officials. Oddly, the basic powerlessness of a scenario where the US President can make an operational decision in Afghanistan and the UK has no choice but to follow suit never seems to have bothered [former PM Theresa] May or her like-minded colleagues at any point in the 20 years prior to August 2021. Conspicuously missing from these Parliamentary outcries is any awareness that choosing to become an inert, emasculated appendage of the US is the thing that really appears to have doomed ‘Global Britain.’

“It’s also unclear whether [critics are] familiar with the US government’s own top auditor reporting that widows of dead Afghan National Army soldiers had to give sexual favors to God-knows-who in order to receive their dead husbands’ pensions. Oddly, this never roused the passions of these sudden defenders of Afghan women, back when the US was an active combatant in the war with the UK as its obedient understudy.”

—Michael Tracey, “British melodrama over Afghanistan withdrawalmasks their own impotence and irrelevance,” MT [blog], Aug 25, 2021 

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Christina Zhao, “Chinese state medias mock U.S. over Afghanistan:‘Smoother than presidential transition,’” Newsweek, Aug 15, 2021 

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“Sens. Jack Reed (Armed Services), Mark Warner (Intelligence), and Robert Menendez (Foreign Affairs) are piling on the frenzy in Washington. These same senators’ reactions to the Washington Post’s investigation in December 2019—dubbed the ‘Afghanistan Papers’—which found that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan? Reed, Warner, and Menendez said very little about the Post’s findings.”

—Ben Armbruster, “Senators nowinvestigating Biden’s withdrawal were mum on ‘Afghanistan Papers,’” Responsible Statecraft, Aug 20, 2021 

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“More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their allies destroyed. ‘Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday. It all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning; these were the people the West supported.’ In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. ‘Marina’ of RAWA told me, ‘We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know.’ Now, they do.”

—John Pilger, “The great game of smashing countries," ARENA, Aug 25, 2021 

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“It is really something to watch this town attempt to absolve itself from two decades of jingoism, profiteering, barely existent oversight, and zero accountability by suddenly demanding answers about Afghanistan.”

—Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders

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“No doubt if Trump had followed through on his stated desire to finally end the war, the chaotic scenes emerging out of Kabul would have been portrayed as somehow part-and-parcel of his secret desire to upend the American-led world order at the behest of Vladimir Putin. The media outrage would have been even more apocalyptic and frothingly conspiratorial. Although the media’s affinities are largely against Trump and largely for Biden, both still attract hyper-animosity when they seek to end wars.”

—Michael Tracey, “Ignore the fake ‘experts’—The real ‘catastrophe’ in Afghanistan was alwaysthe war itself,” MT [blog], Aug 17, 2021 

*

“From the outset, America and its allies embraced—and never reconsidered—a top-down state-building strategy that was always destined to fail. The assumption is that if you can establish overwhelming military dominance over a territory and subdue all other sources of power, you can then impose your will. Yet in most places, this theory is only half right, at best; in Afghanistan, it was dead wrong. Most states have been constructed not by force but by compromise and cooperation. In this model, the state is not imposed on a society against its wishes; rather, state institutions build legitimacy by securing a modicum of popular support.”

—Daron Acemoglu, “Why nation-building failed in Afghanistan,” Project Syndicate, Aug 20, 2021 

*

“Some will say, they didn't fight! They get what they deserve! To which I say, ‘And what do we deserve?’” A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.” [He’s not talking about Afghanistan.]

— Edward Snowden, “A hell ofour own making,” Continuing Ed, Aug 17, 2021 

*

“The global wealth and influence of the United States was so great that it could simply afford a 20-year campaign with no practical value.”

—Andrey Shusentsov, “How much is experience worth? Twenty years of US experiments in theMiddle East,” Valdai Discussion Club, Aug 18, 2021 

*

“They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, letting others clean up the mess they had made.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

*

[written before the Afghanistan collapse] “Potential adversaries have spent 30 years watching and learning from U.S. operations. Any reasonably intelligent counterparty would pay attention to what the U.S. has been doing and then figure out what to expect and how to deal with it. Come the next real war, U.S. forces won’t own space or the skies. Won’t run the electromagnetic spectrum. Won’t have unfettered communications. Won’t control logistics. Won’t have good targeting data. Won’t have air supremacy, let alone sea supremacy or undersea dominance. And many of the expensive weapon systems simply won’t work in the degraded environment. It took an internal wargame in the Department of Defense to illustrate the problem such that no less than one of the most senior generals in the military came out of the closet to admit that America’s super-expensive military complex can’t win the next big war.”

—Byron W. King, “‘It failed miserably’—What if the US losta war and nobody noticed?” Whiskey & Gunpowder, Jul 29, 2021 https://bit.ly/3zprrsI 

Dysfunction and Decline: An Impersonal Essay

I was driving back from a Bernie rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in February of last year when President Trump came on the radio breezily predicting that the Covid outbreak, then consisting of 15 identified cases, was “completely under control” and would soon be history. This sounded overconfident even with the little we knew at the time. But what struck me was the former president’s hypnotically persuasive style. His worldview was so carefree, self-assured, and emphatic that it felt almost churlish to resist his imperious optimism.

Six hundred-plus thousand deaths later, the former chief executive would have no problem revarnishing that moment if confronted with his own words, perhaps by casting the blame far and wide for what went wrong or maybe by shifting the discussion to his (quite real) successes with the vaccine rollout. In fact, the pivot in public identification of the vaccine as a Trumpian triumph to an oppressive Biden-led power grab is one of the many bizarre manifestations of life in Covidland.

In the highly charged political atmosphere surrounding everything Covid—indeed everything about everything—we all have our favored punching bags, our designated bad guys. Some of us have identified heroes or heroines as well, voices in the wilderness whose warnings we believe clearly were vindicated by subsequent events. That’s not especially troubling in itself; people will disagree about things. However, the idea that we could have a meeting of the minds of any sort around what has happened, is happening, or should happen is frankly inconceivable—that is problematic. The point of public life today is that everything is their fault, whoever “they” happens to be for each. The idea of joint action as a nation around Covid or anything else is fast becoming a taboo; those in charge should be worried at this sign of chronic, organic dysfunction.

Despite what we’ve learned at such painful cost, a future outbreak isn’t likely to be handled much better. In this I dissent from Michael Lewis’s conclusion as aired on “60 Minutes” a few days ago in a segment on his recent book, The Premonition. Lewis, also the author of The Big Short about the great financial meltdown of 2008, spins a series of fascinating secondary tales in the new book about the seemingly endless pandemic.

Lewis is a highly successful commercial author, and you don’t get there by being a Debbie Downer. In the film version of The Big Short, the Christian Bale character sees the future and walks away with a cool billion, a sort of happy ending if you’re Christian Bale rather than a newly homeless lady in Baltimore. In The Premonition, Lewis stays upbeat by concluding that the unsung champions of the Covid debacle, the ones whom Trump, the CDC, and most state governors ignored, have showed us how to do it better next time. No doubt they have, but so what? We still agree on nothing, including that. 

One half of the country considers Trump’s eerie capacity to redraw the parameters of reality for his tens of millions of followers as a worrisome legacy of his scattershot presidency. An important corollary implicitly held by the other half is that there is a more real reality in there or out there somewhere, if we could just get to it, find it, agree on it, and from there settle on how to act upon it. This is Pollyannish, misguided, and equally delusional. It presumes that Trump introduced fantasy to our polity and ruined functional governing structures that, without his malign presence, would have let us do things right.

We’ve seen this Manichean mindset play out repeatedly over the course of the pandemic. For example, the CDC’s Nancy Messonnier drew Trump’s wrath early on when she finally blurted out that Americans should prepare for “when” rather than “if” coronavirus would bring mass illness and death to the country. Trump had a cow over that, and promptly Messonnier became a symbol of courage and sobriety as an apostle of The Science. Instead, as Lewis’s book shows, she was part of a sputtering, wheezing CDC bureaucracy that had been burying its head in the sand for weeks while medical providers and local public health officials tried to sound the alarm. One wag quoted in the book renames the CDC the Center for Disease Monitoring and Observation that couldn’t “control” a disease outbreak if it happened in the office next door.

The dysfunction goes far beyond Messonnier’s personal qualities or qualifications. The agency was politicized way back during the Reagan era when its head was made a presidential appointee rather than a protected, career civil servant (like Fauci, whom Trump could not axe). It had already lost ground due to the swine flu vaccine debacle of 1976, the last time the CDC responded energetically to a possible problem—that never materialized. On that occasion, CDC leaders saw a potential epidemic unfolding and acted on the precautionary principle. In other words, they did what a public health authority should do, and a sane polity would have appreciated the protective caution after grumbling and venting about the inconvenience and collateral harm. But because we have no capacity as a nation for social solidarity or sacrifice, the epidemic-that-wasn’t quickly became another club in the arsenal against all things governmental, and the stage was set for Reagan, the anti-government warrior par excellence, to then make sure that a real epidemic—AIDS—was ignored.

So much for the CDC, but the problem goes even deeper. What institution now commands enough general credibility in the nation that its leaders could call upon us to sacrifice or put up with discomforts and burdens in the spirit of shared social goals or, to cast it in archaic language, to “promote the general welfare”? New York’s subway and bus workers have a shockingly low vaccination rate, according to The City. When asked why they are reluctant, many of the employees—half of whom are minorities—said they didn’t trust their bosses at the MTA, reminding the reporter that no one did anything to get them protective equipment at the height of the epidemic when hundreds of their colleagues died. I think they’re being short-sighted, but they’re not irrational.

We’re #1 

One of the most peculiar aspects of this sustained display of national incapacity is that, despite it, we retain our assumptions about the place our country occupies. We remain stuck in the triumphal post-WW2 moment and cannot recognize that things have fundamentally changed. Our political class insists, and we nod along out of habit, that the USA remains preeminent, the essential nation, the standard-setter, the rule-maker, the final authority. We still expect to explain to everyone how people should live and to be the model of what others should strive for and emulate.

We remain convinced that everyone wants to be us, failing that, to be like us. Despite our creeping recognition that not all is well here, we have been successfully brainwashed to believe that American “interests” extend to all corners of the globe where American influence or perhaps control should, as a matter of course, be accepted as right, fitting, and necessary. These postulates survive through another form of hypnotic insistence, and it has nothing to do with Trumpian hyperbole. (In fact, Trump was dismissive of many aspects of empire, especially anything that got in the way of his businesses.)

Our leaders regularly gulp their own Kool-Aid and seem not to notice its lack of nutritious components. Hardly anyone pays much attention to U.S. diplomatic activity unless it’s a media-led focus on some enemy du jour, like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, or China. We should. Trump’s foreign policy apparatus was a clown-show amateur hour, but Biden’s is not much of an improvement. Both teams operated under the assumption that the U.S. is in charge, lectures others what they’re doing wrong, and expects them to behave or face retaliation. A good recent example was Wendy Sherman, Biden’s No. 2 at State, embarrassing us in China by playing schoolmarm with the Chinese foreign minister; her boss Anthony Blinken bombed in Anchorage several months ago trying to do the same thing.

Sherman, who has no experience in Asia, has never lived there, speaks no Asian language, and doesn’t know diddly-squat about the continent, wormed her into an inappropriate meeting with the Chinese foreign minister (she’s not his equal in rank) and proceeded to trot out Beltway talking points as if her audience were pimply congressional interns in a summer program at the Atlantic Council. The Scrum‘s Patrick Lawrence summarized her bizarre performance: “We want to knee you in the groin on questions of this that, and the other, those things that are useful for our propaganda ops as we wage a new cold war against you, but we want to cooperate on climate change and other sorts of virtue-signaling matters. 

Lawrence opined: “Berating the Chinese as just enumerated is not a China policy: it is an admission the Biden regime cannot figure out anything that would even resemble a China policy.” It was also, he adds, a telltale sign of weakness.

The Chinese had something to say in reply two days later:

“The United States always wants to exert pressure on other countries by virtue of its own strength, thinking that it is superior to others. If the United States has not learned to get along with other countries on an equal footing by now, then it is our responsibility, together with the international community, to give the U.S. a good tutorial in this regard.”

If we’re not taken aback by the idea of a Chinese “tutorial” coming along soon, we should be. The entire Washington establishment seems dangerously lost in its own propaganda bubble and has not recognized that 2021 is not 1945 nor 1990. Like Sherman, our diplomats as a matter of course insult their counterparts, convinced that America is the only game in town and that no one remembers how the U.S. (with Biden’s full backing) played first century Roman emperor by trying to conquer Iraq.  

Speaking of Roman emperors, how else can we understand the temple complex underway in Chicago to glorify the reign of a former monarch? Like Trajan’s Column or the Arch of Titus, the Obama Presidential Center (NOT “Library”—an important distinction) will arise on 20 privatized acres of public parkland and will be owned by the Obama Foundation, not the National Archives. Trump should float his own project to build something similar on 20 acres of repurposed Central Park territory—I think it would fit nicely in Sheep’s Meadow. Chicago gave the Obama Foundation a tax-free, 99-year lease on the parkland for $10 while the OPC will charge fees for entry, parking, and third-party use with the profits to go to the Obama Foundation. All hail.

We are headed to a very rude awakening that could well happen, like bankruptcy, “little by little and then all at once.” The overconfident Americans continue to go off half-cocked into ill-considered diplomatic, political, and military adventures, and it’s only a matter of time until they get their asses handed to them. Meanwhile, nowhere are seen any adults in the room, any sober realists tugging at the emperor’s sleeve to suggest that perhaps the legions might not win this time. America is #1, has always been #1, and will remain #1.  

American spokespeople insist that democracy is stronger and more adaptable than authoritarian alternatives while we proceed to provide evidence to the contrary. Depending on who is up and who is down, policy zigzags unpredictably; the country appears run by competing warlords (a scenario the Chinese know well). When the truth finally cannot be ignored any longer, the traumatic shock will make our various Covid neuroses feel like a mosquito bite. From all appearances, then and only then will we be tempted to see each other as fellow citizens.

If you would like alerts of future posts on this site, email me at tfrasca@yahoo.com

Creeping dementia of the medico-financial complex

["The Charlatan," Pietro Longhi, 1757] 

An act of madness occurred in Washington last week when the Food and Drug Administration metaphorically stripped itself naked and stood before us as the proud sex toy of the pharmaceutical industry.

At least this full-frontal view of its swollen, ulcerous pudenda allows us to confirm the appropriate pronouns to be applied to it: me, ours, mine-all-mine. 

On June 7, the FDA approved a new medication for Alzheimer’s disease named aducanumab, branded as Aduhelm. The approval came as a shock to its expert panel, which had voted 8 to 1 (with 2 abstentions) against it based on the lack of evidence that it does anything. That didn’t seem to bother the top brass at the FDA, which had huddled with Biogen, the drug’s peddler, to see whether the data could be resliced and diced to demonstrate some sort of vague utility.

It’s hard to know where to begin to dismember this appalling decision given the multiple forms of horribleness that it embodies. To start, it offers what will probably be false hope to desperate families dealing with the agonizing impact of dementia in a loved one. The FDA was created in 1906 precisely to put an end to the unscrupulous exploitation of sick people and their relatives casting about for a ray of hope in the face of untreatable ailments. Snake-oil salesmen used to be able to bottle up any old concoction and push it onto the panicked and gullible—now they can again.

How could the FDA approve a drug without solid evidence that it has at least some minimum impact on the course of Alzheimer’s? The answer lies in that old saw about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Biostatistics is a highly developed science aimed at answering one key question: do the results of a given trial (such as testing a new drug) constitute meaningful evidence for a causal effect—i.e., does it work? Or are superficially promising outcomes merely random artifacts, chance events that only appear to mean something, like flipping a coin and getting heads 8 times in a row? The logic involved is worth pausing to consider.

Statistical science originated, not surprisingly, with gambling. If we flip a coin 100 times, we can calculate the exact likelihood of getting heads 50 times, 60 times, or 99 times, assuming the coin is perfectly balanced and the flip is performed in an exactly uniform manner each time. By the law of large numbers, more data points will provide greater evidence: for example, getting heads 9 times out of 10 is unusual but plausibly random while getting heads 90 times out of 100 suggests that there is something wrong with the coin—meaning that we are should look beyond chance for some other more likely cause.

Researchers conducting a trial of a new drug will recruit thousands of patients and assign them to either a treatment or a placebo arm, then follow both carefully to see what happens. If the treated patients improve, they can claim success (depending on how much improvement is observed). But one can immediately think of dozens of ways to introduce bias and distortion into the procedures and thus the outcomes, which good researchers try their best to be aware of and avoid.

Given the billions of dollars that are at stake if a drug is shown to work, pharmaceutical companies have built-in incentives to game the system by engineering favorable data. To avoid corrupting the science, data reviewers have to be extremely rigorous and skeptical—which the reviewers of Aduhelm were.

One way to guard against manipulation of data is to set the parameters of what will constitute persuasive evidence at the outset and not change the rules later to fit the desired conclusions. But that is exactly what the purveyors of Aduhelm did: they jettisoned the unfavorable results of one study while highlighting the one in which their drug performed better. They also hypothesized that one of the study arms in the favored study had a disproportionate number of patients whose disease had already progressed beyond the point of being helped by their medication. The FDA went along with all these mid-stream changes.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), three physicians laid out the case against Aduhelm. Two of them (Emerson and Kesselheim) were on the expert FDA panel assigned to review the data—and resigned in protest after their counsel was ignored. They write: “Any treatment will appear to be more effective if individuals in whom it works least are removed from the analysis.”

In addition, one of the two criteria utilized for demonstrating efficacy of Aduhelm was improved scores on a provider-administered observational test of things like memory, problem-solving, and personal care. According to co-authors Emerson and Kesselheim,  Alzheimer’s researchers normally look for an improvement of 1 or 2 points on the 0 to 18 scale as a test of efficacy; even after all the data massaging, Aduhelm demonstrated only a gain of 0.39.

The other test was a reduction in Beta-amyloid clusters in the brain—a mostly discredited theory  about the causation of Alzheimer’s.

The consequences of the FDA’s corrupt behavior are quite dire for the health of Medicare and for the Alzheimer’s field generally. Some of the defenders of this disastrous decision apparently think that tossing vast sums of public money at Biogen for its probably useless elixir will incentivize others to do further R&D and find something better. Dana Goldman & Darius Lakdawalla wrote an article in STAT entitled, “FDA’s approval of aducanumab paves the way for ‘more momentous’ Alzheimer’s breakthroughs,” a broad hint that the approved drug is mediocre at best. (The authors also acknowledge being in the pay of Biogen.)  

Patients’ families will also rush to demand access to the new drug, especially once we start seeing the predictable tsunami of televised ads showing smiling granddads bouncing children on their knees and helping them sail kites. As with every disease in every age, people will desperately try anything that offers a glimmer of hope for alleviating their agony under the presumption that there is nothing to lose.

Unfortunately, there is a whole lot to lose, starting with side effects: “In two clinical trials, about 40% of clinical trial patients who got the approved dose of Aduhelm developed painful brain swelling, headache, dizziness, visual disturbances, nausea, and vomiting; about 17% to 18% of patients had microhemorrhages.” Will lawsuits follow? Will Biogen care once the bosses in its C-suite make off with gazillions from the public purse? Will the company even exist when it’s time to compensate those harmed?

Then there’s the vast billions that Medicare could be forced to pony up to sustain this travesty. Even though the drug was tested only on patients at certain stages of Alzheimer’s-related impairment, the FDA did not limit who will be eligible for Aduhelm treatment. Because Medicare is prohibited by statute from negotiating drug prices, Biogen can just say the stuff costs $56,000, so there. The price tag for Medicare for just 500,000 patients taking Aduhelm will be $29 billion a year.

Caitlin Owens at Axios estimated that the new drug could “blow up health spending.” “If half of the newly eligible Americans in a year began treatment with Aduhelm, the cost would be $14 billion—roughly equivalent to Medicare Part B spending in 2019 on the next 8 products combined.” Vast numbers of new patients enter the Alzheimer’s lists every year. In short, Aduhelm is Pharma’s dream drug: an insanely expensive product targeted at a huge percentage of the population who can live sick for years.

Bob Herman, also at Axios, adds that if the drug triggers Medicare’s “significant cost” policy, Medicare Advantage plans would be liberated from paying Aduhelm claims; that is, once people on MA plans start costing real money, they can be sent back to traditional Medicare to be covered on the government dime. 

Most experts were dumbfounded at the gross twisting of scientific criteria to pander to patient advocates and line the pockets of yet another pharmaceutical company. (Stand by for news of which FDA employee has decamped to Biogen as Vice President for Government Affairs in the next 12 months.) “Science took a back seat.” “Sham.” “This decision does more than bend standards—it shatters them.” “Unconscionable.” “I won’t prescribe it.” “$56,000 for a sugar pill.” 

What to make of this shameless perversion of our research and public health establishment precisely at a time of earnest appeals from these same highly credentialed personages to place our trust in them and bare our biceps for the magic jab? It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the impulse among our governing elites to insert their snouts into the trough of the national treasury has reached stampede proportions. Our society has succumbed to the addictive pursuit of ill-gotten gains to such a pathological extent that the beleaguered brain of the body politic has begun to show clear signs of cognitive deterioration. It is no longer capable of taking care of itself, exercising sober judgment, handling its affairs, or functioning independently—although, as the Clinical Dementia Rating table says for its “mild” score, the patient may “appear normal to casual inspection.” Is it reversible?

Vote Early and Often! A multiple guess test for mayor of New York

 

We are just days away from a big decision: choosing who should govern our city. Outgoing Mayor De Blasio is limited to two terms; he won’t be missed. (Michael Bloomberg did buy himself a third term, but no one else around here has a net worth of $59 billion—a tidy increase from the $25 billion with which he came into office—but I digress.)

There are more candidates than you can shake a stick at though the field has narrowed slightly with dropouts. Sadly, Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party is not running this year despite embodying in his party’s name the one thing probably every New Yorker can agree on. (He once got 40,000 votes.)

You’d think a city of 8 million-plus people could produce at least a few high-calibre candidates from which to choose, including one or two to competently represent and defend each of the extant political tendencies and programmatic visions contending to determine the future of New York. We even have the opportunity, under ranked-choice voting, to support up to five of the candidates in descending order. Instead, many of us are having a hard time finding one whom we truly fancy.

Ranked-choice voting is a neat innovation. It forces the winner to accumulate 50%- plus 1 of the total by means of a computerized elimination of whichever candidate is in last place; that candidate’s votes are then assigned to whomever those voters chose as their No. 2. If no one reaches the magic 50% threshold, the next cellar-dweller is eliminated, and the process is repeated until someone racks up the required majority. It prevents anyone from sliding into office on, say, 18% of the votes ahead of a crowded field. We’ve had endless tutorials on how it works, and we can confidently predict that when people show up to vote, they’ll be completely befuddled and make a hash of it. Luckily, there are 10 days of early voting, which we’ll need.

The deeper problem is that the candidates don’t impress. The most famous/notorious of them is Andrew Yang whom everyone has heard of—already a huge advantage. But Yang is a disaster in a nightmare on the way to a debacle. He has shown himself to be clueless about New York and its residents, admits to never having bothered to vote here until now, has committed gaffe after embarrassing gaffe, and is thoroughly in the tank for the plutocrats who are destroying the city. He also is a billionaire—disqualifying in itself.

Another candidate comes from the banking industry: um, no.

Kathryn Garcia ran the sanitation department under De Blasio and got snow off the streets competently. Does that mean she can run the city? Who knows?

Dianne Morales has good politics and a dubious record. Her staff just went on strike, and her flip-flop on charter schools does not inspire confidence.

Maya Wiley was largely unknown before the race and staked out the “reform” or progressive position. Then she jumped all over the debatable accusations of sexual misconduct against a fellow candidate, demanding that he quit the race based on the allegations of something that occurred 18 years ago. She picked up AOC’s endorsement last week, which should help. But given the city’s sharp uptick in violent crime, her pitch to scale back the city’s insanely bloated police budget probably has only a limited constituency.

Scott Stringer is that candidate beleaguered by two accusations of impropriety, one dating from 1992. He was considered a front-runner and represented a progressive tendency; he even won the endorsement of the Working Families Party (since withdrawn). Stringer is such a classic pol that he sounds machine-generated, always ready with an answer for any policy question. With him out of the picture, the field is wide open for the favored candidates of the city’s two power centers: the Real Estate Board and the cops. I can’t help speculating that there’s a connection with the late-campaign accusations about his personal behavior. Maybe he’s a creep, but the facts of the case(s) are apparently of no general interest—for most people the accusations are enough.

Eric Adams is gleefully receiving real estate cash and must have done their bidding as Brooklyn borough president to make them so happy. But he is a former cop who drew a lot of ire from the top brass during his time there, which makes him interesting as someone who might not be intimidated by them. His record on financial probity is disturbing, but at least he’s not Yang.

Shawn Donovan, housing secretary under Obama, airs ads in which he stands next to the former prez, or, alternatively, Michelle. We are supposed to forget that 8 million people lost their homes to foreclosure under Obama’s presidency while Donovan ran the housing portfolio. Not what I would call an impressive CV.

We’re basically voting the way we would swing at a piñata: blindfolded and hoping to land a blow that results in candies for all. We really have no idea how any of them would perform in office, and maybe it doesn’t matter too much anyway. None of them will dare to challenge the entrenched powers that be unless the populace is suffering enough and up in arms enough to force them to do so. That will mean much more than the complicated levers we will pull on June 22.

May Their Names (and Memories) Be Erased

 

The CBS News show 60 Minutes had a segment Sunday about the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred 100 years ago in the predominantly black Greenwood section of that Oklahoma city, once known as “Black Wall Street” due to the many prosperous black professional families who lived there. After armed black men tried to stop a lynching, white mobs retaliated by destroying the entire community, leaving between 100 and 300 dead and 8000 homeless. No one knows the exact figures because there was no investigation of the crimes afterward and no indictments.

The tale is harrowing enough, but the point of the 60 Minutes report was to explore how the worst incident of racist violence in American history was then completely erased from memory to the point where local people just two generations removed swore it could never have happened. “I went to school here all my life,” said one black resident on camera. “We never heard anything about that, so I was sure it wasn’t true.”

Repairing the damage from terrible events starts with establishing the facts. Even in “merely” criminal acts, we place great emphasis on the ability of the legal system to set out what exactly took place in the eyes of the public, often in the context of determining the guilt of individual perpetrators. How much more important is it when the crimes are massive and/or social in nature like race-inspired murder, systematic oppression such as Jim Crow or apartheid, secret torture regimes, or genocide?

These are highly political matters, and reactionary nationalists hate things like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee that forced people to look at unpleasant facts, including their own complicity or willful ignorance of what took place and how they reaped benefits from it. To this day, for example, Turkish nationalist politicians threaten anyone who dares to suggest that the well-documented genocide of perhaps 1 million ethnic Armenians by the Ottomans—which was observed by German officers and inspired some aspects of the Holocaust—ever occurred. The events are over 100 years old (1915–1916), but you can still get yourself killed in Turkey for publicly stating that they ever happened. One who dared to do so was journalist HrantDink, [below] assassinated in 2007. Photos of the assassin later surfaced “flanked by smiling Turkish police and gendarmerie, posing with the killer side by side in front of the Turkish flag.” 

Since 2018 it is illegal in Poland to suggest that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” You cannot even use the term “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz or Treblinka under threat of a 3-year prison term. (However, it’s okay to blame Ukrainians for it.) Anyone who has seen the devastating Claude Lanzmann film Shoah in which he carefully asks local Poles what happened in front of their eyes and what they thought of it might have a slightly different take on the role of the “Polish Nation” in those events.

Last year, George Floyd's murder caused us to face yet again our own historical revisionism and silence, including a new look at statues of Confederate war leaders and the ongoing use of treasonous generals’ names on a slew of U.S. military bases (Benning, Beauregard, Bragg, Hill, Gordon, Hood, Lee, Pickett, Rucker, Pendleton). The “Lost Cause” rewrite of the Civil War convinced generations of Americans that that conflict wasn’t really about slavery and white supremacy after all but rather a more palatable and vaguer concept, that of “states’ rights,” elegantly interpreted by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Erasure was a key part of sustaining white supremacy up through World War II.

What then shall we make of yimakh shemo (“May their names be erased!”), the rallying cry of Jewish supremacists who chanted it in East Jerusalem while helping their cops displace residents of the territory they covet? I gather it has historical meaning applied to enemies of the Jewish people, of which there certainly is no shortage. But the implications are chilling when applied by a state engaged in a decades-long process of pushing people out of their coveted homes and turning them into an underclass. It suggests that not only will the ethnic cleansing continue, but that once it’s over, we will pretend nothing ever happened—and who will challenge us?   

The foundational fact of Jewish racial supremacy over non-Jews in Israel has long been obscured by the fantasy that two states could eventually come into being as wary neighbors and allowed to work out their differences over time. But recent events have shown that the erasure impulse is much too strong and has grown steadily since the establishment of the ethno-religious state in 1948. Erasing Palestine from the map was only the first step, and it is now clear in retrospect that the Zionist project could never tolerate allowing it back even under the one-sided terms of Oslo. Since erasure is the point, refusing to be erased is the counterpoint, and the George Floyd-inspired movement has clarified the terms on either side: you will bow your head (no we won't), or we will kill you (just try).

The debate about Israel-Palestine, as Norman Finkelstein explains in this interview, is no longer about the occupied territories, the construction of a two-state solution, the acceptance of the Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, of two permanently estranged communities acquiescing in some sort of separate-but-equal fantasy that was tried here in the U.S. and finally demolished as the disingenuous wishful thinking of the privileged class. That was the narrative for decades since the so-called Six-Day War. But we are no longer examining the problem of 1967 but that of 1948, the impulse to declare a land the colonial preserve of a religious group to the exclusion of all others. Occupation, expulsion, and settlement used to be criticized for the 1967 lands while the exact same behaviors of 1948 were accepted as irredeemable facts—even by the Palestinian leadership.

That’s over now. While Israelis have been busy trying to erase Palestine and its inhabitants, they simultaneously have erased the boundaries between the events of those two landmark years. By raising the legality or legitimacy of importing settlers into the West Bank and expelling ancient families from their East Jerusalem homes, we now must examine the same questions about the 1948 expulsions of hundreds of thousands to Lebanon and Jordan and the permanent ghettoization of Gaza. “Let Their Names Be Erased” is Israel’s doomed call to achieve the impossible—short of repeating the historic crime that led to the present impasse.

Here in the U.S., we continue to grapple with segregation and racism, their historical underpinnings, their effects, and their ongoing appeal. One way to challenge the hoarders of the nifty advantages of racial supremacy is through the boycott as was demonstrated by the Baton Rouge bus boycott (1953), the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56), the Savannah boycott (1960-61), the Natchez (Mississippi) commerce boycott (1965-66), and dozens of others throughout the civil rights movement.

No wonder that BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to halt the movement for Jewish supremacy, has the Israelis’ and their allies’ knickers in such a knot that they have engineered a bunch of state laws to punish advocacy of it. Unfortunately for them, the First Amendment remains part of the U.S. Constitution (for now), and this week another court outlined in clear language that actions to ban speech are not kosher. Forcing someone to sign an anti-BDS pledge, said the judge, is equivalent to “requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs.” 

Legal action to undermine boycotts has a long, shameful history in the U.S. Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written while he was imprisoned for promoting a boycott and encouraging picket lines to enforce it. It’s no wonder that white supremacist forces should have done everything to stop boycotts and that people would face prison for promoting them. It’s a powerful tool.

BDS is a nonviolent, moral movement to pressure the oppressor into changing course. It makes some people very uncomfortable. I get it. Plenty of my Ohio neighbors in the 1960s hated Martin Luther King and thought he was a troublemaker. Very few Israelis are interested in hearing any criticism because they’ve been enabled in every crime and abuse that occurs to them to commit by the impunity provided by the U.S. umbrella. White Alabamans were furious about Rosa Parks’ seating arrangement, and white Arkansans hated the girls who integrated Little Rock High. Racist privilege dies hard. BDS is the civil rights issue of our age, and we have a clear choice. Qui tacet consentit: “Silence [erasure] gives consent.”

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