Propaganda Squared

A reader noted in the Q Tips section below that Tuesday's ATC featured Pentagon propaganda on the Green Berets. It's no secret that NPR do love it some counterinsurgency, including the Green Berets.

The piece from Jon Kalish was an unabashed, uncritical advertisement for a Green Beret commercial called Why We Fight Now. There was no critique of the Green Berets, just positive comments, an "explanation" of the filmmaker's motives, and a handy link to the 10 minutes of the film on YouTube (watch it if you can stomach it - it's a lazy, stupid, paean to warriorism).

Here's a taste of the NPR feature:

Kalish: The film is titled Why We Fight Now, a nod to the World War II series Why We Fight, produced by Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra for the U.S. War Department.....Why We Fight Now has no narration and consists mostly of Green Berets talking about their work. It was directed by Mark Benjamin, a 62-year-old Manhattan filmmaker who might seem an odd choice for the job." [Actually there is nothing but narration, provided by Green Berets parroting a simple-minded world view and the worship of war and counterinsurgency which in NPRspeak is "talking about their 'work.' "]

Benjamin: "I've always been anti-war and never thought I would ever work for the military."

Kalish: On the wall in Benjamin's office is a poster of Che Guevara, but there's also a picture of a Green Beret handing a piece of food to a child in Afghanistan. Benjamin's political evolution is due in no small part to the terrorist attacks of September 11. He knew people who died and has made several films dealing with the day's repercussions."

Benjamin: "Because of 9/11, I became this liberal hawk. My own political perspective on global conflicts, democracy, capitalism, human rights everything changed. I certainly became more militant. I think we should go after terror wherever it is."

That's all we get. Not one bit of intelligent information or analysis. There is some chatter from an ex-Green Beret who now is a fellow at NPR-favorite war-tank, Center for New American Security, who liked the film (surprise!) and seemed surprised that the military is airing this pro-special forces rubbish (because it favors the Green Berets over other special forces!)

As always there was no mention of the sordid history of the Green Berets supporting dictators and torture states - such as the disgusting Karimov of Uzbekistan or the torture deaths of Green Beret prisoners in Afghanistan (yawn...) or the usual trail of torture, blood, and repression that US special forces leave in their wake all over the world.

In the comments section below the story Boulder Dude nails it: "So, what does one call Propaganda of a Propaganda film? Double Plus Good news?" Or as I see it propaganda squared.

Surging Inhumanity

Know what I learned from Guy Raz on Saturday? The Surge™ worked! Ignore the role of ethnic cleansing, and forget about there still being 4+ million refugees and internally displaced persons (and no major improvements in sight), a death squad and human rights abusing regime in place - because, according to Guy Raz, "before the surge in Iraq, we kept hearing that there were no good options for Iraq. This is a choice between bad and worse. But the surge seemed to have worked out."

Well, how about that. Everybody thought the outcome could only be bad or worse - but the miraculous Surge™ turned out to be GRRREEEAAAT! It's not really surprising since NPR has been hawking the Surge™ , and Raz was talking to one of NPR's favorite Bushista military men, Jack Keane. Raz does seem to be feeling the love keanely when he not only compliments him on the Surge™ but also on his strategic genius:

"Jack Keane, the counterinsurgency plan you wrote for Iraq worked at the time. You were instrumental in getting David Petraeus installed as the ground commander there. Do you think that kind of plan could work in Afghanistan?" (kiss, kiss)

Hmmm, somebody must be thinking about a 2012 Petraeus-Keane dream team...with you know who for White House Press Secretary...

NPR and the Resistence of Memory

Monday's Morning Edition featured another NPR exclusive on Afghanistan. Mary Louise Kelly was on to explain all about the Two-Clock Theory of War. Opening the report Renee Montagne explains:

"We begin this morning with Afghanistan and a story about two clocks: one ticks in Washington, the other in Kabul. They measure progress in the war. The challenge: they are moving at very different speeds" [notice the bloodless euphemisms - "progress" and "challenge"].

All perspectives in the story are provided by war advocates [Peter Feaver -Bush speech-shaper, warmakers Petraeus, Gates, and Mullen - and Steven Biddle, CFR fellow, who Kelly notes is "part of a team advising General Stanley McChrystal...on his war strategy"].

According to Kelly and all her experts, there are always two clocks in US warmaking: the grown-up, big-boy clock of the presidents, generals, and admirals as they bomb, occupy, kill, and destroy. This serious and mature clock ticks very slowly and takes years to produce progress and - ultimately - victory. Opposed to this is the childish, impatient clock of the American public which whizzes away at double or triple time and leads the uninformed masses to reject the wisdom of the wars that the serious grown-ups are running. Kelly's guest Feaver states that "A longstanding criticism of democracies, but especially the American democracy, is that Americans are impatient. They want to see success sooner than later."

Listening to this report, I realized that there is something grimly comical that Kelly has forgotten to tell us about: The Third Clock.

The third clock is the one that doesn't tick at all. In Kelly's report she notes something I've been hearing a lot about since Obama took over the Afghanistan War: the 12 to 18 month "window of opportunity." In Kelly's report we hear Admiral Mike Mullen state

"I do believe we have to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint over the next 12 to 18 months."

Kelly reiterates this by noting, "So, progress within the next 12 to 18 months. But is that on the Washington clock or the Kabul clock?"

The date of Kelly's report is September 14, 2009. Let's see how the NPR clock ticks out this magical 12 to 18 month time frame.

THREE MONTHS ago, General McChrystal told Tom Bowman, "So, we see it as very, very important, probably over about the next 12 to 24 months, that we absolutely get a trend where we are clearly winning....I think that the next 18 months are probably a period in which this effort will be decided."

TWO MONTHS ago Robert Siegel talked to Sir Jock Stirrup [not joking], head of the British war staff, who stated, "Well, I think our judgment is probably the same that has been reached here in the United States, which is that over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, we need to be able to demonstrate convincingly to our people that we are making the right degree of progress."

ONE MONTH ago Inskeep chatted with Anthony Cordesman of CSIS about the coming victory in Afghanistan. Speaking on the US war policy in Afghanistan, Cordesman claimed, "If these tactics are to work, we'll know in 12 to 18 months."

Holy smokes! NPR's clock must be an Einsteinian relativity clock that appears to be moving normally to everyone at NPR, but in the real world is virtually standing still. What do you want to wager that next summer NPR will still be dutifully reporting on the need to show progress in Afghanistan within the critical 12 to 18 month time frame? Who knows, by then maybe they'll have dropped this catch phrase about Afghanistan and be explaining how the US has "turned a corner."

The Protector

On Weekend Edition Sunday, Lynn Neary, speaking to NPR's Tom Bowman about the possibility of more US troops being sent to Afghanistan, asks, "Will General McChrystal be asking for more troops?"

In explaining that McChrystal probably will ask for more troops Bowman states,

"The big effort he's making is protecting the population and to do that you need more troops."

And this passes for journalism?

More Blood Soup

NPR do luv them some Nagl. John Nagl, Mr. Soup with a Knife genius, has been one of their regular counterinsurgency go-to guys for a while - and they did pick the right horse. Nagl is climbing the rungs of power (to the Defense Policy board along with neo-imperialist Robert Kaplan). You can bet we'll hear a lot from this COIN snake oil soup salesman.

Yesterday on ATC Siegle had a chummy talk with Nagl about our clients in the colony of Iraq. It was the typical "training wheels" talk about whether Iraqis can manage without all the great protection and security the US military has brought to Iraq. Siegel asks Nagl, "How well prepared are the Iraqis to deal with threats to their own security?"

Nagl brags that they are capable of handling counterinsurgency, but "they certainly still need our help for deterring conventional attacks from some of their neighbors." Later in the interview Siegle picks up this thread to remind us of the Iranian threat(!?):

"Are Iraqi forces sufficiently trained and improved to deal with any interference in their country by Iran?"

That was certainly out of the blue, but Nagl doesn't miss a beat and chimes in with, "No. The short answer is no."

Yet again NPR's discussions about US counterinsurgency is an utter whitewash - never touching on the sickeningly brutal aspects of these dirty wars. Instead they allow people like Nagl to peddle their "brilliance" without challenge. Probably the best all-around dissection of the movement that Nagl represents is found in this piece by Justin Raimondo.

The Catch Phrase if You Will

If you wondered why the US is in Afghanistan [has nothing to do with the sordid geopolitics of uranium, copper, oil and gas -of course], it's all about keeping promises - so says Steve Inskeep:

"The increase in American troops this summer is in some sense an effort to make good on a promise that the international community made back in 2001 - to bring peace and a measure of prosperity to a country that's been at war for decades..."

Bringing peace and prosperity...of course. How's that for objective journalism?

To bolster the story that the US has nothing but the noblest aims NPR turns to Seth Jones, RAND expert on Afghanistan. He explains that the problem of the Soviet Army's war in Afghanistan was "their decision to treat this as a conventional war and what becomes clear when you look at counterinsurgency operations is the focus should be on protecting the local population not on killing it."

Every time I hear someone talking about counterinsurgency "protecting the local population" it blows my mind. Just what alternate universe counterinsurgency is Jones talking about? Anyone who reads history knows that most counterinsurgency operations are about extreme levels of state terror being applied to vulnerable - usually poor - civilian populations. I'm thinking of Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, East Timor and of course the US godchild of counterinsurgency - Guatemala.

Montagne jumps in to explain that [protecting the local population] "is now the catch-phrase if you will of the US military...McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, that's precisely what he says US troops and NATO troops are there to do now."

Oh silly me, I didn't realize that the "top US commander" said that's what the US military is doing - dang! I guess if the good general says it's so then it must be true. Seth Jones is not about to disagree either, stating that "the focus...has shifted to try to protect the local population." I guess it's not only the military that owns this catch-phrase.

Lastly, the report closes with Inskeep's announcement that "Renee is packing her bags to travel to Afghanistan and we'll be hearing from her..." That is great news, Montagne has done some really profound reporting from Afghanistan including stories of BIG VICTORIES.

Specialized News from a Specialized Reporter - NPR Promotes Counterinsurgency

In these times of austerity and job "shedding" at NPR, I have an excellent money-saving idea for those running the show at NPR. Instead of spending all the money it must take to embed a reporter like Tom Bowman with the US military in Afghanistan, why not cut him out of the picture and just hand a microphone to one of the officers or commanders there? Heck, if that's too expensive, why not just get on the Internets and pull some hard-hitting journalism from the military web site of whatever unit Tom would have been embedded with? It sure would be a lot cheaper, even though it would mean we wouldn't get the kind of critical insight that Bowman coughed up for us this morning:

"What they're going to be doing is something similar to what they did in Anbar province in Iraq. They're going to move out into the countryside and really live among the people - and that's the whole point here, is the counterinsurgency technique is to live among the people, provide security, and eventually help rebuild this part of Afghanistan...." [Could you have a more sanitized, propaganda laden description of the often repressive, brutal and violent strategy of counterinsurgency?]

And how about this informative answer when Liane Hansen asks about the "new top commander, General Stanley McChrystal...can you tell us something about him?"

Bowman: "....[he] ran the Joint Special Operations Command, that's the secretive unit that goes after high value targets. These are the guys that rolled up Saddam Hussein in Iraq and also Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...so he's sort of a specialized soldier with specialized forces...."

How's that for on-the-ground, in-depth reporting. From Bowman's report we'd never even guess that the whole Afghanistan counterinsurgency surge strategy (or any military solution) is likely to fail. And when asked to "tell us something" about McChrystal, Bowman somehow failed to mention the specialized assassinations and specialized interrogations carried out under McChrystal's tenure with JSOC.

I guess I can see why NPR doesn't want to can Bowman; imagine how boring plain, old propaganda, straight from the Pentagon would be without Bowman telling us how the Marines at Camp Leatherneck have some apprehensions, but are "really eager to get out of this base and really start doing the job here....they're eager to get out into the field and into the fight" (and really live among the people, too.)

Rumors of His Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated - NPR Champions Drone Attacks Again

In the comments section, NPR Check reader "Gopol" took note of more Drone Love from NPR on Friday morning. With his permission I'm posting his critique.

Where do these reporters come from? Mary Louise Kelly graduated from Harvard in 1993. Just in time for the Contract On America to usher in fellow Harvard grad Keven Klose as President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an acknowledged arm of CIA/Pentagon propaganda.

On Friday morning Mary Louise Kelly had a piece on how Predator drone attacks are cause for guarded optimism that we may yet kill Osama Bin Laden, whom, you may recall Benazir Bhutto claimed was murdered by the double agent Omar Sheik (about 6 minutes into the interview), just before she herself was murdered. It seems that killing (rekilling?) the straw man OBL has been a preoccupation of MLK (no, not *THE* MLK) for some time. In her pursuit she has made acquaintance with a large number of CIA ops:

"The trail for bin Laden was allowed to get stone cold over seven years," says CIA veteran Bruce Riedel.

Juan Zarate, the top counterterrorism official in President Bush's White House, says, "The administration smells blood here. I think al-Qaida is on its heels."

And of course she's intimately familiar with Ullysees S. Offishalls:
"Predator attacks have killed 11 out of 20 on the Pentagon's most-wanted list along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, say U.S. officials."

Not to be left unnamed, Hank Crumpton:
"a career CIA officer who led the agency's Afghan campaign after Sept. 11. He says Predator strikes are useful on two fronts: They have disrupted terrorist attacks, and they help in the hunt for bin Laden.

'Using the Predator and other drones, it gives us an opportunity to create a great deal of uncertainty, a fear among enemy leaders. It forces them to communicate more, forces them to move more, which provides other opportunities,' he says."

It's so sickening to be invited for an inside seat on the biggest kabuki charade on the planet.

MLK ends with this classic bit of ... what's the word for it when you do the thing that you say you would never do? As in, w"e would never even suggest guarded optimism."

The Counterinsurgency Channel

If you were listening to NPR last night you might have thought Tom Bowman was describing US foreign policy in Afghanistan when he said, "picture a Brinks truck on steroids." Actually he was simply describing a US armored vehicle.

The report itself is meant to promote an aspect of US counterinsurgency in Afghanistan - the training of Afghan police as part of Task Force Phoenix [what dumb ass names these operations anyway?]. The report opens with some great editorializing from Michele Norris:

"If American policy is ever to be successful in Afghanistan, it will be because of people like Army Major Jim Contreras; he's the top American police trainer in Helmand province in Southern Afghanistan. Afghan police are key to fighting insurgents: they know the neighborhoods, the people, who is an insurgent and who is not."

In spite of the likely failure of the US "mission" in Afghanistan - and the dismal (and lucrative) history of the US training program for Afghan police forces, Norris assures us that this will be the "key to fighting insurgents." It's striking, too, how apropos of nothing, Norris confidently asserts that they know "who is an insurgent and who is not"?

There is nothing in the report to indicate how disastrous the new Bushama/Obamush War in Af-Pak will be, instead there is the focus on one program (and one man) that will deliver that ever elusive, mythical (can you say Phoenix?) success that empires are always gunning for in Afghanistan.

Lethal Contradictions

NPR's Wednesday ATC touts the praise that a counterinsurgency expert has put on Obama's coming Afghanistan strategy. Who is this expert brought on for an interview with Robert Siegel? It would have to be one of NPR's two favorite counterinsurgency hucksters: Super-Duper Soup-with-a-Knife Nagl or Kill-and-Cull-em Kilcullen.

Turns out that Wednesday's story features Kilcullen playing a bit of Jekyll and Hyde - something that Siegel completely misses (no surprise there). As the kindly Dr. Jekyll, he tells Siegel:

"The accidental guerrilla is a person fighting us not because they hate the West - but because they've been co-opted by a very small clique of radicals in their area, and/or because we just turned up in their valley with a brigade, shot their cousin you know, dispossessed their land and so on - and it's a backlash against our presence. "

To deal with this he suggests that the US-NATO forces need to

"...focus a little less on full-time main-force guerrilla columns...and focus more on protecting people where they live. That is building relationships with people in local villages, in valleys, major towns and so-on....partnering with local communities to make them self-defending."

Sounds downright hunky-dory. But when Siegel asks how long "we" will be in Afghanistan Mr. Hyde reveals:

"I would say that we have three to five years of major engagement with Afghanistan and of that a substantial amount will be heavy combat in the next year or two. If that goes well - and that's a big if - then we will probably find ourselves in a situation where we need to support the Afghans from perhaps one step back if you like, as they handle the problem for another five or ten years or so - and then after that they will handle the problem."

A year or two of "heavy combat"? You'd think Siegel would ask his esteemed expert how the US and NATO are going to engage in heavy combat without slaughtering more civilians and how that won't create more "accidental guerrillas"? Apparently the thought never entered Siegel's mind.

Back to being the gentle Jekyll, Kilcullen claims that "....the way they [counterinsurgencies] end is you drive the threat down to the level at which the locals can handle it, and then they just handle it." As is always the case on NPR, there is no reality check on the atrocities and carnage that have been the hallmarks of the counterinsurgencies that Nagl and Kilcullen are so enamored of.

Lastly, something worth reading is a telling (and very defensive) reaction from Kilcullen to a review by Andrew Bacevich of Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla book.

Talking Swat

Last Tuesday on ATC I heard a rather typical Jackie Northam piece regarding the Pakistani truce with TNSM in the Swat valley. She interviewed the usual smorgasbord of CIA, US State Department, and National Security Council shills and - what do you know - they all had basically the same opinions, or as Northam so pointedly stated:

"....none of the analysts interviewed for this report thinks that the truce in the SWAT valley will hold for long."

Honestly, I just didn't have the time, stomach or basic knowledge to sort out Northams lousy (and lazy) journalism, so I emailed Manan Ahmed who posts at the informative ICGA (associated with the other Informed Comment) and who produces the really fine blog, Chapati Mystery. If you haven't visited it, don't let it remain a mystery for too long. I asked him if he'd be willing to post on the NPR piece and allow me to cross-post it here, which he kindly agreed to. Well, he went above and beyond the call - putting NPR in the context of the other rather poor coverage of the Swat valley story. Here's the opening of his post:

READING SWAT

Increasingly, I am convinced that the discourse on Pakistan within the United States needs some major intervention. My fear, or maybe paranoia, is that Pakistan is en-route to be declared "mentally incapacitated" by United States aka "failed state". The impact of such a declaration (whether stated or not) would be that US will need to put a "care-taker" in charge of the mess. The rising frequency of the drone attacks, the extension of missile strikes, the troop "surge" in Afghanistan read as concrete steps towards a radically intrusive strategy towards Pakistan. I will have more to say on this. But I wanted, for the moment to simply bring to your attention some recent writings on Swat.

1. Jackie Northam, "Pakistan Deal With Taliban Draws Critics", All Things Considered, Feb 17, 2009.
Perhaps the worst of all recent pieces - NPR could only find 1. CIA Station Chief, 1. State Department Official and 1. NSC Official to declare that the Swat deal basically meant that Afghanistani Taliban have basically invaded and taken over Swat and that this means the Pakistani army is ridiculously weak. Between the lines, you should understand that the nukes are about to fall into the Taliban hands. Also al-Qaeda. Thank you, NPR.

To continue reading.

Drone Love

I thought NPR couldn't show more love to the unmanned, extrajudicial killing machines of the Pentagon and CIA. There was one at an awesome arms bazaar on January 2007; there was "Drone Daddy" coming home from killing on April 2007, and Drone Bowman salivating over the exquisite precision of killer drones on December 2008.

You can never have too much of a good thing, so NPR brought out Jackie Northam on Monday morning to talk about how the use of killer drones in Pakistan is being "reviewed" by the US. Odd thing is that - except for Andrew Bacevich's blunt assessment that drone attacks represent an expanded war in Pakistan - the rest of the interviewees are rather upbeat about them:

• Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, using the same "clear, hold and build" propaganda of US counterinsurgency, says that drones may be helpful in the short term, but "over the long run, they need to be supplemented by much broader, longer-term activities to clear hold and build..."
• Stephen Cohen of that "liberal" Brookings Institute claims (with no evidence) that the majority of people killed by drones in Pakistan have been "militants." He also notes how humane they are: "What they do is allow any country that possesses them to pinpoint and target without much collateral damage. The drone in a sense, while it conjures up images of a mechanical monster, in fact is far more effective and more humane than dropping tons of bombs on an area."

After Jackie's softening up operation Monday, Tom Gjelten emerges from the shadows on Tuesday morning with yet another big "scoop" from his employers high officials at the CIA. It's a real performance:

• According to Tom, starting early last year "the CIA turned up the heat. Unmanned aircraft began targeting suspected al-Qaeda leaders and facilities in Pakistan on a routine basis. Now US intelligence officials are reporting the results of the ramped up campaign. The al-Qaeda leadership has been decimated says one official."

• "The enemy is really, really struggling says another official. These attacks he says have produced the broadest deepest and most rapid reduction in al-Qaeda leadership in several years."

• The featured "skeptic" of these claims is Bruce Hoffman (CIA award winner). Hoffman, according to Gjelten "says one effect of the strikes against al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan could be a demoralization of Jihadi warriors in other parts of the world." This is followed by Hoffman's own voice, "Might they not conclude if the United States can reach out and target these highly protected and valued individuals, what happens to the ordinary soldiers?" That is some serious skepticism!

Just in case you get some wild idea that maybe our half-trillion dollar war-stimulus package is a bit much now that al-Qaeda is on the ropes, Gjelten reminds us that we have nothing to fear but the lack of fear itself:

"The officials are careful to say the reported success of the Pakistan campaign does not necessarily mean the al-Qaeda threat has diminished. As many as a hundred fighters have already graduated from training camps in Pakistan and are said to be prepared for terrorist operations in the West."

We then are treated to the puffery of Sec. of War Gates asserting that "we will go after al-Qaeda wherever al-Qaeda is." To which Gjetlen wonders, "And where might that be? Al-Qaeda has been defeated in one area before only to pop up somewhere else. It's operations in Pakistan may be weakened, but officials say the network is now gaining strength in east Africa."

Westward ho! to Africa. Sounds to me like we might need a few thousand more of these humane, freedom lovin' Reapers.

Quixotic

Okay, I've contacted the OMBOTsman 9000 at NPR again on its surging enthusiasm for US counterinsurgency. If you've missed the latest, check out Monday's or Tuesday's ATC piece from the NPR chum cannon (several readers have commented in the Q Tips sections below on these "reports.") You can also click on the counterinsurgency tag below to follow NPR's love affair with counterinsurgency.

I sent the following to Ms. Shepard at NPR:

Back on Dec. 22 the Weekend Edition host noted:
"Hugh Sanson reflects the opinion of a number of you when he writes 'The stories of young soldiers' lasting suffering are deeply moving - I would be further moved if NPR could consider any of the millions of Iraqis affected - the million dead, and the millions wounded or displaced. What effect would a story of a victim of an American bombing have. Is NPR too timid or too dishonest to offer such stories?' Mr. Sanson, our plan is to do just that in January." Well your two reports on Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing of the sort. Now how about you try the same test on your upbeat counterinsurgency reports. Let's hear from some of the victims of past US counterinsurgency in Vietnam and Latin America - or is NPR too timid or dishonest?

I think I'll be waiting a long, long time for any NPR story that includes that perspective...

Private Shapiro and Sutherland

(Lt General William Caldwell speaking through JJ Sutherland)

The US Army releases its Stability Operation Field Manual and Alabama Moon points out that there's nothing "new" about its goal ("conflict against enemies intent on limiting American access and influence throughout the world") and its author's implied threat against "homeland" instability!

But from the news organization that revels in counterinsurgency and gets all goosesteppybumpy over Army Strong you can expect nothing but an upbeat commercial for this latest product of US militarism.

Here's the meat of the report:

(Ari Shapiro opens with): "When the US army fought its way into Baghdad in 2003 soldiers there found they were not prepared to establish peace, security and the rule of law in Iraq. It's taken the military years to show some progress on those fronts..."

(Sutherland follows): "That lack of coherent planning for what happens after the shooting stops was intrinsic to the army...that process bore terrible fruit in the days, then months, then years after the invasion of Iraq: chaos in the streets, no basic services, a growing insurgency, thousands of dead Americans. Security in Iraq has improved dramatically - from a civil war to at least a modicum of peace. Fragile certainly, but an improvement, an improvement driven by fundamentally changing the army's approach.

The manual lays out a series of steps on how to stabilize a country after a war - from providing security, establishing the rule of law, to things like social well-being, stable governance and a working economy....

....an army needed to win the wars we're in, an army this manual will help to build. "

As always, not a mention of the terrible "fruit" of 4.5 million Iraqi refugees and over a million dead. Makes me want to scream. And this passes for journalism...ugghh.

Surgin'

According to Michele Norris on Thursday's ATC, NPR was "curious about John McCain's premise that applying the lessons of Iraq could lead to victory in Afghanistan." Opening the report, Norris says, "McCain asserts that the best way to turn around the situation in Afghanistan is by using the experience in Iraq as a blueprint." This is followed by McCain's voice asserting "...it is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan; it's by applying the tried and true principles of counterinsurgency used in the surge - which Senator Obama opposed - that we will win in Afghanistan."

What NPR should be curious about is whether the very premise of McCain's claim is true. Has the Surge has been a "success?" Unfortunately, as anyone who follows NPR knows, NPR has simply accepted that the Surge has succeeded.

In the report Norris talks to Nathaniel C. Fick, counterinsurgency advocate and fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Fick is all for using the "lessons learned" in Iraq, Vietnam, Malaya, etc. (NPR has a long history of promoting US/British counterinsurgency) as the US seeks "victory" in Afghanistan. If you listen to the report you won't hear anything about these lessons from the Surge: rearming parties to an unresolved sectarian conflict, that the US may be helping Maliki crush political opponents, that a lot of the "peace" of the surge is from cantonization of Baghdad and ethnic cleansing.

What NPR should be doing is acknowledging that the Surge has been a smashing success if its goal is to reduce immediate violence and postpone the final horrors of the Iraq War until Bush leaves office. If they were reporting truthfully on the failures of the Surge, then McCain's wish to apply the Surge wouldn't even merit serious consideration, but would reveal itself as the self-evident folly that it is.

And That Other Minor Detail

In the wake of the Colombian Army's successful hostage rescue operation the surgery on memory continues. Robert Siegel talks to Professor Marc Chernick who's bio notes "has been a consultant to the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, the U.S. Department of State and the government of Switzerland."

Supposedly we are going to learn about the FARC. Siegel asks, "How old a group is this...?

Chernick states, "Well they were founded in 1964. Their leaders first took up arms in the late 1940s...before the group (FARC) existed they were rebels in the mountains, part of a broader struggle and in the 60s they transformed themselves into the FARC."

Siegel asks a reasonable question: "What were they struggling for?"

And Chernick giving a meaningless answer says, "Well, they came out of an intense period of partisan civil war in Colombia called 'The Violence' - 40s and 50s - one of the bloodiest periods in Latin American history, but the main groups there made peace, but a small group of guerillas - liberal guerillas they were at the time - stayed out of the conflict; it's that group that formed the FARC."

I was hoping Siegel would say, "Yeah, but what were they struggling for?" Instead he says, "Then during the years of the Soviet Union...we associated the FARC with being a Marxist group - fair?"

Chernick replies, "No absolutely, the key moment is actually not the Soviet Union, but the Cuban Revolution...when the FARC was formed there was an era of revolutionary groups being founded all over the continent. The FARC became decidedly Marxist, allied themselves with the communist party and were pro-Soviet."

I have to say, that whatever you think of the FARC, this conversation was so mind-numbingly stupid and misinformed that it is impressive in a sick sort of way. Can Chernick say poverty? The UN can - even the World Bank can! And regarding "The Violence" of the 40s and 50s, even the Library of Congress country report on Colombia notes that "the basic cause of this protracted period of internal disorder, however, was the refusal of successive governments to accede to the people's demands for socioeconomic change." How convenient that poverty (and dictatorship and horrific government brutality) never came up in the conversation.

Listening to Siegel and Chernick talk you'd think that it was some Marxist virus sweeping the continent that just made people want to take up arms and head to the mountains for no other reason than having commie or "pro-Soviet" sympathies.

And people wonder why so many Americans are so stupid.

Putting a Shine on a Dirty War

Juan Forero has an absolutely triumphalist piece on ATC tonight about the losses of the FARC and the successes of the Colombian government. He mentions that the people of Colombia have suffered "pain from the long guerrilla war - one that's cost thousands of lives." He notes that "mayors and small town dignitaries...praise the army for having pushed back the rebels...but they say they're still suffering." He states that the war has "touched every part of the country" and that "for years FARC guerrillas have destroyed small towns and attacked military posts," but "a modern fleet of helicopters and fighter planes regularly pound FARC units." Forero tells us that Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos "says he expects the guerrillas to continue with acts of terror..."

I'm not interested in covering up the crimes of the FARC; they have committed many war crimes in their struggle against the Colombian government. BUT any review of the crimes of torture, massacre and terror in Colombia over the past several decades will put the huge majority of the blame squarely at the feet of the Colombian government (and of course its benefactor, the US). Whether it is Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch (which is very critical of the FARC) the main purveyor of violence and terror in Colombia has been the state and its allied paramilitaries. The 2001 Human Rights Watch report linked previously states:

"Most political killings by far, over 50 percent, were the work of paramilitary groups, which continued to work with the tolerance or open support of units of the Colombian security forces. Eight percent of political killings were attributed to anti-government guerrilla groups and 10 percent to unidentified forces. Two per cent were linked directly to the security forces. The balance could not be attributed to a specific group."

Though, according to Amnesty International's 2008 report, civilian killings are down in Colombia, the government has hardly cleaned up its act - and has done almost nothing to hold anyone accountable for the horrendous crimes of the past.

Some victory...

Slaughterhouse Jive

When Juan Forero reports you really have to listen, this guy is a slick operative. I saw that he was reporting this morning on "Colombian Army Units Killing Peasants," and thought "Wow, maybe this will be a decent report." It's not.

You know how the bad apples spin carried the day during the Abu Ghraib revelations - well Forero and Inskeep are trying to pass off the same line on the long, sordid history of the Colombian military/paramilitaries atrocities (and the US role in creating and supporting them).

Here's Inskeep carefully enunciating his way through his morning script:
"In recent years the [Colombian] government appears to have made progress...Not for the first time though the government faces questions about its methods. Human rights groups say army units are under pressure to produce results, and that may explain why some rogue army units are accused of killing peasants, civilians..." Dang those rogue army units! If only they could use some of those refined graduates of SOA/WHINSEC.

Inskeep having set the table, Forero carries on with this theme. Here are some lowlights:

• The war in Colombia "has been marked by atrocities, committed by rebels, by death squads, by soldiers - but little was known about what are called extrajudicial executions until now." Actually a lot has been known for a long time, and though the FARC commits atrocities, the overwhelming bulk of torture and killings have been carried out by the military and its allied paramilitaries.
• There is "concern among reform-minded officials in the ministry of defense."
• "The army's reliance on the body count...is contributing to the problem"
• "The defense minister has issued new rules of engagement...assigned consultants to combat units...and the attorney general's office is also prosecuting dozens of soldiers...
• "...military officials say there's a command and control problem."

Not only does Forero decontextualize the history of the paramilitaries, but he pushes the argument that the Colombian government and military have cleaned house and are struggling with rogue elements who commit atrocities. Even a cursory look through the human rights records of the Colombian government show that that simply was a lie several years ago and continues to be a lie now.

Protecting the Population

This morning I was wondering where that "hard reportin' " Scott Simon was that I had been hearing about. He was chatting with another counter-insurgency soldier/intellectual, Col. H. R. McMaster, who had his genius on display way back in Feb. 2003, when he wrote that, "It seems as if the George W. Bush administration has kicked the Vietnam syndrome. Maybe it is time for the rest of us to do the same." See, that's the kind of sharp thinking that gets you gigs at the big think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the International Institute For Strategic Studies - and NPR air time, of course!

I just loved when the Colonel stated that "as the natures of the conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq evolved from more conventional campaigns...they shifted to a...counter-insurgency campaign that placed a premium on protecting the population." Man, that takes some serious chutzpah to put that one out there - I do believe a trained-monkey-of-a-reporter might have a few questions about those 1,000,000 plus souls who somehow slipped through the population protection safety-net there in Iraq (not to mention the 4 million plus who opted for their own population security plan by fleeing). But let's listen to Scott Simon's challenge to this utter Pentagon hogwash:

("__________________________________________")

That's right - nothing.

The Colonel's not done, though. He surges on with this gem, "What we endeavored to do over the past year is to help move the various communities in Iraq to stop this very destructive cycle of sectarian violence." Well yes, the US surge did help "move" the various communities all right, but what about the context of the US policy of creating sectarian division and using sectarian death squads? Let's give Hard Hittin' Simon another listen:

("__________________________________________")

There it is again. Hello darkness my old friend.

Nagl Gazing

Media "genius" for US counterinsurgency, John Nagl, is back on NPR...again (see Aug. 9, 2007 and Dec. 5, 2006). On Tuesday's ATC, Michelle Norris has a friendly chat with Nagl, not once raising the issues of how, in spite of Nagl's intellectual window dressing (and plagarism), US counterinsurgency has always been about crushing poor people with appalling violence.

Norris also does not question the contradiction that lies at the heart of Nagl's argument (see his brief summary here). Nagl tells Norris that counterinsurgency can not be won simply by killing insurgents; he states that "whatever underlying social concerns led to an insurgency developing will reemerge unless you find a way to solve those basic problems." Yeah, well what if the underlying social concern is the fact that an imperial power is occupying your country to control your country's resources (Iraq) or to prop up its oligarchy and protect poverty wages (Central America)? Maybe that's why historically, US counterinsurgency has relied on mass murder, torture, and other forms of state terror (Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.)

Norris never even hints at the sordid and murderous history of counterinsurgency, instead she says, "We're talking about wars that are long and protracted and drawn out and very very difficult." That's definitely how it looks from the point of view of the empire.

Nagl likes Norris' answer. He says, "That's exactly right Michele, the average counterinsurgency campaign takes about a decade so these are long hard slow wars..."