Hardened hearts and a glimmer of humanity

Once in a great while, a work of fiction comes along that somehow eclipses what I believe to be true from my reading of non-fiction news articles and my viewing of TV documentaries and "60 Minutes"-style magazine pieces.

"The Swallows of Kabul" rises to that level, imbuing its characters with the emotions, insights and epiphanies that are sometimes harder to convey in conventional step-back pieces. It's the internal dialogue of the characters in Yasmina Khadra's 2005 novel that illuminates the depth of despair and brutality of modern-day Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban.

Khadra is a pseudonym for a Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian Army officer who's written four other books. In "Swallows" he traces the lives of two couples and the unlikely events that twine their lives together: Mohsen and Zunaira, unemployed, frustrated members of the educated middle class; and Atiq, a disillusioned jailer, and his wife, Musarrat, who is dying of terminal illness.

Mohammed Moulessehoul, the real 'Yasmina Khadra'

The book has been compared to Khaled Hossein's "The Kite Runner" for providing a window into the lives of Afghan people. For all the harshness and misogynistic oppressiveness that it depicts, the novel also reveals a glimmer of humanity, built around Atiq's long-deadened soul and his realization that not every shred of tenderness and love has been stripped from him.

Here I yield to the words of one reviewer, who describes the book's essence in a way I can only admire:

The Swallows of Kabul is a scathing indictment of a world turned to stone, where the worship of a fundamentalist God makes life uninhabitable. The softness of women has been extracted from society; due to that separation, men’s hearts have hardened. What is left beside despair and madness?
This small book is a journey, a rapid descent from a nagging discontent straight into hell. Like the missing swallows, the bearers of hope have been sentenced to endless days of mourning, covered in the colors of “fever and fear.” 
-- Luan Gaines, Curled Up With A Good Book


And here I quote from the book itself as an example of the inner turmoil felt by its characters, in this case Atiq Shaukat, the jailer in charge of guarding prisoners before their executions.

Something like a sob constricts his throat. He has to squeeze his fists bloodless to keep from collapsing. He's tired, tired of going in circles, running after wisps of smoke, tired of these dull days trampling him down from morning till night. He can't figure out why he has survived two consecutive decades of ambushes, air raids, and explosive devices that turned the bodies of dozens of people around him into pulp, sparing neither women nor children, neither villages nor flocks, and all to wind up like this, vegetating in a dark inhospitable world, in a completely disoriented city studded with scaffolds and haunted by doddering human wreckage -- a city that mistreats him, damages him, day after day, night after night, whether he's in the company of some wretch condemned to die and awaiting her fate in his stinking jail or watching over his tormented wife, doomed to an even crueler death.

Exquisite writing and a simple, powerful story make me agree with the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Swallows of Kabul will stay with you long after you've finished it."

 Photograph by Guardian/Graham Turner

Memorial Day 2011

Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta

As Americans prepare to observe Memorial Day, I imagine there will be plenty of people who don't give much thought to the meaning of the holiday.

How I wish I could sit them down in front of a TV or a computer and have them watch a "60 Minutes" special that aired tonight: "Honoring Our Soldiers"

The first segment profiled Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, a self-described "average" or "mediocre" soldier from Iowa who was awarded the Medal of Honor last November -- the nation's highest combat honor -- for his extreme bravery in a firefight with the Taliban in 2007 in Afghanistan's notoriously dangerous Korengal Valley.

The second segment took viewers to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where an Army captain and his troops at a small base are trying to hold their own against a relentless wave of insurgents, many of them foreign fighters who pour over the international border in one of the most hostile environments on the planet.

In both cases, you're left admiring the soldiers' professionalism and their absolute dedication to each other and their mission. You also can't help but plead for President Obama to pull the plug on our involvement there and bring the troops home. But for one night, those geopolitical considerations were secondary to Sgt. Giunta's story and what it depicts about the courage and heroism that spring up in the most ordinary of American servicemen.

Giunta was a teenager working as a "sandwich artist" at a Subway shop when he decided to enlist. Four years later, he ran directly into enemy fire at close range to drag a wounded sergeant to safety and then ran back a second time to kill a Taliban insurgent and prevent another wounded soldier from being taken captive.

For his actions, Giunta became the first living American soldier since Vietnam to receive the Medal of Honor. And yet he comes across as the most humble person you'd ever want to meet, insisting he had done nothing special and was, in fact, uncomfortable being singled out.

"This is only one moment," he said in the interview. "I don't think I did anything that anyone else I was with wouldn't have done. I was in a position to do it. That was what needed to be done. So that's what I did."

Of course, I thought of my son Jordan and his buddies. This weekend, they're away from base, in the midst of three weeks of field training designed to prepare them for deployment if and when it ever comes. I understand that Jordan wants to put his military training to use -- it's only natural to want to follow through and test yourself on the things you've practiced over and over. But as a father, I pray he never has to be put in harm's way.

If that day comes, I'm confident he'll serve honorably. For me, it's not that much of a stretch to see that Spec. Jordan Rede has a lot of the same qualities and values as Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta: Humility. Loyalty. Dedication to the team and the task at hand.

I'm equally confident that parents all over this country would say the same about their own son or daughter serving in today's volunteer Army.

Between books

Cutting down poppies in Afghanistan

After finishing the exhaustive biography of Mickey Mantle late last month, I decided to take a break and catch up with a few magazines. I'm glad I did. Here are a few highlights:

-- "The Opium Wars." From National Geographic Magazine's February 2011 issue, an on-the-ground account of U.S. efforts to wean Afghan farmers off growing opium poppies. Robert Draper explains how America's national security interests are tied to this strategy:

The grim axiom defining today's Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan government seemed to take stock of the obvious: For the outside world's largesse to continue, the national economy's addiction to opium must end. The poppy fields must be destroyed. But just as this devoutly Muslim nation did not become the world's leading opium supplier overnight, uprooting Afghanistan's poppy mind-set promises to be a complicated endeavor.

Gov. Nikki Haley

-- "The Comet: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina." From the March 6 issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. This Q&A interview with the Palmetto State's new Republican governor -- a daughter of wealthy Sikh immigrants who's converted to Christianity -- reveals her to be plain-spoken and just a touch competitive.

Q. You’re said to be incredibly competitive. Outside politics, how does this manifest itself?
A. Ask my kids. When we have basketball tournaments, I am the basketball queen. When we play the Wii, I am the bowling queen. And I will forever say that I am the Putt-Putt queen.

Q. How do you react when you lose?
A. I don’t lose, so I don’t have to worry about that.

--  "How Chris Christie Did His Homework." From the Feb. 27 edition of the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Yes, a piece on another Republican governor. But whereas Haley has been in office only since January, Christie already has established himself as a GOP star just two years after winning election in New Jersey. He professes to have no interest in running for president in 2012 but if the Republicans win their war on public employee unions, it will be Christie -- not Wisconsin's Scott Walker -- who gets the credit for being first to draw a line in the sand.

Gov. Chris Christie

As Matt Bai reports:

Some critics have posited that Christie’s success in office represents merely the triumph of self-certainty over complexity, the yearning among voters for leaders who talk bluntly and with conviction. Yet it’s hard to see Christie getting so much traction if he were out there castigating, say, immigrants or Wall Street bankers.

What makes Christie compelling to so many people isn’t simply plain talk or swagger, but also the fact that he has found the ideal adversary for this moment of economic vertigo. Ronald Reagan had his “welfare queens,” Rudy Giuliani had his criminals and “squeegee men,” and now Chris Christie has his sprawling and powerful public-sector unions — teachers, cops and firefighters who Christie says are driving up local taxes beyond what the citizenry can afford, while also demanding the kind of lifetime security that most private-sector workers have already lost.

It may just be that Christie has stumbled onto the public-policy issue of our time, which is how to bring the exploding costs of the public workforce in line with reality.

Looking forward to starting a novel when we go on vacation this week. In the meantime, wanted to recommend the Haley Q&A as a quick read and the other two pieces as well worth their time, given the in-depth reporting and incisive analysis each one offers.

Photo gallery of poppies by David Guttenfelder for National Geographic

Photo of Nikki Haley by Matthias Clamer for The New York Times

Photo of Chris Christie by Mark Peterson for The New York Times

The Afghan War: Up close and personal

In my Best of 2010 list, there was one item conspicuously missing: Sebastian Junger's gripping book, "WAR: As Soldiers Really Live It."

My friend Colleen gave me the book last summer and I read it voraciously. While I've read outstanding pieces of reporting about the Afghan War in The New York Times and Esquire by C.J. Chivers, this was by far the best treatment I've seen in book form. In fact, the movie "Restrepo" -- co-directed by Junger with photographer Tim Hetherington -- was based on this book. It played in Portland movie theaters for just a few weeks, but I missed it.  Had I seen it, I imagine the book and film would have landed on my Best of 2010 list. You can bet I'll be ordering it soon on Netflix.

So what was so good about the book?
-- The reporting: It's one thing to debate U.S. policy objectives, as so many pundits do, but another entirely to devote yourself to immersion reporting on the front lines. Starting in the spring of 2007, Junger and Hetherington spent 15 months with a single platoon at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The proximity to those troops resulted in first-hand observations and descriptions of the soldiers' thoughts, fears and actions, both risky and heroic. It's harrowing stuff, reading about the sound of gunfire and the physics of a single bullet's speed and lethality, let alone the hidden dangers of roadside bombs and the punishing climate and mountainous terrain of the Korengal Valley.

Misha Pemble-Belkin, left

-- The writing: Junger, the author of "The Perfect Storm," does a great job describing the hostile environment of Afghanistan, the brotherhood among the troops, and their genuine respect for the enemy (impoverished Taliban fighters who were outnumbered and under-resourced yet gave their American foes all they could handle in a firefight). He also tells the stories of a few individuals, including Oregon's Misha Pemble-Belkin, to paint the larger picture of a platoon made up of unique personalities and backgrounds.

It was a weird irony of the war that once you were here -- or your son was -- the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant until very conservative families and very liberal ones -- there were some -- saw almost completely eye to eye. Misha Pemble-Belkin's father was a labor organizer who had protested every American war of the past forty years, yet he and his wife were wildly proud of their son.

Pemble-Belkin wasn't allowed to have toy guns when he was young, even squirt guns, so he and his brother picked up crooked sticks and pretended to shoot those instead. The men of Second Platoon shortened Pemble-Belkin's name to "PB," which inevitably became "Peanut Butter" and then just "Butters."

He spoke slowly and very softly, particularly on the platoon radio, and he played guitar and drew pictures of the valley on a sketch pad. He claimed it was the only thing he knew how to draw. Butters could easily have been an art major in college except that he was a paratrooper in the Korengal Valley. He joined the Army after spending a year living in his car, snowboarding.

-- The insight: Junger is a great conduit for the thoughts and motivations that keep these young men on task, whether coping with the boredom and oppressive heat of a summer day or the adrenalin-fueled sensation of coming under attack from an unseen enemy. In one passage, he overhears one soldier complain to his sergeant about a man in another squad falling out during an uphill climb after a 20-hour operation.

The idea that you're not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you're not prepared to walk for someone you're certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.

Toward the end of the book, Junger writes about war's "all-embracing fog of uncertainty" and how it binds combat troops.

Combat fog obscures your fate -- obscures when and where you might die -- and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time.

The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing.

I don't remember dog-earing as many pages in a book as I did this one. And as I plowed through it, my youngest son, Jordan, was ever-present in my mind. He doesn't talk much about the harshness of training exercises or the camaraderie amongst the troops, nor do I push him to reveal what he'd prefer to keep to himself -- although he and I did talk about the book at one point last year. Still, Junger's book -- like Chivers' newspaper and magazine articles -- added to my understanding of the realities that Jordan might someday face if he is deployed.

He's training with a Stryker Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and possibly could be deployed sometime in 2012. He hopes to go so he can finally put into practice all that he's learned to do. We get that -- he wants to perform the job he's trained to do. But as parents, Lori and I of course hope that day will never come. With the U.S. presence there pretty much assured until 2014, we'll have to see how things unfold.

Photograph by Tim Hetherington

War? What wars?

Scene from "The Telling Project"

During all the pre-election hype and continuing through the post-election analysis Tuesday night, I don't recall more than a single reference to Afghanistan -- and none to Iraq.

Which is a shame. Because all the pundits and politicians would have you believe that the mid-term elections were solely about the economy and the deficit. Those are obvious issues, of course, but it's distressing to me that our foreign entanglements -- which are equally important to our fiscal health -- didn't register as a major concern with voters.

As if to make my point, a writer for the alternative weekly, Willamette Week, had this to say in a blurb about a forthcoming play about the forgotten wars:

"You probably don’t spend much time, on a day-to-day basis, thinking about war. I don’t. The country has been embroiled in violent overseas conflict since my last year of high school, leaving 5,787 men and women of my generation dead and tens of thousands more wounded, but most days I worry more about how all the damn ants are getting into my living room than I do Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t think I am much different from most Americans, in that respect. We have placed our wars, and our soldiers, in the same mental box as the national debt and the eventual possibility of colon cancer." 

Give the writer some points for honesty. And if you're in the Portland area, consider attending a performance of "The Telling Project." It's a performance piece featuring six veterans who discuss their experiences at war -- and whose status as amateur actors makes their words and emotions all the more meaningful. I attended a show last year and it was a real epiphany for me. (Read my review: "Ordinary heroes")

As someone who's become a military dad, owing to our youngest son's enlistment in the Army, I've naturally taken more of an interest in the politics and military strategies associated with our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the U.S. electorate and scads of political analysts can't be bothered to acknowledge the wars, at least I can tip my hat to these brave soldiers, sailors and Marines who've served and are willing to let us in to their world.

Photo by  Patrick Weishampel, Willamette Week

A benevolent God?

"Everything happens for a reason."

No doubt you've heard people say this. Maybe you have too. Do you believe it? I don't.

Does that make me a non-believer in the religious sense? I don't think so. To me, accepting that things happen for a reason is to acknowledge that they are pre-ordained and that there is meaning attached to everything that takes place -- whether good or bad, uplifting or dispiriting.

I think things happen for no reason. That is, I think they happen randomly and the only meaning that attaches to them is what we humans choose to ascribe to a higher power.

Why am I writing about this?

I finally got a chance to sit down over breakfast with my friend Eric, who along with his wife Sue, had to deal with the tragic death of their daughter-in-law earlier this year. I wrote about this in an earlier post -- their oldest son, Scott, and his wife, Jenna, both young officers in the Air Force had just finished their deployments in Afghanistan and were on vacation in Scotland when a spare tire blew up on Jenna's lap. She died of her injuries five days later.

Eric immediately flew to the hospital in Edinburgh to be with Scott, to support him through the difficult process of carrying out Jenna's advance directive. After he returned home to Portland, Sue flew to England, where Scott was based, to be with their son. She's still there but plans to return home this week with Scott, who's been reassigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord just outside Tacoma.

Sensitive to the heartache anyone would still be feeling, I gently asked Eric if whatever his religious/spiritual beliefs were prior to the accident, did he find himself questioning them during the days when Jenna lay comatose?

Yes, he answered. You certainly question whether God is benevolent. If He is, why would He allow (or cause) this tragedy to happen to a young couple who had done all the right things -- gotten their college degrees, volunteered to serve their country and emerged unscathed from a hostile place, eager to begin spending time together. Why them? What possible explanation could there be for the notion that everything happens for a reason?

Yet, he acknowledged, he also prayed to that higher being that Jenna be able to recover from her injuries and in such a way that life would be worth living. The doctors had determined that if she survived, the most she'd be able to do would be to open her eyes. Maybe.

In that situation, Eric said, you're desperate and you try to grab onto anything that gives you reason to hope. I can understand that completely. I also can imagine that I would do the same. Rail against the unfairness and the randomness of an inexplicable accident while at the same time beseeching something or someone to intervene to make things right. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or just a frail human still trying to figure things out when maybe they'll never make sense?

It's strange, Eric said. Jenna died on April 1st. The next day was Good Friday. Two days later was Easter Sunday.

Today marks two months since Capt. Jenna Sielski Wilcox passed away. She will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in July.

Photograph: Solano Community Church.

Losing Jenna

Driving back from Orcas Island two weekends ago, totally relaxed and appreciative of the wonderful week we'd spent at our cabin, we were roughly 30 miles from home when Lori's cell phone rang. We pulled off the freeway and there, on the darkened asphalt slab of a drive-thru espresso stand, we heard news that jolted us to our core.

Jenna Wilcox, a 27-year-old U.S. Air Force captain, and the wife of fellow USAF officer Scott Wilcox, the son of our good friends in Portland, had been critically injured. Our first thought: that she had been wounded in battle in Afghanistan, where she and Scott had been stationed for the past year. But, no, she hadn't. In one of life's cruel ironies, the young couple had completed their service in Afghanistan a few days earlier, been reunited at their home near Cambridge, England, and were enjoying a well-deserved vacation in Scotland when tragedy struck.

They had stopped their sports car to change a tire and because there was no room in the luggage compartment for it, they had placed the bad tire on Jenna's lap and resumed driving. The tire exploded and Jenna took the full force of the blast and sustained massive internal injuries. Scott, miraculously, wasn't seriously hurt.

All this we heard through sobs from Scott's mother, Sue.

How could this be? We'd seen Scott grow up in the neighborhood, two streets away, as our families grew closer by the year. We'd met Jenna and her parents when they came out from Buffalo, N.Y., to Portland shortly after she'd married Scott. An impressive young woman, she was smart, genial and athletic, a former gymnast who went to graduate from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Their careers had taken them to Korea, England and, most recently, Afghanistan. They had been separated for most of their four-year marriage by their differing responsibilities but now were looking forward to time off -- together. (Jenna had even escaped injury during a roadside bomb attack during her tour of duty.)


Jenna succumbed to her injuries on April 1, five days after being rushed to the hospital. Poor Scott had to confront end-of-life decisions at the too-young age of 27. Jenna, however, had specified her wishes in an advance directive and Scott's dad, Eric, was there for support, having immediately flown to Scotland to be with his oldest son.

How could this be? No parent ever expects to bury a child. No parent of a service member expects their child to lose their life from non-combat injuries. No one who follows news of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan could have imagined death would come from an exploding tire on a friggin' vacation.

How unfair, how random, how non-sensical life can be. To have such an outstanding young woman taken away so young is a loss to all of us.

On Saturday, Britain's Daily Mail published a news story about Jenna, which has gotten wide readership on that side of the pond. The piece ended with a quote from Jenna's March 21 entry on the blog she maintained while abroad: "This will be my last entry. Both Scott and I are home, safe and sound and I no longer have a reason to continue with this blog."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1263095/U-S-Air-Force-captain-Jenna-Wilcox-holiday-Scotland-dies-freak-accident-sports-car-tyre-explodes-lap.html#ixzz0kOWS5MGg

To view Jenna's blog: http://jennawilcox.blogspot.com/

May she rest in peace.

A toast to our heroes

As the sky begins to darken on Christmas Eve, I want to share this column by David Ignatius of The Washington Post, one of the most knowledgable commentators on foreign affairs generally and on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular.

Ignatius reports from Forward Operating Base Frontenac in Afghanistan, a place where our son, Jordan, could be headed next year, if a number of variables fall into place.

"This holiday season is a good time to remember these faraway soldiers. The debate over Afghanistan has provoked strong feelings, pro and con. But the country seems united in its appreciation for a military that has been suffering the stresses of war, without complaint, for the last eight years."

Read the piece here.

Above: U.S. soldiers with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division rest on their Stryker armored vehicles at Forward Operating Base Frontenac, Afghanistan, on Nov. 3, 2009. (U.S. Air Force photo By Tech. Sgt. Francisco V. Govea II/Released)

A mother's heartbreak

Going from the light-hearted (yesterday's post) to the heavy-hearted...

As the number of military deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan mounts by the day (5,377 and counting, according to IraqWarHeroes.org), we can sometimes lose track of the heartache each casualty causes in the families left behind.

In the case of Victoria Walz, a single mom from Vancouver who lost her only child, it's impossible to read of her loss and not feel her pain...and her pride.

Read Allan Brettman's account of Christopher Ian Walz's funeral in The Sunday Oregonian and then reconsider, with me, whether pouring more troops into Afghanistan really does make sense. "Mom: 'He died for us to live' "

Photo: Motoya Nakamura, The Oregonian

Afghanistan: Back on the front burner

Sometimes I hardly know where to begin.

I've got a "Frontline" special -- "Obama's War" -- on the TV right now, so I'm listening to all this analysis from military aides and government officials retracing the multiple challenges we face in trying to figure out our next moves in Afghanistan and, now, possibly Pakistan.

I've got Frank Rich's most recent Sunday column in The New York Times -- "Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco" -- in mind as I sit down to the computer.

And I'm cognizant of the fact that a major health care reform bill cleared the Senate Finance Committee today, with a single Republican contributing to the 14-9 vote, even as the health insurance industry began running TV ads in six states aimed at undermining support for the historic legislation.

So while I should be celebrating Maine Senator Olympia Snowe's courage in crossing party lines, along with the fact that the health care reform bill has now advanced further than any similar legislation in a generation, instead I'm infuriated by the callousness and cowardice of the health insurance industry in trying to sabotage the reform efforts. It's not surprising at all that they'd step out of the shadows at the 11th hour, with millions upon millions to spend on negative advertising.

As important as that issue is, this week I'm thinking more about Afghanistan and hoping the White House will emerge with a plan that makes sense out of a nonsensical situation. I'm sympathetic to the notion that we need to fight this war, and maybe even ramp up our troop levels there, in order to keep the Taliban in check. But when I read that the Taliban have become less of a threat than al-Qaida, and I already know that the real terrorists have set up in the mountainous regions of Pakistan, near the Afghan border, I have second thoughts. If we're serious about neutralizing al-Qaida, shouldn't we and our Pakistani allies be going after them there, despite the diplomatic hard feelings this would create?

I don't know that nation-building is a very realistic goal -- at least not one that I expect could be achieved in my lifetime. Afghanistan is simply a very, very different place, with a long history of official corruption, tribal governance, illiteracy and poverty, and a forbidding terrain that makes communication difficult and the goal of a strong, effective central government nothing more than a pipe dream. It's almost as if we think doing a fashion makeover on someone might somehow fundamentally change their values and behavior. Ain't gonna happen.

I'll close this post with a spot-on quote from Frank Rich's brilliant column of Oct. 11. In it, he holds accountable those hawks who got us into Afghanistan and now are pressuring Obama to turn up the heat, so we can "win" -- though no one seems able to define how "victory" would look.

Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Take 10 minutes to read Rich's piece. Then think about what advice you'd give Obama at this point.

Photo of Soviet troops withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1988. solarnavigator.net/geography/afghanistan.htm withdrawing from Afghanistan in ithdrawing om Afghanistan in 1988Soviet troops withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1988

Afghanistan, reconsidered

Leave it to Bob Woodward, half of that storied team of Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal 35 years ago, to get me to thinking about Afghanistan again. Not that it's ever far from my mind.

When you have a young son who's in the Army, you read the newspapers and magazines and tell yourself that he won't be deploying for several months, maybe even a year or more, to either Afghanistan or Iraq. At the same time, you read these articles and watch the TV news reports and try to come to some understanding of what our interests are in that part of the world and whether it makes sense to be there...regardless of the soldier in your family.

It was obvious a long time ago that George Bush invaded the wrong country after 9/11. What a waste of manpower and money and public support on such a misadventure...

And so here we are eight years into the Afghanistan War, launched ostensibly to root out Osama bin Laden, with little to nothing to show for our efforts. You've got a corrupt or incompetent government with allegations of fraud in the recent presidential election, some of the most formidable terrain in the world, an impoverished and largely illiterate people whose loyalties flip back and forth between U.S. and NATO forces, the Taliban and their individual tribes, based mainly on who can help them feed their families.

As Woodward reported this week, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, warns that the war can be lost if we don't commit more troops and quickly implement an effective counterinsurgency strategy. President Obama and his advisers are reviewing his assessment as public opinion polls show waning support for our involvement there. Congressional leaders -- i.e., top Democrats like Nancy Pelosi -- have already signaled their reluctance to get in deeper. And who can blame them?

The parallels to Vietnam can't be overlooked. There, we tried to force our values and military superiority on a people whose resiliency we grossly overestimated. Back then, we were fighting North Vietnam, backed by China. Now, Afghanistan is our ally and the real threat to the United States is posed by al-Qaida cells in Pakistan, which we can't invade because it too is an ally -- though probably the most unstable and erratic of our "friends."

A week ago Sunday, we devoted quite a bit of space in print and online to the Afghanistan War:
-- A thoughtful analysis by Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, asking "How committed is Obama to the Afghanistan War?"
-- A "Letter from Kabul," an on-the-ground report from a Lewis & Clark College professor, Zaher Wahab, who's been going back every year to visit his family and help rebuild his country's higher education system.
-- An op-ed piece by Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus, in which he contends "Afghanistan isn't Vietnam -- yet."

We followed up with an op-ed by one of our Oregon congressmen, David Wu, who had just come back from Afghanistan and announced his support for our continuing presence: "War in Afghanistan: an ongoing threat to our security."

And today our editorial board weighed in: "The general speaks. Now what?"

I don't know that I have the answers. Like Wu, I fear that withdrawing from Afghanistan will give the Taliban carte blanche to continue recruiting young men to their cause and plant the seeds for another potential attack on Americans, here or elsewhere in the world. I understand there's a difference between the religious extremism of the Taliban and the deadly militancy of al-Qaida, but it seems like the line would get blurred awfully quickly if we were to pull out entirely.

Editorial cartoon by Jack Ohman, The Oregonian

On the ground in Afghanistan

Results of Thursday's balloting in Afghanistan's second-ever presidential election may not be known for weeks -- and it will be no surprise if Hamid Karzai wins a second term as leader of "a nation burdened by warfare, pervasive corruption, a booming drug trade and seemingly intractable poverty," as characterized by Laura King of The Associated Press.

Granted, Afghanistan's weak central government reflects all the difficulties you'd expect in a region where there is no tradition of democracy, where a small fraction of adults can read, and the people have been governed for centuries by local tribes. So we shouldn't have great expectations about the pace or scope of positive change, no matter who emerges as president.

The ongoing, seemingly impossible, challenge of imposing order on a rugged and unruly country is hard to grasp for us, so many thousands of miles away. But if you'll invest 20-30 minutes, there's no better piece I've come across than C.J. Chivers' "The Long Walk" in conveying both the on-the-ground experience for U.S. troops and a big-picture explanation of just what we are trying to accomplish there.

Writing in the August issue of Esquire, Chivers describes 40 hellish hours with Company B, a column of 125 infantrymen, as they set out on a mission in the Korangal Valley, a mountainous region of forests and spires that passes as Afghanistan's jungle.

At the same time, he poses the fundamental question: What is the United States military doing in Afghanistan?

The question, when not framed as a pejorative, has many answers. Depending on the soldier and the unit, at any given moment the military is likely doing one of four things. It is hunting for, and hoping to capture or kill, the top-tier Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and their coteries. This is a direct extension of the original mission, the one that brought the United States back to Afghanistan in 2001 and that remains fired by the paired desires of justice and national security and, though the public-relations specialists do not frame it this way, a desire for revenge.

Simultaneously, the United States military is working with foreign governments, nongovernment organizations, and American agencies to build a nation where ten years ago a nation existed principally in name. This reconstituted Afghanistan, anointed a democracy by foreign influence as much as by domestic will, is supposed to develop with popular consent into a self-sufficient central government and provincial governments and district governments, with honest ministries serving all three, and courts, and a diverse economy, and passable roads and reliable electricity and potable water, and robust exports besides illicit drugs. To use the term now in favor — what one officer called the "flavor of the decade" for a nation that in recent decades has seen Islamism and warlordism and communism — this new nation is also supposed to recognize and run by rule of law, rather than by many other rules, opaque to most Westerners and largely unexplored by the United States, by which Afghanistan used to run, and often still runs, and might prefer to run if anyone were able to measure such things.

And as this reordered nation is assuming a shape that remains tentative and wormy with corruption, the United States is pursuing a third primary mission, which is to create foundations for indigenous security. This includes a national police force and an army with enough skilled soldiers to integrate fire support and operate an air corps and stand up to an insurgency in battle anywhere. It also includes an intelligence service that can penetrate and understand myriad groups — local, regional, and transnational — that make up that insurgency, as well as the drug networks that control the shadow economy, which fuels much of the war.

Last, or perhaps first, the United States military is doing what many people imagine it to be doing most: It is fighting that war. This is where Company B fits in. The long-term plan for Afghanistan is to build a competent and sturdy government and to hand off the country's affairs to this government in time. This will take many, many years. While those years pass, an essential military mission, year in and year out, is to keep the roads open and cities secure so commerce flows and Afghans can live their lives. As part of this, the military operates remote firebases and outposts far from the main roads and cities, with hopes of keeping insurgents busy away from much of the population. Each is home to squads, platoons, or companies — part of a defense-in-depth of blocking positions, or, as one colonel called them, Taliban magnets, with the organizing idea being that it is better to have the Taliban concentrating forces around a distant outpost than in Kabul, Jalalabad, or Kandahar. Company B, which occupies the Korangal Outpost and several small firebases nearby, is one of those magnets.

That's just a sample of the intelligent reporting and clear writing you'll find in this compelling piece. Click here for the article and photos by Tyler Hicks.

Quick Takes

It's the end of another month -- my fourth as a blogger -- and time for another round of Quick Takes.

1. After much anticipation, I get to see Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller tonight in concert at Oaks Park. They're touring as Three Girls and Their Buddy. I saw Emmylou long, long ago at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene. I've been waiting forever to see Patty.

2. After much anticipation of a different sort, I was gratified to read the news that we're finally beginning to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Obviously, whether Jordan winds up serving in Afghanistan or Iraq or is something that weighs heavily on my mind as we prepare to fly out to Ft. Benning tomorrow morning.

As The Washington Post's Marie Cocco points out:

But there is a reason the Bush administration was unable to get out of Iraq quickly, and it is found in the regional, ethnic and sectarian divides that persist: "The problem with Iraq is that there really is no state. Iraqis can reach agreement but they can't make it stick," [a Middle East expert, Joost Hiltermann] says. "There are all these fractures. The Americans will have to provide that glue, still.

3. I finally -- finally! -- got around to reading The New York Times Magazine article, "The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton." It's an excellent piece by Peter Baker, in which he writes that Clinton, 62, and now out of the White House longer than he served in it, can now cede the spotlight, doesn't need to shake every hand and, finally, can let go. Here's a snippet from the May 31 article:

Two sides of Clinton's persona have longed warred with each other, sunny optimism versus angry grievance. Clinton succeeded in politics largely because he projected the former; his worst moments usually came when he gave in to the latter. Both sides are genuine reflections of who he is.

Twelve years after his last campaign for office, he found it harder to control his resentments when he returned to the trail on his wife's behalf. In his view, the news media and the political world held her to a different standard, while practically anointing Obama. And when he says her, he also means, in the back of his mind, himself.

Two things I didn't realize about Clinton: He wears a hearing aid. He doesn't use a computer.

The man who ushered in the Internet age still does not use a computer, much less a BlackBerry, but keeps up with blogs and sites like The Huffington Post through clips printed out by aides.

Photo of Clinton by Ruven Afanador for The New York Times