Citizen Cartwright

Part 4 of NYTimes editorial series on violent extremism in U.S.

As I mentioned in my Dec. 13 post, I try to run the most balanced information I can find on what’s going on and tend to avoid opinion articles and media editorials. 

 

But the Times’ series on violent extremism is trying to point out all the levers to protect our democracy from political violence and seems to me worth our attention.  

 

“One of the most effective ways to deter political violence is to make it unacceptable in public life. To do that, all political leaders have an important role to play,” says the Times in its Nov. 26 editorial.

 

"Leaders in politics, law enforcement, the media and elsewhere have an obligation to do everything they can to remove from public life those who participate in or endorse political violence.

 

"The onus falls on Republicans. While voters this month rejected some of the most extreme candidates, the party is still very much under the spell of Mr. Trump and his brand of authoritarianism. Two prominent Republicans who have been outspoken about right-wing extremism and baseless lies, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have been driven out of office. Meanwhile, the spread of conspiracy theories that have already inspired violence continues unabated from politicians and conservative media.

"Even if Mr. Trump doesn’t become the party’s nominee for president, the party and many of its supporters seem to have convinced themselves that the spread of extremism in service of their causes is not an urgent concern. Those who can influence the direction of the party — its voters and its biggest donors and supporters — must do everything they can to convince them otherwise. American democracy depends on it.

 

"Democrats, too, have a role to play. They should not spend money on far-right fringe candidates in the primaries with the hopes of beating them in general elections. To do so only further pollutes the public square, even if it can lead to Democratic victories, as it apparently did this year. Rather than giving in to the temptation to tar the entire party with the actions of its worst members, Democrats should continue to find opportunities for bipartisanship whenever possible.

"The alternative is allowing extremism to run rampant until the degradation of American politics is complete.

 

"Political disagreement need not include the menace of violence. Americans, and their political leaders, have the ability to choose a different future.”

Another NYTimes editorial on violent extremism in U.S.

Last month, I summarized the first two Times editorials in its series on the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions.

 

As you know, I run almost no media editorials in this blog. But this series contains content that seems to me worth our focus, and I want to summarize it as time permits. Let’s take a look at editorial three, which the Times published on Nov. 19.

 

"One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way,” the Times says.

 

White supremacy has been part of the story of the United States since its earliest days, but the modern notion of replacement is a foreign import, says the Times. It was outlined in 2012 by Renaud Camus, a French author who's written that immigrants with high birthrates are a threat to white European society. 

 

The idea of a hostile replacement by immigrants has gained some acceptance around the world, even after inspiring mass killers in New Zealand and Buffalo, Norway and South Carolina. While extremists driven to murder are a tiny fraction of those who subscribe to racist ideologies, the mainstreaming of their ideas can make the turn to violence easier for some people, the Times says.

 

And that’s why it's alarming to see the great replacement idea espoused by political leaders around the globe, including Jordan Bardella, who's been confirmed as the successor to Marine Le Pen as head of France’s leading far-right party, says the Times. The idea been cited approvingly by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. Tucker Carlson of Fox News talks about it often.

 

A poll by The Associated Press-NORC this year found that about one in three American adults believes that “a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Last year a poll found that 61 percent of French people believe it, too.

 

While domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States have effective tools to target organized extremist groups, a pervasive problem is the political will to turn the power of the state against white supremacists, the Times says. Too often, extremism researchers say, there’s a reluctance in white-majority nations to see white extremists as threatening as nonwhite foreigners.

 

The United States is also newer to thinking about white extremism as a transnational problem, the Times says. 

 

The Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, released last year, needs more attention and urgency from lawmakers and the public, says the Times.

 

An approach tried in about a dozen countries around the world is de-radicalization programs, which encourage extremists to change their minds or at least reject violence. The U.S., German and British governments have had some success with de-radicalization programs aimed at white supremacists, the Times says.

 

One of the difficulties of the domestic effort against far-right and white supremacist extremists is that the government’s response has to try to avoid alienating people who believe in things like expansive gun rights or strict limits on immigration yet reject violence, the Times says. Often, they're the only credible messengers who can reach deeply radicalized people and talk them back from a more violent course.

 

Tech companies can and should invest more money and resources in content moderation, though that alone won't purge the internet of extremism — especially when the networks for sharing it cross international borders, span continents and come in countless languages, the Times says.

 

Yet “if lawmakers and ordinary Americans make a concerted effort to drive extremist rhetoric out of mainstream politics, the influence of these groups will again fade,” says the Times.

Austin, Milley on what we need to understand about Afghanistan

The six hours of senior Pentagon leaders’ public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday "were at times acrimonious and at times verging on political theater,” says The New York Times.

 

"Republican senators who had in the past defended President Donald J. Trump’s desire to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan demanded resignations from military leaders who carried out a Democratic president’s orders to withdraw,” says the Times. "Democrats, who are traditionally tougher on military leaders, on this occasion, provided solace in the form of softer questioning and traced flaws back to the Trump administration.”

 

Media get clicks by focusing on the theater. Let’s focus instead on the military's assessment of what happened in Afghanistan and the lessons to be explored.

 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said: "We helped build a state, but we could not forge a nation. The fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away – in many cases without firing a shot – took us all by surprise. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise. 

"We need to consider some uncomfortable truths: that we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks, that we did not grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, that we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that Taliban commanders struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha [peace] agreement, that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers, and that we failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for which – and for whom – many of the Afghan forces would fight.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said: “Over the course of four Presidents, 12 Secretaries of Defense, seven Chairmen, ten CENTCOM Commanders, 20 Commanders in Afghanistan, hundreds of Congressional Delegation visits, and 20 years of congressional oversight, there are many lessons to be learned. 

"Some of the key ones that require thoughtful examination are the decisions to reduce forces in Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq. We need to fully examine the role of Pakistan 
sanctuary. We need to completely understand the degree to which corruption contributed to the collapse of the Afghan government. We need to fully understand the mission creep 
where we transitioned from a Counter Terrorism mission to nation building. And on the military side we need to understand how we developed, trained, and equipped the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] and why they collapsed in only 11 days.”

America ends its longest war

The last planes took off from Kabul airport at one minute before midnight Kabul time on Monday.

 

Many words have been brandished in recent days for political purposes and by media needing clicks, and I don’t want to add more. Let’s for now just note the magnitude of what’s happened.

 

A war that began 20 years ago under President George W. Bush as a hunt for Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who oversaw the 9/11 attacks on the United States, has cost more than 170,000 lives and more than $2 trillion, according to The New York Times.

 

Al Qaeda was driven out and Bin Laden was killed by an American SEAL team in Pakistan in 2011. America gave Afghans "a shot at democracy and freed many women to pursue education and careers,” as the Times puts it.

 

But now the United States has left Afghanistan to the same militants it swiftly drove from power in 2001.

 

As a member of this human family, it’s heart-rending to see Afghans' desperation and fear of what’s next, especially those who helped us and have been left behind.

 

And the desperation and fear of what’s next among those Afghans who did manage to get on a plane — sometimes separated from their loved ones in the chaos. Officials haven’t said whether all the Afghan evacuees who made it to the United States will be allowed to stay, according to The Washington Post.

What is Kabul airport attacker ISIS-K?

The Afghanistan affiliate of the Islamic State, Islamic State Khorasan, claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack. It takes its name from the Khorasan Province, a region that covered much of Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia in the Middle Ages, says The Associated Press.

 

The affiliate emerged in the months after the group’s core fighters swept across Syria and Iraq, carving out a self-styled caliphate, or Islamic empire, in the summer of 2014. In Syria and Iraq, it subsequently took local and international forces five years of fighting to liberate the territory.

 

The group began as several hundred Pakistani Taliban fighters, who took refuge across the border in Afghanistan after military operations drove them out of their home country, says AP. Other like-minded extremists joined them there, including disgruntled Afghan Taliban fighters unhappy with what they saw as the Taliban’s overly moderate and peaceful ways.

 

As the Taliban pursued peace talks with the United States in recent years, discontented Taliban increasingly moved to the more extremist Islamic State. Most were frustrated that the Taliban was in negotiations with the United States at a time they thought the movement was on its way to a military victory, AP says.

 

Many were attracted to the Islamic State’s violent and extreme ideology, including promises of a caliphate to unite the Islamic world — a goal never adopted by the Taliban.

 

The Taliban have confined their struggle to Afghanistan, but the Islamic State group in Afghanistan and Pakistan has embraced the Islamic State’s call for a worldwide jihad against non-Muslims.

 

The group hasn’t conducted attacks against the U.S. homeland, but the U.S. government believes it represents a chronic threat to U.S. and allied interests in South and Central Asia, says AP.

 

The Taliban have waged major coordinated offensives against the Islamic State group in Afghanistan. Taliban insurgents at times joined both the United States and U.S.-backed Afghan government forces to rout the Islamic State from parts of Afghanistan’s northeast.

The Thursday attack killed 28 Taliban, according to the group now ruling Afghanistan.

'Why did we lose' in Afghanistan?

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to an article by Carter Malkasian, a civilian adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan who subsequently was a senior adviser to General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from 2015 to 2019.

 

Malkasian says he’s been trying to understand for the past 12 years why the United States lost the war in Afghanistan.

 

"The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight,” Malkasian writes in Politico Magazine. "Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad — more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States — has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader.”

 

The Afghan government’s average soldier and policeman "simply did not want to fight as much as his Taliban counterpart,” says Malkasian.

 

"Corruption was part of the problem. As is well-known, the effectiveness of soldiers and police suffered because government officials or military commanders pocketed their pay, hoarded their ammunition and diluted rosters with ghost soldiers. Yet even after accounting for corruption, the police and army were usually still numerically superior to and better equipped than the Taliban in any given battle.

 

"A stronger explanation was that the police and soldiers did not want to put their lives on the line for a government that was corrupt and prone to neglect them,” says Malkasian. "Still, I knew a number of Afghan commanders who took great pains to care for their men. Could we really rest blame on corrupt, uncaring government leaders when Taliban were fighting for less pay, with fewer heavy weapons, far worse medical care, and leaders that for years hid out in Pakistan while their soldiers fought? Moreover, the Afghan special forces — which far and away have better leaders than the Taliban and are exquisitely supported — still had great difficulty fighting without U.S. air support and advisers.”

 

Malkasian concludes that "it is tougher to risk life for country when fighting alongside what some call occupiers, especially when they do not share your faith.”

 

Malkasian adapted the article from his new book, "The American War in Afghanistan."

Lessons from Afghanistan that apply to other conflict zones

The report released Tuesday by John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, says his agency has identified seven key lessons that span the entire 20-year Afghanistan effort and can be used in other conflict zones.

 

Many of these lessons are similar to the ones I learned in political science classes on bureaucracies.

 

Lesson six — that the United States didn’t understand Afghanistan — makes me particularly sad. Over decades, I’ve observed over and over how a superpower tends to have “hubris," as Sopko said in a July 29 interview I referred to on Monday.

 

The superpower tends to believe it knows what to do about the 195 other countries in the world. But that very 1-to-195 ratio seems to make it inevitable that the superpower will misunderstand much of the “context” of other nations and will risk getting crucial policies wrong. 

 

1. Strategy: The U.S. government "continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.”

 

"The U.S. government was simply not equipped to undertake something this ambitious in such an uncompromising environment, no matter the budget,” the report says.

 

2. Timelines: The government "consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, and created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly. These choices increased corruption and reduced the effectiveness of programs.”

 

3. Sustainability: "Many of the institutions and infrastructure projects the United States built were not sustainable."

 

“Even when programs were able to achieve short-term success, they often could not last because the Afghans who would eventually take responsibility for them were poorly equipped, trained, or motivated to do so.”

 

4. Personnel: "Counterproductive civilian and military personnel policies and practices thwarted the effort.”

 

"The U.S. government’s inability to get the right people into the right jobs at the right times was one of the most significant failures of the mission.”

 

"DOD police advisors watched American TV shows to learn about policing, civil affairs teams were mass-produced via PowerPoint presentations, and every agency experienced annual lobotomies as staff constantly rotated out, leaving successors to start from scratch and make similar mistakes all over again.”

 

5. Insecurity: "Persistent insecurity severely undermined reconstruction efforts.”

 

"The absence of violence was a critical precondition for everything U.S. officials tried to do in Afghanistan — yet the U.S. effort to rebuild the country took place while it was being torn apart. For example, helping Afghans develop a credible electoral process became ever more difficult as insecurity across the country steadily worsened — intimidating voters, preventing voter registration, and closing polling stations on election day.”

 

6. Context: "The U.S. government did not understand the Afghan context and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly.”

 

"Effectively rebuilding Afghanistan required a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics. However, U.S. officials were consistently operating in the dark, often because of the difficulty of collecting the necessary information. The U.S. government also clumsily forced Western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its disputes through informal means; and often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls.

 

"Without this background knowledge, U.S. officials often empowered powerbrokers who preyed on the population or diverted U.S. assistance away from its intended recipients to enrich and empower themselves and their allies. Lack of knowledge at the local level meant projects intended to mitigate conflict often exacerbated it, and even inadvertently funded insurgents.

 

7. Monitoring and Evaluation: U.S. agencies "rarely conducted sufficient monitoring and evaluation to understand the impact of their efforts.”

 

"SIGAR’s extensive audit work on sectors spanning health, education, rule of law, women’s rights, infrastructure, security assistance, and others collectively paints a picture of U.S. agencies struggling to effectively measure results while sometimes relying on shaky data to make claims of success,” the report says.

How did Afghanistan fall so fast?

What caused the country’s Western-trained security forces to collapse or flee in the face of an insurgent offensive that took over the country in just over a week?

 

John Sopko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction for the past nine years, said in an interview on NPR on Sunday, “It’s not surprising.”

 

"We've been warning — my little agency — for the last almost 10 years about issues with the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces]. All the signs have been there. I mean, we've been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started 2012 about changing metrics, about ghosts, ghost soldiers who didn't exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn't sustain what we were giving them.

 

“I’ve ... testified up 50 or 60 times about this. So it's been out there. I think the speed maybe is a little bit of a surprise. But the fact that the ANDSF could not fight on their own should not have been a surprise to anyone.

 

“We've spent $145 billion on reconstruction. And included in that is $88 billion just for the train, advise and assist mission to the Afghan military police."

 

On July 29, Sopko told reporters there are two words to describe the U.S. effort in Afghanistan: "One is this hubris that we can somehow take a country that was desolate in 2001 and turn it into a little Norway." The other is mendacity: "we over exaggerated, our generals did, our ambassadors did." He noted that officials over the years spoke about "just turning the corner" in the fight against the Taliban. "Well we turned the corner so much, we did 360 degrees.”

 

At that time, Sopko said there had been a failure to help create an Afghan military force with the basic pay, logistics, medical care and other elements that made local troops feel risking their lives was worth it. And Sopko repeatedly noted that fuel supplies aren't under proper government control and suggested that as much as half may have been stolen, an obstacle that's reduced military capability.

 

Sopko’s final report is to come out on Tuesday, NPR says.

Biden’s decision to end America’s ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan

The president said on Wednesday that the United States had long ago accomplished its main mission of denying terrorists a haven in the country.

 

He made a case that there was no longer any justification — if there ever was — to believe that the United States military presence could turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy.

 

The roughly 2,500 American troops on the ground there are to be gradually withdrawn starting May 1 — the exit deadline the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban — with the process complete by Sept. 11.

 

The war has killed more than 2,200 U.S. troops, wounded 20,000, and cost as much as $1 trillion.

 

“War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said, noting that service members now in Afghanistan have parents who served in the same war.

“We were attacked,” he said. "We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives.”

 

On Oct. 7, 2001, just weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush told Americans that the United States was invading Afghanistan.

Twenty years later, a series of Afghan governments has failed to sustain control over vast sections of the country. A succession of Afghan leaders, supported by the United States and its allies, has pledged to fight corruption, end the drug scourge and establish stable governance, but all those gains have proved fragile at best, says The New York Times.

 

Biden said at a news conference last month that “we’ve got to prove democracy works,” and he went on to describe a foreign policy that was focused on restoring America’s reputation for getting big things done. “China is outinvesting us by a long shot,” the president noted, “because their plan is to own that future.”

 

And "no one celebrated the American involvement in Afghanistan, or Iraq, more than the Chinese — conflicts that kept Americans up at night worrying about casualties and taking control of distant provinces, while Beijing focused on spreading its influence in regions of the world where America was once the unquestioned dominant power,” says a Times analysis.

 

By withdrawing the remaining few thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Biden is taking a calculated risk that extremists in Afghanistan can be countered by U.S. and partner forces elsewhere in the region — and that he won’t become the president who underestimated the resilience and reach of extremists who still aim to attack the United States, says The Associated Press.

 

Biden is the first president to reject the Pentagon’s recommendations that any withdrawal be “conditions based,” meaning that security would have to be assured on the ground before Americans pulled back. To do otherwise, military officials long have argued, would be to signal to the Taliban to just wait out the Americans — after which they would face little opposition to taking further control, and perhaps threatening Kabul.

Biden's decision was cheered by many Democrats but harshly criticized by most Republicans, who predicted that the withdrawal of American troops would embolden terrorists and hasten the collapse of the Afghan government.

 

As far as the reaction of Afghans, “for two decades, American leaders have pledged peace, prosperity, democracy, the end of terrorism and rights for women,” says a separate Times article. "Few of those promises have materialized in vast areas of Afghanistan, but now even in the cities where real progress occurred, there is fear that everything will be lost when the Americans leave."

 

When historians look back at this moment, they may conclude that Biden’s decision was predestined, says the Times’ analysis:

"The place is not called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing: The British pulled out in 1842, after an expedition their textbooks call the “disaster in Afghanistan,” and the Soviets in 1989, after a decade of death and frustration. What Soviet leaders learned in a decade, four American presidents learned over the span of two.”

 

Here is the text of Biden’s announcement, from the White House.

 

After his announcement, Biden visited Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery to honor those who died in recent American conflicts. Here is a video.

Our global politics of fear, and how you and I can avoid giving in to it

Around the world, dominant majorities increasingly see themselves as imperiled minorities, says The New York Times.

 

And that dynamic — sometimes called a majority with a minority complex — is thought to be a major factor in the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, religious nationalism in Asia, and white nationalist terrorism in the United States and New Zealand, the paper says.

 

Demographic change, global interconnectedness and even the rise of democracy can make majorities feel that their dominance is endangered, leading to fear of, and sometimes attacks on, minorities.

 

A “classic, cautionary case” is Northern Ireland, the Times says.

 

When communal tensions turned into the outright fighting known as the Troubles in the late 1960s, Northern Ireland’s Protestants were numerically, politically and economically dominant. But they were a minority on the island as a whole, feeding a sense of demographic peril.

“The basic fear of Protestants in Northern Ireland is that they will be outbred by Roman Catholics,” Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s prime minister, said at the outbreak of the conflict. “It is as simple as that.”

 

Now these dynamics are rising globally, and not just when one group is a majority nationally and a minority regionally, says the Times.

 

Asked in 2013 about Buddhist violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority that the Times says culminated in genocide, Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, responded by warning of “global Muslim power.”

 

As democracy became the global norm, dominant ethnic groups found themselves under growing pressure to share power with minorities, and they even occasionally lost an election.

Anxiety around losing status can show up as fears, however unfounded, of becoming outnumbered. In countries with weak institutions, that can lead to violence, possibly contributing to the stall in democracy’s once-speedy spread.

 

“We often see this phenomenon at moments of increasing democratization and increasing enfranchisement,” says Kate Cronin-Furman, a University College London political scientist, citing “horrible violence against the Rohingya breaking out at a time of increased democratization in Burma.”

 

In Europe, right-wing populist parties like the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Front talk about Muslims soon outnumbering non-Muslims in Europe and imposing Shariah law.

A leader of Vox, the Spanish far-right party that just won its first Parliamentary seats, talked at a September rally of an “Islamist invasion” and backs policies to increase Spanish birthrates.

 

And for whites who see the decline of white dominance as destabilizing, any increase in the minority population is perceived as an attack, says the Times.

A growing body of research suggests that this sentiment may be driving significant political change in the United States, which is projected to become “majority minority” — with whites less than half the population — by 2050.

 

What can you and I do?

 

For one thing, we can be aware of the nature of our fears.

 

“We regress to tribalism when afraid," says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Arash Javanbakht in Psychology Today. "This is an evolutionary advantage that would lead to the group cohesion and help us fight the other tribes to survive.”

 

"Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts,” he says. "Some examples are Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, religious wars and the Dark Ages.”

 

"To win us, politicians, sometimes with the media’s help, do their best to keep us separated, to keep the real or imaginary ‘others’ just a ‘concept,'" Javanbakht says. Because if we spend time with others, talk to them and eat with them, we will learn that they are like us: humans with all the strengths and weaknesses that we possess.

 

I’m trained by a neuropsychologist to work with kids, and he points to the research that we can train our brains — and we can retrain them at any age.

 

When we feel fear of the “other,” we can remind ourselves that we’re all part of the human family. We can pursue compassion over conflict.