Remember a country far away ... called Afghanistan?

Blogging about the warmongers led me to think about Afghanistan.  How much have we--the US--sunk in there?

Of course, the war spending is a staggering amount.  In case you forgot that amount, you might want to sit down first and hold on to a firm table or pillar.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost the US.taxpayers $1.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service.  But, that is an underestimate:

A truer measure of the wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. This fuller accounting includes “long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs,” Harvard economist Linda Bilmes calculated in 2013.
The Pentagon and its civilian overseers don’t like to talk about war costs, either before or after the shooting. That’s because a high price tag beforehand acts as an economic brake, making war—assuming that’s the goal—less likely.

After all that spending ...

Anyway, that was for the wars that supposedly ended.  Since then, we have also been investing in Afghanistan for its reconstruction.  How much has that been?  Even after adjusting for inflation, our spending there has exceeded the amount that we spent in Europe via the celebrated Marshall Plan.  I wonder who really benefited from all those hundreds of billions of dollars--certainly not the students in my classes who work anything between 15 and 40 hours every week in order to make sure they will not have huge debts when graduating.

So, after all that spending ...

Wasil was waiting Monday at a fruit stand in Tirin Kot, the capital of southern Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, when he was shot dead by two gunmen. His uncle said he was 12 years old.

What was special about Wasil?

Wasil Ahmad learned to fire a gun at age 9, after his father was killed by Taliban militants.
Before long, his uncle said, the boy had become a celebrated Taliban killer, credited with gunning down six insurgents during a battle last summer.

And,

Local officials in Uruzgan and others hailed Wasil as a hero, but some said his story offered yet another example of the price paid by Afghan youth in the more than 14-year conflict.
In the first six months of 2015, the U.N. Mission in Afghanistan documented 1,270 casualties among children — 320 deaths and 950 injuries — a 13% increase over the prior year.

Yep, that is the Afghanistan today, after all that spending ...

Forgotten by the West, Afghanistan is facing a multidimensional civil war with the Afghan Taliban, which is being aided now by a plethora of groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Chechens, and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

Oh, hey, aren't you glad that we were wonderfully distracted and entertained by the likes of Trump and Palin and more?

In at least two provinces bordering Pakistan (Nangarhar and Zabul) the Taliban are also fighting ISIS, which is trying to recruit among dissatisfied Taliban members. Not until the end of January were US Special Forces in Afghanistan given authorization to go after ISIS fighters in the country—one reflection of how lackadaisically the Pentagon is responding to the crisis there. US forces can now pursue ISIS fighters, who have been declared a threat to the US. One may well ask, What about the threat that the Afghan government has already faced from ISIS all these months as the group has built up its base areas?

Ah, do the blabbering bellicose buffoons who want to lead the Republican Party care about such details before they go to all corners of the world to kick ass and bomb people to oblivion?

Caption at the source:
12-year-old Wasil Ahmad, who was killed by gunmen in southern Afghanistan on Monday, Feb. 1, 2016

I, too, am America

I could not wait to become a citizen of the United States. I filed the application practically the minute I became eligible and then impatiently waited for the letter that would provide me with the details on the swearing-in ceremony. Finally, that cherished day arrived, during the halcyon days of the year 2000. There were the usual congratulations and wishes from friends and colleagues. One gift was special—a quilt.

A friend, who was a Japanese-American, brought the gift and explained that it was her mother who made the quilt. It had red, white, and blue in the square patches, obviously to reflect the colors of the American flag. But, those colors alone did not make the gift special.

The friend’s mother was one of 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced to relocate from their homes to the concentration camps. She was a young child when she was forcibly moved to a camp in Manzanar, California. The quilt was, therefore, very special because she loved the country despite how she and other Japanese-Americans were atrociously and inhumanely treated by her government and fellow-citizens. Her commitment to, love for, and pride about the United States were all there in the quilt that welcomed a new citizen.

I was reminded of that quilt and the Japanese-American friend when viewing the traveling exhibit—Art of Survival: Enduring the Turmoil of Tule Lake–at Eugene’s federal courthouse. The photographs and descriptions were about the conditions of the Japanese-Americans who were forced to live in the concentration camp in Tule Lake, which is in the dry elevations of northern California’s Siskiyou County, immediately to the south of Oregon’s border.

It seems so unreal that the federal government, under the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who led the country out of the depths of the Great Depression and instituted various programs including Social Security, rounded up its own people and sent them to camps where all their constitutional rights were stripped away. Their only crime was that they looked like the people of the country that attacked Pearl Harbor. The calculation apparently was that because Japan attacked America, Japanese-Americans were suspects.

Years later, the federal government, under the presidencies of Reagan and Bush, formally tendered its apology to Japanese-Americans. Of course, there is no amount that one can ever pay as compensation to those whose lives were so rudely interrupted, and which tremendously affected the rest of their lives after being released from those camps. 

Even though it happened seventy-plus years ago, it was chilling to look at photographs that had signs saying: “Japs Keep Moving, This is a White Man’s Neighborhood.” It was also surreal to view the images at the exhibit, and to think about the horribly simplistic thought that people had made equating Japanese-Americans with the enemy.

It is even more surreal to think that we are employing that same crude thinking in the context of the refugees from Syria and Iraq, and about Muslims in this country. Because the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists are Muslims, and because the recent terrorist acts in France and elsewhere are by ISIS, this country is quickly sliding into a dangerously erroneous conclusion that the Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq are terrorists, and that even American citizens who are Muslims cannot be trusted. It was shocking, to say the least, to hear one presidential contender talk about the need for a database to track Muslims in the country.

I suppose my brown-skinned and bearded appearance, along with an accent that makes it clear that I am not from here, could make some believe that I am a Muslim who needs to be monitored. As the political hysteria gets louder, my worries about my own welfare increase, as was the case in the days and months after 9/11. If that’s how I feel, when I am not a Muslim and when I am not from Iraq or Syria, I would think that Muslim refugees and brown-skinned Muslims in this country are way more worried than I am. And then I think about the Japanese-Americans who were sent to concentration camps for the only reason that Japan had attacked America—what they experienced seems to be of a magnitude that I cannot even imagine.

The quilt from the Japanese-American mother was more than a mere gift. It was a profound statement on her love for America, with its warts and all. It was a patchwork quilt that echoed the African-American poet Langston Hughes’ line, “I, too, Sing America.”

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

It is easy to dish out philosophical advice and comfort to others upon whom the cosmos might have showered misfortunes.  When a death happens but in a different home, we trot out all the platitudes.  The believers might even say things like "your loved one is now with god" or "god's will hath no why."

In the old country, there is an expression: தனக்கு பட்டால் தான் தெரியும், which translates to something like "you will truly understand it only when it happens to you."  When, for instance, a death happens in our own home--even if it is the death of beloved dog--we cry and sob just like how the neighbor did and we forget all those philosophical platitudes that we dished out to the neighbor.

It is one thing when such events happen at a personal, individual level, but, another when an entire country is going through an upheaval that I cannot even begin to imagine in my wildest imaginations.  I am referring to Syria here.  When the war and the killings unfolded in Syria, all those over the past few years apparently mattered less to us compared to when the horrific killings happened in our own home, in Paris:

Monuments around the world lit up in the colors of the French flag; presidential speeches touted the need to defend “shared values;” Facebook offered users a one-click option to overlay their profile pictures with the French tricolor, a service not offered for the Lebanese flag. On Friday the social media giant even activated Safety Check, a feature usually reserved for natural disasters that lets people alert loved ones that they are unhurt; they had not activated it the day before for Beirut.
“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog. “When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.”
The implication, numerous Lebanese commentators complained, was that Arab lives mattered less

That was after a double suicide attack in Beirut only a day before the Paris tragedy.  A city that was finally becoming calm and peaceful after years of unrest, and despite all the chaos next door in Syria that was pushing out refugees into Lebanon.

“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily basis for five years,” said Nour Kabbach, who fled the heavy bombardment of her home city of Aleppo, Syria, several years ago and now works in humanitarian aid in Beirut.
“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives, with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every world leader condemning the violence,” she wrote on Facebook.

I want to be very clear here, before some troll thinks that I am minimizing the tragedy in Paris--I am not, and these two posts make that very clear.

"All of these tragedies are "an attack on all of humanity," writes this commentator, who points out how the media even reported the events very differently:

Although the terrorist group behind the attacks in Paris and Beirut was the same, the Western media narrative has been vastly different. In Paris, ISIS attacked the city's progressive youth, massacring dozens enjoying their night out at a concert, a soccer game and a restaurant. In Beirut, ISIS struck a "Hezbollah stronghold" in the "southern suburbs of Beirut," a poor, majority Shia area often characterized as a bastion of terrorism in the region. The attack was portrayed as little more than strategic punishment for Hezbollah's ongoing involvement in the Syrian civil war and support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

As much as we are shocked and sad about the Paris attacks, don't we need to think about other places too where the same ISIS has made daily life a hell on earth?  Shouldn't what we feel for Paris and France be the same as what we feel for Aleppo and Syria?  For Beirut and Lebanon?  For Baghdad and Iraq?  for ...

It seems like we have forgotten this part that Shakespeare wrote:

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
if you poison us, do we not die? 

But want to remember only the lines that come after that:

and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Caption at the source:
The relatives of one of the victims of the twin suicide attacks in Beirut mourned
during a funeral procession in the city's Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood.

Paris, je t'aime

The highly empathetic pacifist that I am, I felt my body tightening up after reading the news about the latest act of terror in Paris.  I shut down the computer and lay down for a few minutes in silence.

As I blog this, it is nearly a full day since that first report.  "Third World War" is one of the trending themes in Twitter.  Turns out that it was after something that Pope Francis said:

Left behind in Paris were the latest scars, said Pope Francis, from the “piecemeal Third World War.”

If we really want to talk about a Third World War, then I would submit that it already happened, and it was in a different context--Congo:

Between 1998 and 2003, an extremely complex and chaotic civil war engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) -- a vast, thickly-jungled nation in Central Africa the size of Western Europe -- and spilled over into neighboring countries, including Rwanda, Angola, Burundi, Zimbabwe and Uganda.
While the estimated 5-million death toll from this war pales in comparison to the 15-million lives lost during World War I, and the 60-million who perished in the Second World War -- the DR Congo inferno was nonetheless was one of the ten deadliest wars in recorded history.
Moreover, given that the DR Congo war erupted in such incredible violence during the turn of the 21st-century (amidst the global internet communication phenomenon), its relative obscurity is puzzling, to say the least.

It was the deadliest since WW II.

In addition to the terrible tragedy of loss of lives and traumatic injuries--physical and mental--to many more, another problem arises, as Nick Gillespie wrote five years ago:

The problem isn't with the current moment's rhetoric, it's with the goddamn politicization of every goddamn thing not even for a higher purpose or broader fight but for the cheapest moment-by-moment partisan advantage. Whether on the left or on the right, there's a totalist mentality that everything can and should be explained first and foremost as to whether it helps or hurt the party of choice.

How can we begin to engage in constructive dialog in such contexts?  I do not mean a dialog with ISIS--those are irrational actors who are beyond any dialog.  I mean a dialog amongst the overwhelming majority of us who, thankfully, do not think and act like how ISIS and other terrorists do.  "It’s a simple strategy. It’s just not easy to implement":

[Reframing]  political arguments in terms of your audience’s morality should be viewed less as an exercise in targeted, strategic persuasion, and more as an exercise in real, substantive perspective taking. To do it, you have to get into the heads of the people you’d like to persuade, think about what they care about and make arguments that embrace their principles. If you can do that, it will show that you view those with whom you disagree not as enemies, but as people whose values are worth your consideration.
Even if the arguments that you wind up making aren’t those that you would find most appealing, you will have dignified the morality of your political rivals with your attention, which, if you think about it, is the least that we owe our fellow citizens.

Yep, easier said than done.  The inability to engage in a constructive dialog is why responses include stuff like this:

I hope some day we will learn how to talk with each other and take care of our common problems like ISIS.  Until then, it seems like this pacifist will have only stress-filled days :(

If it is Saturday, it must be ... Yemen!

The older I get, the more it seems like growing up when I did and where I did was quite a blessing.  Consider the simple, daily habit of reading the newspaper.  A habit that goes back as far as I can remember.  The news about places that I didn't even know existed, and about politicians who seemed immensely larger than life, fascinated me to no end.

So well developed was this habit that once, as an adult, when I visited with a family in the expansive tree, I was shocked that they did not subscribe to a newspaper.  There I was, up in the morning and no paper to read.  That was a torture from Torquemada's playbook ;)

The Hindu was international in its news coverage.  Its left-of-center sympathies resonated well with my own political preference of those days.  It was through that paper that I even knew that there was a country called Yemen--those were the days of a war between North Yemen and South Yemen, which was yet another war between the commie sympathizers and the others.  Recall all those proxy wars during the Cold War years?

With all the refugee crisis related to Syria, the world seems to be overlooking Yemen.  The violence there is not one between the old Cold War enemies, but is also a proxy war of a different kind.  It is a Shia-Sunni war.  Iran (Shia)-allied Houthi movement versus the rest backed by Saudi Arabia (Sunni, and that too a strict, fundamentalist version) and,, of course, the United States.  Makes you wonder why the US is always pals with the "frenemy" Saudis, right?

A few weeks ago, Amnesty released a report on the "collateral damage" that civilians have become in this unholy war.

Amnesty International has documented hundreds of cases of civilians, many of them children and women, killed or injured while asleep in their homes or going about their daily activities – fetching water, buying food, visiting relatives. Scores were struck in the very places where they had sought refuge after having been displaced from their homes by the conflict. ...
Entire neighbourhoods have virtually emptied as residents fled their homes in fear of attacks or because strikes on civilian infrastructure left the areas without water, electricity and other essential services. In some neighbourhoods, as residents fled the conflict other civilians displaced by the fighting elsewhere moved in for lack of better options. Many have been unable to relocate to safer areas due to lack of resources. With frequently shifting frontlines, residents have struggled to keep out of harm’s way, often finding themselves in the line of fire where they thought they would be safe.
The sick and wounded have faced restrictions in accessing medical care due to the shortages and high prices of fuel and medicines and to difficulties in securing safe passage through checkpoints manned by the different armed groups. The parties to the conflict have hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid to areas controlled by their opponents, causing a sharp deterioration in the humanitarian situation.

I bet that since then the damage has worsened.  Makes me wonder, as always, why humans engage in wars and why we continue to develop more and more ways to kill each other.  This world needs a lot more pacifists to counter the warmongers all over, especially here in the United States--the US sells those killing devices all over the world and seems intent on feeding the global war monster.

The BBC reports that all the chaos in Yemen has provided ISIS--yes, those maniacs--with a golden opportunity!

Human Rights Watch cites reports that on 23 August, IS dressed a number of Houthi prisoners in orange jumpsuits, placed them in a boat which was then towed out into the harbour.
Reportedly watched by local residents of Aden, the boat carrying the prisoners was then blown up, killing those on board, the report says.

As if all that wasn't enough for you to yank your hair out:

For now, it seems that the jihadists of AQAP and IS have largely put aside their differences to fight their common enemy, the Shia Houthi rebels.
Ironically, they are being aided by air strikes from the very countries - Saudi Arabia and the UAE - who normally oppose them.

Wait a second.  The US is allied with the Saudis in the Yemen conflict.  But, the Saudis are working with the Islamic State because they want to defeat the Iran-backed Shia Houthi.  So, in a way, the US is on the same side of the barbaric Islamic State?

When I reach such conclusions based on what I have read, I wonder if the newspaper reading habit from when I was a kid has not helped me.  I could have been oblivious to the happenings all around, gone ahead with a career in engineering, enjoyed a remarkably affluent life, and not worried about a damn thing.

Nah.  as Bob Dylan said, "it ain't me, babe."

(ps: my oldest post on Yemen dates back to January 2010!)

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'Tis Thanksgiving. Remembering the year that was ...

As we sit down for the Thanksgiving meal with friends and family, perhaps all of us can be thankful for one thing—the year with strange and unexpected developments is coming to an end.

Who would have thought that this country would ever end up panic stricken about Ebola? So panicky we became that the photograph of a nurse biking in a small town in Maine caused quite a few, who were thousands of miles from the Pine Tree State, to worry that they, too, caught the dreaded virus infection. We became so involved with the panic over nothing that we even forgot the thousands in West Africa who continue to suffer from the illness.

Ebola came in time for us to worry about the state of the world just when the Israel-Gaza conflict ended. Of course, the end of the bombing campaigns does not mean that peace has descended upon that troubled geography. Not far away, a ruthlessly barbaric outfit that grew out of the ashes of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has quickly become a force to reckon with. And the number of name changes this outfit has had in a matter of few months—Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islamic State (IS)—has made the casual observer feel like there are multiple versions similar to the number of Agent Smiths in “The Matrix” movie series.

The big European story is, of course, about how Russia swallowed up the Crimean Peninsula. One day Crimea was a part of Ukraine, and the next day it became a Russian territory. Russia is not done with gobbling up Ukraine’s land, with more military incursions expected.

The perils of Pakistan continue, with the same old formula of a weak and ineffective government that is constantly trying to keep the powerful military away. The story of its life ever since its birth in 1947! Meanwhile, suicide bombers continue to strike, with a recent one near the border with India killing nearly sixty and injuring another estimated hundred. Terrorists have warned that the next incident will be in India.

If you are like me, every once in a while you wonder whatever happened to the more than 300 girls who were kidnapped in Nigeria. Remember all that Facebook and Twitter activism to “bring back our girls”? But then that was such a long time ago and Ebola has completely taken over our panic-stricken collective consciousness.

The global economy continues to be in a state of flux. Economists keep warning about the Euro area on the verge of a recession and, perhaps, deflation as well. An economic contraction while prices keep falling is one awful combination, which will surely be worrisome to the millions of unemployed youth, especially in the southern countries of Spain, Italy, and Greece.

While we in the US might feel sheltered from such an listing—however incomplete it is—of less than pleasant developments around the planet, the Ebola virus was a nasty reminder that we live in an interconnected world and that what happens in a remote part of West Africa will not necessarily stay in West Africa. The military conflicts around the world will force the US to act—a burden that comes with being the sole global superpower. Economic slowdown in Europe will affect us, given the highly interdependent economic web that links us to countries that we might not even be able to identify on a world map.

An old idea that is often mentioned, especially in academia, is that “war is God's way of teaching Americans geography.” We need to update that for the contemporary contexts. Now, any crisis is apparently how we Americans learn geography. Thus, thanks to Boko Haram, we were forced to look up Nigeria on a map. With Ebola in the news, there is a good chance that a few Americans were suddenly thrust with narratives about the historical connection between Liberia and slavery in the US. But then, if history provides any guidance, we perhaps passed on all the chances to learn geography.

Whether or not we learnt anything, not unlike my students, we are thankful that the tumultuous and eventful year is coming to an end. But, of course, just because the calendar year is ending, all those problems won’t simply go away. It will be a long while before the public health professionals declare an end to the current Ebola outbreak. The geopolitical tensions in the Levant, Ukraine, and Pakistan, will continue irrespective of the month and the year. Above all, there is really no respite from one certain scary development—when the calendar flips to 2015, the campaigning for the November 2016 elections will begin!

Don't know much about geography. Don't know much about, well, everything.

The Onion made fun of bloggers like me:

‘I Let Everyone Down’: A Blogger Apologizes For Not Posting In A While http://t.co/xbuowr9ylQ pic.twitter.com/geTN7xa8Hg
— ClickHole (@ClickHole) September 12, 2014

So, of course, here I am returning to my blog after a break of, gasp, two days!

BTW, if there is nobody to read a blogger's post, then does the blog post make that philosophical noise in the forest? ;)

Anyway, two months ago, I remarked on how much even the attention-paying few realize that yesterday's news becomes quickly forgotten:

We live in a world in which yesterday's news is not merely yesterday's news but feels like something that might have happened back in the Jurassic Age! 

Apparently, I was not the only one to think along those lines, though it does almost always feel that way in my world.  In today's paper, I read this commentary, where the author writes that "even dedicated news junkies are bound to tune things out" because of the sheer volume of events:

A look back at this year shows just how fickle the public’s attention can be. Several stories have peaked in the news, but no two have commanded the same peaks of attention at the same time.
Google Trends tracks how often people search for keywords — including those related to major events — all over the world. Back in March, the conflict in Ukraine grabbed the world’s attention, but it was largely forgotten when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared.
It wasn’t that the action in Ukraine or its global importance diminished, as we would see later in the year. Audiences and news organizations simply switched head space and resources to the other story.
Two stories could not claim the same peak of attention at the same time.
Then, in July, the fighting in Gaza ramped up along with its audience. But just as it was heading for a Google Trends peak as high as those of Ukraine and MH370, something else happened: the downing of another Malaysia Airlines jet in Ukraine. With two big stories developing simultaneously — the plane was shot down on the same day Israel launched its ground invasion of Gaza — neither managed the heights of attention of Ukraine and MH370 earlier in the year.
Within weeks, however, attention shifted again. An outbreak of ebola in West Africa wiped almost everything else off the map. In August, there was another change. Ebola dropped well off its peak, as the crisis in Ferguson, Mo., began to capture eyes from around the world.
Then, as the Islamic State has advanced farther across Syria and Iraq and has committed horrific crimes, it has pulled readers and viewers away from ebola and other stories. Of course, none of this has any impact on whether the deaths from ebola are mounting (they are) or concern from public health officials is growing (it is).

Forget the "average" person.  What about the experts?  No, I am not referring to Thomas Friedman.  And, no, by experts I am not pointing to where John McCain drools.  I am referring to real experts like, well, me.  Hahaha!  Ok, seriously, what do the experts think?  Here is Dan Drezner, who has now started moonlighting at the Washington Post, opining that nobody knows anything:

Let me be blunt:  I didn’t expect a lot of this to go down in this fashion. After all, I’ve been relatively upbeat about global economic governance, and I was hopeful that as the developed economies recovered, so would their ability to tamp down geopolitical tensions.  Oops.

It has been one awful year. Just when it seemed like we were all settling into more peaceful and friendly ways, kaboom!

Drezner ends it with an important piece of advice:

when the world seems like an uncertain place and you’re looking for some guru to help explain what the world will look like in 2015, please remember:  Nobody. Knows. Anything.

If that is the case, then is it even worth following the news?

YES, DAMMIT!  Don't ever take your eyes off the world news.  Otherwise, the McCains and the Friedmans of the world will screw us even more than they have.

Ok, I exaggerated.  Ignore the world news.  Ignore the Onion.  READ THIS BLOG! ;)