Matthew Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg recently sat down for a conversation about the war in Afghanistan.
Matthew Hoh made headlines late last month when he resigned from the U.S. State Department. Hoh, 36, became the first known U.S. official to resign in protest over the war in Afghanistan. Ellsberg, gained notoriety in 1971, after he leaked parts of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times as part of an effort to end the Vietnam War, a war that he argued was “a wrongful war.”
Below are two clips from Hoh and Ellsberg’s exchange documented by Brave New Films.
Both wonder what the US is doing in Afghanistan, arguing that American hubris is one of the things keeping the country from learning the lessons of the Soviets’ War in Afghanistan.
Former CIA officer and author Robert Baer argues that “Afghanistan is a quagmire that everyone wants us in,” in a new video segment from the Brave New Foundation’s “Rethink Afghanistan” project.
Baer observes that Russia and Iran are seeking expansion and are happy that US troops are stuck in Afghanistan, whilst it is in Al Qaeda’s interests for the US to be in a war where Muslim civilian casualties are unavoidable.
Andy Cobb starred in TV commercials pitching health insurance for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida — until he had a crisis of conscience.
“In some gigs, in rare cases, you’re forced to come to terms with the moral content of your commercial,” he told the Huffington Post. To disassociate himself from what he now calls “the worst product in American history,” Cobb wrote and starred in a short video renouncing his former employer (see below).
He also asked other pitchmen to do the same.
“It’s time for change,” says Cobb in the video. “That’s why I’m calling on leaders of the spokesjerk industry: the FreeCreditReport.com guy, the ShamWow dude, and Senator [Ben] Nelson, recipient of big money from insurance companies, to lead us, to walk away from their cash cows and tell the American people the truth.”
The Huffington Post reached out to credit-report peddler Eric Violette, star of the famous commercials airing non-stop on cable television. Violette refused to comment on Cobb’s call for a spokesjerk revolution. But in an email, he had this to say:
“Does this guy really equate health insurance with cleaning cloths and credit ratings? When making the decision about health care in the US, I hope the public will see that having access to health care is much more important than cloths and credit scores.”
Yes, but what about the epic dishonesty of Violette’s vids, whose makers have been repeatedly sanctioned by the government for false advertising? The free credit report offered simply isn’t free — you get the report after signing up for a $14.95 monthly service. Experian, the credit bureau that owns freecreditreport.com, profits in hard times from people worried about identity theft and their credit score.
The New York Times reported last week that 9 million people are spending a total of $650 million to $700 million a year for credit reporting services, with Experian making more than twice its three biggest competitors combined.
The Federal Trade Commission, whose more than $1 million in sanctions have utterly failed to stop the ads, has been so exasperated that it even made its own parody video.
The credit card reform bill signed into law by the president will curb the ads by requiring them to include the following statement: “This is not the free credit report provided for by Federal law.”
ShamWow huckster Vince Shlomi could not be reached. Didn’t seem to be much point in calling Sen. Ben Nelson’s office. The Nebraska Democrat made the list because Cobb sees him obstructing health reform.
Cobb said he had his change of heart this year after participating in fundraisers for friends who went bankrupt and broke because they got sick — even though they had insurance from Blue Cross.
Violette, for his part, is from Canada, where health insurance and credit reports are less of a problem.
Check out Cobb’s video, which was produced by Robert Greenwald’s BraveNewFilms as part of its Sick for Profit series:
Here are some of those catchy credit spots — you’ve got to give Violette credit for being an appealing pitchman:
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced new legislation on Friday that should, he claims, solve the phenomenon of massive and failing financial institutions holding the nation’s economy captive.
It’s all of two pages long.
The Vermont Democrat-Socialist unveiled the “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act” — which he billed as a succinct remedy for tackling financial risk and avoiding a repeat of the taxpayer-funded bailouts that occurred just one year ago.
The act is straightforward. It would require that 90 days after its passage, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner “submit to Congress a list of all commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and insurance companies that the Secretary believes are too big to fail.”
Subsequently, one year after the law is enacted, the Treasury Secretary would be required to “break up entities included on the Too Big To Fail List, so that their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout.”
The rest of the details — like, say, how to do that, how the broken-up entities would be structured, and what authorities would be granted for preempting institutions from becoming too big to fail in the first place — would be filled in during the legislative process, Sanders’s office said. The goal is simply to immediately preempt a duplication of last year’s economic meltdown.
“Here is an example of amazing irony,” the senator said in a video shot by Brave New Films accompanying the legislation’s release. “Three out of the four largest financial institutions in the country who led us to this financial disaster are now bigger then they were before the collapse. So we have got to break these guys up so we don’t see a recurrence of what we saw a year ago.”
WATCH:
The brevity of the Sanders bill is, in some ways, its selling point. The Senator notes in the video that, “unlike the health care bill, which is 1,990 pages, this is all of two pages.” An easier contrast, however, is between the senator’s efforts to tackle Too Big To Fail and those being pursued by others in Congress and the White House.
Last week, Geithner, in cahoots with House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank, released a proposal to not only structure a new system for bailing out failing institutions but also for improved regulations over those institutions. Clocking in at 253 pages, the plan would empower regulators to essentially shut down banks or firms that threatened the stability of the economy. Should a bailout be necessary, other financial firms and not the taxpayers would have to front the bill.
Andy Cobb has had enough. A former pitchman for BlueCross Blue Shield of Florida, Cobb is breaking with the firm and speaking out in favor of health care reform and a public health insurance option.
“This is the time when Americans have to choose which side we’re on,” Cobb told HuffPost, quoting Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). “Is it the insurance companies or the American people?”
Cobb calls on what he dubs his fellow “spokes-jerks” — singling out the FreeCreditReport.com guy — to stop hawking products that hurt the American people.
“I do know that 19 percent of every dollar of our premiums goes to administrative costs, for executive compensation and people like me. We can’t afford people like me any more in this country,” he said.
A little more than two months ago, Brock McIntosh was fighting in Afghanistan, a member of the Army National Guard. This week, he’s walking the halls of Congress, trying to end a war that began when he was 13 years old.
McIntosh, now 21, and four other vets are in Washington for something of a preemptive strike. A new pro-war group calling itself Vets For Freedom plans to begin lobbying Congress Thursday, pushing for an escalation. The anti-war vets hope to head them off.
But if their erstwhile comrades and now political opponents are “for freedom,” that raises an unusual question. “What does that make us?” Devon Read, 29, asks mockingly. “Vets Against Freedom? Vets For Terrorism?” Read served for eight years and took part in the invasion of Iraq before leaving the Marine Corps in 2008.
Technically, the soldiers are part of Iraq Veterans Against the War, but most are Afghan veterans who have linked up with Brave New Films president Robert Greenwald, whose documentary project “Rethink Afghanistan” urges a drawdown of the American presence in that country.
As the vets wait outside the office of Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Jake Diliberto, 27, recounts tales from the first skirmish with Vets For Freedom earlier in the morning.
Diliberto went mano a mano on CNN with VFF rep Thomas Cotton. Cotton had a simple appeal to authority: He’s for whatever General Stanley McChrystal wants — and that’s more troops.
Before they went on, says Diliberto, he could hear his opponent prepping himself. “He kept repeating, ‘General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal.’ ”
Backers of escalating the eight-year-old war present a variety of complex arguments, but at their heart is Cotton’s mantra: “General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal.”
The troops were joined in Grijalva’s office by Malalai Joya, an Afghan member of parliament who has been suspended for speaking out against the warlords who run the country. She is appealing her suspension and, in the meantime, promoting her new book, “A Woman Among Warlords.” Joya, too, has a simple message: Go home, USA.
“It’s much easier to fight against one enemy than two,” Malalai Joya tells Grijalva, identifying the two current enemies as the Taliban on the one hand and the United States and the Afghan government it props up on the other.
The Afghan government, she says, is hopelessly corrupt; President Hamid Karzai is in league with powerful warlords and druglords, some of whom are his close relatives. His top opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, is himself a well-known warlord, she says. The election process is controlled by warlords for their benefit. The farce that was the previous election will not lead to a run-off because Abdullah doesn’t believe it will be fair.
“It’s not important who’s voting. It’s important who’s counting,” says Joya, adding that the canceled election matters little since both candidates are representatives of the warlord class. “They both call the Taliban brother.”
Both President Obama and General McChrystal have said that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan cannot succeed without a governing partner that is seen as legitimate by the Afghan people. That’s a tremendous problem for proponents of a troop escalation, since Karzai is seen as anything but that.
The problem for the war’s opponents, however, is that it’s hard to comprehend just how corrupt the Karzai regime is. Seeing it first hand persuaded the troops.
“The Taliban isn’t their enemy,” says Read. “The greatest enemy of the Afghan people is the Afghan government and the occupation forces.”
McIntosh, who takes some time to get over his nerves in the congressman’s office, tells Grijalva that the Afghan people appreciate the occupation army most for the medical services it provides. Afghan doctors, he says, were poorly trained, because the Taliban banned pictures in text books. The health care makes them dependent, he says, when what they need is training.
“They can do it on their own,” he says. “They’re fully capable human beings.”
Grijalva nods, acknowledging the wisdom from the young man who just recently got the legal right to drink.
The kind of training Afghans don’t need, the soldiers say, is military. We’ve been training young men to fight in Afghanistan for decades, they note, and look where it’s gotten us. An overwhelming number of soldiers trained by the U.S. go on to fight for the Taliban instead, which was itself originally trained by the U.S., notes Read. “So if we train 400,000 soldiers and 200,000 go fight for the Taliban, what have we gained?”
“We don’t expect anything good from you,” Joya tells Grijalva. “Just stop doing wrong.” As she brandishes photos of dead civilians, known warlords, and evidence of Karzai’s corruption, her voice gradually rises. With a finger pointed squarely at the progressive congressman, she repeatedly indicts the occupation and those who allow it to continue.
“This is what your government has done,” she fumes. “Silence of good people is worse than action of bad people.”
Witnessing her rough treatment if Grivala, who agrees with her, it isn’t hard to see how she has found herself out of favor among the warlords.
After the meeting, Grijalva says that Joya helped alter his perspective. “Sometimes in our urge to fix things, we just pile money on top of a [friendly] government,” he says. But Joya had convinced him, he says, that the U.S. is “funding fundamentally the people who are unraveling the country.”
Outside in the hall, the vets assess the meeting. “I don’t think he needed a whole lot of convincing,” offers Diliberto. Next up: Reps. John Tierney (D-Mass.), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). “But we’re not just meeting with progressives,” assures Leighton Woodhouse, a Brave New Films aide escorting the soldiers. Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.), David Price (D-N.C.), Tim Johnson (R-Ill.) and Sylvestre Reyes (D-Texas) were also scheduled to receive the veterans.
One member had previously offered a “walk and talk” with the soldiers, but had since demoted them to a sit down meeting with the chief of staff.
He might not get off that easy. The vets are neither your typical lobbyist nor your standard anti-war protesters. Diliberto suggested they deal with that congressman in a way that would convey the gravity of their message.
“We should just go to his door,” he suggests, ‘and say, ‘Look, motherfucker.’”
Diliberto will be on Larry King Live tonight on CNN, debating General Wesley Clark and one of the Vets for Freedom.
As anyone who knows me knows, I’ve always had at best an ambivalent relationship with the military. Coming of age as I did during the tail end of the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, like many of my generation I have always been highly skeptical of military speak and assertions by the American military leadership that its missions are noble and grand. And to miss the irony of President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he pours more troops onto the fire in Afghanistan would be like missing the coverage of Michael Jackson’s funeral or Roman Polanski’s current digs in Switzerland.
Admittedly, I have lived a charmed life as far as military service goes. But as those who have driven with me know, I’m no pacifist and if called to serve, I would. The fact is, I’ve never been asked and now that my skin is wrinkled and my hair is turning gray I doubt I’d be much use on the battlefield anyhow, except perhaps behind the wheel of a tank.
While some may resent that I make no apologies for not volunteering for the armed forces it’s who I am and I sleep just fine in the bed I’ve made. When registration for the draft was reinstituted during my college years I reluctantly signed on, waiting until I’d received a thoughtful reminder from the boys at the Selective Service. If you looked at my lineage, I guess you could say it’s hereditary. The last male in my direct line to serve in the military was my maternal grandfather who proudly served his country in Brooklyn while attending engineering school at Pratt Institute. His honorable discharge sits framed in my home. Another ancestor cut off his trigger finger rather than serve in the Czar’s army, while legitimate medical dispensations kept my father and his father out of the service, though I suspect my grandmother would have found another way to keep her son out of harm’s way if she needed to.
Two uncles did serve proudly during the Second World War, one with the Marines at Iwo Jima and the other at the Battle of the Bulge where he took a bullet for his country. Choice words about their commanding officers aside, to this day, both men speak often and proudly of their service and country. But formed as I am by books (though I could never get through it) like the Pentagon Papers and the music and dark humor of Bob Dylan and Tom Lehrer, my regard for the military has been minimal at best. I expect I will go to my grave as skeptical of generals as I was as a 19 year old driving 8 hours from Ann Arbor to Washington to protest the country’s military involvement in El Salvador. If I understood Chomsky I might be able to better articulate my distaste for war and an unrestrained military but I could never get past the fact that he looked too much like my trombone teacher. In any event, anyone that self righteous can’t be correct all of the time.
Since life for me lately is about surprises, given my military pedigree I was pleased to recently find myself choked up during a preview of a short film entitled, Fish Out of Water. The film which is due out on November 11th (that’s Veteran’s Day for those of you like me who didn’t know), was produced by Explore, a special project of the Annenberg Foundation. The film’s title is a riff on the wisdom of Lao Tzu, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Fish Out of Water profiles the important work of Sun Valley Adaptive Sports (SVAS) a nonprofit the Annenberg Foundation has funded to support its work helping wounded warriors with their recovery and reintegration into society.
Since 2007, about 1.65 million U.S. troops have been deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the nature of the conflict and “improvements” in munitions including IEDs, traumatic brain injuries have become the most common injuries of the wars. A recent RAND study found that about 200 veterans have suffered spinal cord injuries and 1,200 amputations, but around 325,000 have suffered traumatic brain injuries and 300,000 suffer from PTSD. According to Tom Iselin who runs SVAS, “The general public believes the signature wounds of war are a guy in a wheelchair or a guy with an amputated leg or arm. But the real signature wounds of war are the invisible wounds — traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, and major depression.”
Explore’s mission is “to champion the selfless acts of others” and who can think of anything more selfless than losing life and limb for one’s country. While the Weavers singing “Study War No More” remains my theme song, studying war isn’t the same as studying the origins of conflict and the consequences that wars cause. Explore’s film and another from the Brave New Foundation entitled, Rethink Afghanistan, are worth a look. Both films present the complex, harsh, and enduring legacy of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Explore’s tag line is, “Never stop learning.” Sage advice, especially in these strange times when a barrier breaking and inspiring president named Barack Obama is accepting the Nobel while expanding America’s troop presence in the curious and insoluble conflict in Afghanistan. And from what I read, there aren’t too many fishing rods amidst the materiel U.S. soldiers are packing. Maybe we should reel them in before it’s too late.
Joe Biden met with CENTCOM chief Gen. David Petraeus this morning to talk about Afghanistan — an issue that has pushed the vice president into the spotlight, landing him on the cover of the latest Newsweek.
I have an idea for how he can capitalize on all the attention, and do what generations to come will always be grateful for: resign.
The centerpiece of Newsweek’s story is how Biden has become the chief White House skeptic on escalating the war in Afghanistan, specifically arguing against Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy there.
The piece, by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas, opens with details of a September 13th national security meeting at the White House. Biden speaks up:
“Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent.
Being Greek, I’m partial to Biden’s classic use of the Socratic method — skillfully eliciting facts in a way that lets people connect the dots that show how misguided our involvement in Afghanistan has become.
It’s been known for a while that Biden has been on the other side of McChrystal’s desire for a big escalation of our forces there — the New York Timesreported last month that he has “deep reservations” about it. So if the president does decide to escalate, Biden, for the good of the country, should escalate his willingness to act on those reservations.
What he must not do is follow the same weak and worn-out pattern of “opposition” we’ve become all-too-accustomed to, first with Vietnam and then with Iraq. You know the drill: after the dust settles, and the country begins to look back and not-so-charitably wonder, “what were they thinking?” the mea-culpa-laden books start to come out. On page after regret-filled page, we suddenly hear how forceful this or that official was behind closed doors, arguing against the war, taking a principled stand, expressing “strong concern” and, yes, “deep reservations” to the president, and then going home each night distraught at the unnecessary loss of life.
Well, how about making the mea culpa unnecessary? Instead of saving it for the book, how about future author Biden unfetter his conscience in real time — when it can actually do some good? If Biden truly believes that what we’re doing in Afghanistan is not in the best interests of our national security — and what issue is more important than that? — it’s simply not enough to claim retroactive righteousness in his memoirs.
Though it would be a crowning moment in a distinguished career, such an act of courage would likely be only the beginning. Biden would then become the natural leader of the movement to wind down this disastrous war and focus on the real dangers in Pakistan.
The number of those on both sides of the political spectrum who share Biden’s skepticism is growing. In August, George Will called for the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan and “do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units.”
Former Bush State Department official and current head of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haas argued in the New York Times that Afghanistan is not, as Obama insists, a war of necessity. “If Afghanistan were a war of necessity, it would justify any level of effort,” writes Haas. “It is not and does not. It is not certain that doing more will achieve more. And no one should forget that doing more in Afghanistan lessens our ability to act elsewhere.”
In Rethink Afghanistan, Robert Greenwald’s powerful look at the war (and a film Joe Biden should see right away), Robert Baer, a former CIA field operative says, “The notion that we’re in Afghanistan to make our country safer is just complete bullshit… what it’s doing is causing us greater danger, no question about it. Because the more we fight in Afghanistan, the more the conflict is pushed across the border into Pakistan, the more we destabilize Pakistan, the more likely it is that a fundamentalist government will take over the army — and we’ll have Al-Qaeda like groups with nuclear weapons.”
And Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam vet and Biden confidant, toldNewsweek that, while “there are a lot of differences” between Vietnam and Afghanistan, “one of the similarities is how easily and quickly a nation can get bogged down in a very dangerous part of the world. It’s easy to get into but not easy to get out. The more troops you throw in places, the more difficult it is to work it out because you have an investment to protect.”
And doing so, as we’ve seen, usually means losing more and more of that “investment”: each of the last six years of the Afghanistan war has been more deadly than the one before.
Both sides of the Afghanistan debate were represented on this Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Sen. Diane Feinstein offered up a few rationales for why Obama should rubber stamp Gen. McChrystal’s wishes. First, she said, “there has to be a process of finding out, which of these people can we work with and which can we not.” Really? Seven years in and we still haven’t checked that one off our to-do list?
Feinstein then broke out the latest trendy, new-for-fall reason why we need to up the ante in Afghanistan — it’s all about the women. ” I particularly worry about women in Afghanistan,” Feinstein said, “acid in the face of children, girl children who go to school, women who can’t work when they’re widowed, huddled on the streets, begging, women beaten and shot in stadiums, you know, Sharia law with all of its violence.”
This is indeed very tragic, and I share her concern. But missing from the discussion was the fact that “Sharia law with all of its violence” has just been made the law of the land by President Karzai — you know, our man in Kabul. The Sharia Personal Status Law, signed by Karzai, became operational in July. Among its provisions: custody rights are granted to fathers and grandfathers, women can work only with the permission of their husbands, and husbands can withhold food from wives who don’t want to have sex with them. On the plus side, if a man rapes a mentally ill woman or child, he must pay a fine.
Of course, even with America standing guard, only 4 percent of girls in Afghanistan make it to the 10th grade, and up to 80 percent of Afghani women are subjected to domestic violence. As one of the Afghan women interviewed in Rethink Afghanistan sums up the current situation: “The cases of violence against women are more now than in the Taliban time.”
So can we please put to rest the nonsensical rationalization that we’re there for women’s rights? And don’t be surprised if that reason is soon replaced by another — those pushing for escalation in Afghanistan seem to have learned the Bush administration’s old tactic of constantly moving the goal posts. Don’t like this reason? Fine, here’s another one.
Countering Feinstein on Stephanopoulos was Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, who has taken the lead on this issue in Congress, introducing a bill calling for an exit strategy in Afghanistan.
“I think adding more American forces to Afghanistan would be a mistake,” he said. “I think it would be counterproductive. And I think there’s a strong case to be made that the larger our military footprint, the more difficult it is to achieve reconciliation.”
McGovern then amplified Biden’s concern that the real threat is elsewhere:
When I voted to use force to go to war after 9/11, I think I and everyone else in Congress voted to go after Al Qaida. That was our enemy. And Al Qaida has now moved to a different neighborhood, in Pakistan, where, quite frankly, they’re more protected. And we’re told by Gen. Jones that there are less than 100, if that, members of Al Qaida left in Afghanistan… So we’re now saying we should have 100,000 American forces to go after less than 100 members of Al Qaida in Afghanistan? I think we need to re-evaluate our policy.
Or, as Biden put it, “does that make strategic sense?”
In June, Gen. Jones, the president’s National Security Advisor, was at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan, meeting with U.S. commanders there. This was shortly after the arrival of the 21,000 additional troops President Obama had sent over. Jones raised the question of what the president’s reaction would be if he were asked for even more troops. Well, Jones said, answering his own question, if that happened, the president would probably have a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” In other words, wtf?
Well, Obama has gotten that request, but it wasn’t a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment” for him after all. Sadly, Newsweek reports that Obama is typically “looking for a middle way.” But this isn’t a negotiation for a used car, where you split the difference. It’s either in our national security interest to be there or it isn’t. It’s either a necessary war or it isn’t.
Newsweek’s profile makes much of Joe Biden’s loyalty. He’s a “team player,” one close friend says. And after he dissented on Afghanistan this spring he “quickly got on board.”
I have no doubt that Joe Biden is a loyal guy — the question is who deserves his loyalty most? His “team” isn’t the White House, but the whole country. And if it becomes clear in the coming days that his loyalty to these two teams is in conflict, he should do the right thing. And quit.
Obama may be no drama, but Biden loves drama. And what could more dramatic than resigning the vice presidency on principle? And what principle could be more honorable than refusing to go along with a policy of unnecessarily risking American blood and treasure — and America’s national security? Now that would be a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment for the McChrystal crowd — one that would be a lot more significant than some lame, after-the-fact apology delivered in a too-late-to-matter book.
If you follow my seriousish blog at DownWithTyranny with any regularity you probably also know that as a hobby I run a fun travel blog on the side. I ran away from home when I was 13 — hitchhiked to Florida (though I only got as far as the New Jersey Turnpike where I was arrested) — and I’ve been on the road ever since. I lived overseas for almost seven years and I normally spend at least a month out of the U.S. every year — a habit I got into in the late 1970s. Lately I’ve been to Mali and Bali and I’m putting the finishing touches on a trip to Albania. When I write about foreign policy questions I like to think my time abroad informs what I have to say.
There aren’t many members of Congress who have traveled extensively out of the country. In his delightful book, Fire-Breathing Liberal, Rep. Robert Wexler marvels at how many of his Republican colleagues seem to think not possessing a passport is a badge of honor! Last weekend I spent some time with Rep. Barbara Lee who is no longer surprised when she talks with Republicans who haven’t been — and don’t want to be — outside of the U.S. The opposite extreme would be one member who certainly qualifies for the Century Club, Rep. Alan Grayson. When I told him I was going to Mali he was able to give me some travel tips for remote, seldom visited villages like Bandiagara and Sanga, and a few weeks ago he told me about some odd customs I can expect to experience in Albania.
In 1969 I drove to Afghanistan. Between then and 1972 I spent over half a year there, and never spent one single day in a hotel. Traveling from London, through then still-Communist nations like Hungary and Bulgaria, then through Turkey and Iran and into Herat, the most important component doesn’t feel like mileage, but time. Sure, I traveled in space; but what seemed far more profound was a trip back in time. Afghanistan was like being in the 11th Century, not the turn of the 20th. And I noticed immediately that the people there don’t recognize a country called “Afghanistan.” In Herat and Kandahar, respectively the 3rd and 2nd biggest towns, there was resentment towards the “central government” as a pretension — backed by foreign military equipment — of Kabul, the biggest town and what foreigners insist is the capital of “the country.” The only part of the discussion of Afghan policy more awkwardly missing from the calculations that there is no Afghanistan, is that all the men there — yes, all of them — are stoned all day, every day on the strongest hash (much of it opiated) on God’s earth. I know West Point was just named the best college in America by Fortune but do they teach them that stuff there?
This week Robert Greenwald debuted his intense new documentary, Rethink Afghanistan in Washington, DC. Rep. Grayson was on a panel and made some remarks worth taking a look at:
I think that the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make Congress and the American people feel better about the war and about killing. I think that diplomacy in the areas of fig leaf to try to make the American people think that there is some constructive alternative to the war when the war itself is destructive and not constructive.
I think that the basic premise that we can alter afghan society is greatly flawed. Afghanistan is simply the part of Asia that was never occupied by the Russians or the English in the Great Game. It’s not a country; it’s not even a place. It’s just an empty place on the map. It’s terra incognita. People who live there are a welter of different tribes, different language groups, different religious beliefs.
All over the country you find different people who have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that we call them Afghans, and they don’t even call themselves Afghans. They’re Tajiks or they’re Pashtuns, or they’re Hazzaras or someone else. The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.
And the idea that we could transform that society or any other society through aid I think is entirely questionable. I’ve never seen it happen; probably never will happen. If you go to the Stan countries north of Afghanistan, and I’ve been to all of them; what you find is that the way that the Russians altered that society was by crushing it. Stalin killed half a million Muslims in Kazakhstan, in Turkmenistan, in Kyrgyzstan, in Uzbekistan.
He simply sliced off the head of that society in order to remake it in the image that he wanted. And I think that we would have to do no less if we wanted to remake Afghanistan in our image. We’d have to destroy it in order to save it, and I don’t think the American people are ever going to do that to anybody. So I think that the underlining premise is simply wrong.
I’ve been to 175 countries all around the world including Afghanistan, including every country in that region, and what I’ve seen everywhere I go is that there are some commonalities everywhere you go. Everywhere you go people want to fall in love. It’s an interesting thing. Everywhere you go, people love children. Everywhere, they love children. Everywhere you go, there’s a taboo against violence. Every single place you go. And everywhere you go, people want to be left alone. And that’s the best foreign policy of all. Just to leave people alone.
Grayson was one of the 32 members of Congress who stood up on June 16 and said “NO!” to more war funding. It’s more than a promise; it’s something he did. Blue America is hosting a page, No Means No! seeking to encourage members of Congress to put their feet down and help end the occupation of Afghanistan. Please visit the page and consider making a contribution to Grayson or any of the other courageous members of Congress on the list. Is your own congresscritter there?
And even if Obama isn’t listening to a freshman like Grayson, it sounds like Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey is. Obey’s asking the kinds of tough questions that every single member of Congress should be asking unless they want to be considered in dereliction of their duty.
“The problem with increasing the number of troops is that we become the lightening rod, and our presence runs the risk of inciting more anti-American sentiment that can become a recruiting tool for the very forces we seek to curtail,” Obey said of one option President Obama is weighing.
“If any adjustment is made in U.S. troop levels, it would be much better if those troops were focused on the job of training Afghani troops and police to take on the job of securing the population and maintaining law and order,” he said. “But even there, we have to ask what is achievable. My understanding is that there have never been more than about 90,000 troops under the sway of the central government. Now we are told that the goal is to train up to 400,000 soldiers and police personnel. I think it is reasonable to ask whether that is a realistic and achievable goal.”
As for a policy bent on counter-insurgency and nation-building, Obey said, “We should be asking not what policy is theoretically the most intellectually coherent, but which policy is actually achievable given the only tools we have in the region; the Afghani and Pakistani governments. Is there sufficient leadership, popular support, and political will, not in the United States but in Afghanistan, necessary for effective governance to take hold?”
Equally important, he said, “Do we really have the tools to overcome language, culture, history and a 90 percent illiteracy rate to sufficiently transform such a country?”
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Maine, a subsidiary of WellPoint, the nation’s largest insurer, wanted the state to approve an average rate hike of 18.5 percent on its policyholders. Maine rejected the increase and now the insurer is fighting for the hike in court.
Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films is taking aim at Anthem’s rate reach in the latest installment of his “Sick for Profit” series. The video, posted below, is a slick pitch for pitchfork-style outrage. It notes how much WellPoint pays its CEO ($9.8 million) and how much of its policyholders’ premiums it spends on lobbying ($9,529,747). WellPoint’s subsidiary in Maine says it needs the rate increase to guarantee a 3 percent profit margin.
“The only justification for this lawsuit is just pure greed,” says Ali Vander-Zanden of the Maine People’s Alliance in the video.
And the Maine attorney general’s office seems to buttress that argument — in a Sept. 23 filing, in response to the insurer’s claim that raising premiums is necessary for the financial health of the company, the AG says Anthem is perfectly profitable.
In its filing, Anthem said it had lost $3.7 million on its individual insurance products over the past five years. The AG says Anthem has made $5.4 million from individual consumers over the past two years, and points out that Anthem paid $75.7 million in dividends to WellPoint in 2008, $40.4 million in 2007, and $35.6 million in 2006. And its executives paid themselves pretty well, too.
“In 2006, Anthem executive compensation in Maine for its nine highest-paid employees totaled over $4.3 million, averaging almost $500 thousand per executive,” the AG’s filing says. “This included total base salaries of nearly $1.6 million, bonuses in excess of $835 thousand, and all other compensation of over $1.9 million (which may include payouts under multi-year long term incentive plans, sales incentives, severance, and the exercises of stock options granted in prior years.) … During 2006-2008, the three-year average executive compensation for Anthem’s top nine employees remained at nearly $500,000.”
The attorney general points out how much Mainers already pay:
“In addition to the average annual premium of approximately $6,000 paid by Maine consumers to Anthem in 2008, these same individuals paid their own health care costs below the deductible. The average deductible as $7,250 in that year, and is projected to grow to an average of $7,570 in 2009… That means the average policyholder would have to incure a total cost of more than $13,000 in premium and deductibles, prior to becoming eligible to receive any health benefits under the policy.”
The filing states that with the rate increase, Anthem’s 12,000 policyholders in Maine “would have paid an additional $12 million in annual premium for the same level of benefits.”
Oral arguments are expected in November. An Anthem spokesman has not yet responded to a request for comment from the Huffington Post.
