Urinal humiliation policy leaked

In a barely coherent and historically confused on-air rant, US shock jock Mark Levin tries to enunciate unofficial US military policy in the ‘war on terror’:

Let this be a lesson to every one of you subhumans who plots against America and tries to kill American citizens. We don’t give a damn who you are! We don’t give a damn what you believe! And we don’t give a damn if you’re offended! Because we’re going to hunt you down and kill you and then humiliate you after you’re killed!

Got it?

Yep... got it! — Those marines who urinated on corpses of Taliban fighters they’d just killed are not ‘bad apples’ in an otherwise noble enterprise. No, they’re the embodiment of what Levin and his ilk would like to see as the norm of behaviour in our warrior caste.

But while Levin speaks for the shit-scared and clueless, others such as Sebastian Junger at the Washington Post endeavour to understand what has happened to ‘us’.

I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan... At one point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that celebration was just so ugly. I didn’t want them to be like that.

I do feel for our warrior caste, being torn as they are between ‘enlightened’ standards, and what people such as Levin “want them to be like.” It’s not enough that they are put in harms’ way in a hopelessly flawed enterprise. They’re also subject to deeply conflicted expectations of cosseted ignoramuses in the media.

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Elsewhere: Lancet assessment of mixed outcomes in Afghan health

The Lancet reports the release of the first national comprehensive mortality survey of Afghanistan as providing cause for both hope and concern.

To improve rebuilding efforts as well as gauging development initiatives and years of multisectoral investment by the international community, the Afghan Public Health Institute of the Ministry of Public Health and the Central Statistics Organisation undertook the Afghanistan Mortality Survey (AMS) 2010. AMS 2010 is the first national comprehensive mortality survey of 222,351 households, 47 848 women aged 12—49 years, and verbal autopsies of 3157 deaths in the 3 years preceding the survey, and covers 87% of the population in 34 provinces in the country. ...

The most encouraging progress is in maternal health, with an overall increase in coverage of antenatal care, skilled birth attendance, and births in health facilities to 63%, 34%, and 32%, respectively. Despite these achievements, fewer than 16% of women reported having at least four antenatal visits (the minimum necessary to provide adequate screening for pregnancy complications), while 71.5% women had not received postnatal check-ups for their last birth, which is vital for monitoring delivery complications.

This is in a context where...

According to a UNICEF fact sheet released last month, Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous places for a pregnant woman or a child to be born. Afghanistan has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world, with 1400 women out of every 100 000 livebirths dying of a complication related to pregnancy or childbirth, while its mortality rate for children younger than 5 years is ranked second in the world, with 199 deaths per 1000 livebirths. Even if a child is lucky enough to survive birth, he or she could only expect to live 44 years, while the life expectancy at birth of the world overall is 67.2 years for 2005—10.

However,

this report is not without limitations. First, 9% of the total populations in Afghanistan, who live in the rural areas of Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul provinces in the south zone, are not represented in the survey owing to security reasons, which seriously limits the report’s usefulness for planning. Second, although the survey has suggested much lower maternal, infant, and child mortality rates than previous estimates, given the geographically limited samples and use of verbal autopsy data, the numbers should be treated with caution. ... Finally, anthropometric indicators such as stunting or wasting rates, which can help evaluate malnutrition—the biggest contributor to child mortality by far, are missing. According to UNICEF’s Afghanistan Country programme document 2010—2013, around 1.2 million children younger than 5 years and 550,000 pregnant or lactating mothers are at high risk of severe malnutrition in Afghanistan.

The Lancet concludes, ominously:

To safeguard what has been gained with so much difficulty, sufficient and consistent assistance must be ensured from the international community.

Hear hear! And let’s be reminded again of Tony Blair’s 2001 pledge that we will not abandon Afghanistan.

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Hitch should know better

This recent column by Christopher Hitchens is bound to confirm an article of faith of his fellow travellers: namely, that human rights groups and NGOs generally are anti-American just for the sake of it, if not because they’re inherently perverse, or even evil.

Hitchens’ rhetoric is, of course, characteristically effortless:

Even in a week that concentrated all eyes on the magnificent courage and maturity of the people of Cairo, a report from Kabul began with what must surely be the most jaw-dropping opening paragraph of the year. Under the byline of the excellent Rod Nordland, The New York Times reported: “International and local human rights groups working in Afghanistan have shifted their focus toward condemning abuses committed by the Taliban insurgents, rather than those attributed to the American military and its allies.” . . .

The story became more mind-boggling as it unfolded. One had to ask oneself what had taken the human-rights “community” so long. . . .

The turning point, in the mind of the human rights “activists,” appears to have occurred in late January, when a Taliban suicide-murderer killed at least 14 civilians in the Finest Supermarket in Kabul. Among the slain was a well-known local campaigner named Hamida Barmaki, whose husband and four small children were also killed. One wonders in what sense this was the Taliban going too far — women are killed and mutilated by them every single day in Afghanistan. Yet let the terror reach one of the upscale markets or hotels that cater to the NGO constituency in Kabul, and suddenly there is an abrupt change from moral neutrality.

Before joining Hitchens in his railing against the dastardly “moral equivalence” of those ironically quote-enclosed “activists,” it might be noted that Hitchens in his lazy reading of Nordland’s article seems to have missed the fact that, long before January, groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had been calling for the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by the Taliban.

Hitchens’ angle here, of course, is to retrospectively validate his long-standing support for the ever-lengthening war in Afghanistan. In a re-definition that renders the term concentration camp almost meaningless, he notes without irony that “during [the Taliban’s] period in power, it ran the country as a vast concentration camp,” etc.

No-one would deny the egregiousness of the Taliban’s authoritarian rule, which virulently and tragically metastasised tendencies already inherent in traditional Afghan tribal culture. But Hitchens’ looseness here with language is the hallmark of a partisan tract.

Hitchens should know better, and I believe he does and moreover is plainly capable of far better. But on certain topics, evidently requiring a retrospective twist, Hitchens can be quite unreliable.

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Scales fallen from eyes

At work this week an analyst came in to consult with users on our needs in relation to a super-duper new management information system.

At one point she remarked that the locus of system problems often occurs “between the chair and the keyboard.”

We errant users gnashed our teeth and were fairly blown away by this radical new conceptual framework in which to consider human interaction with computers: Don’t think of them as staff, think of them as CKIUs — Chair/Keyboard Interface Units.

Meanwhile, a pundit interviewed this week on Lateline helpfully illumined the present troubles in Afghanistan with a gynaecological analogy: “You can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

Yep, it’s all clear to me now!

By the way, I believe that particular gyno-analogy was originally minted by Warren Buffet in relation to US President Obama’s economic stimulus initiatives. A very useful meme which undoubtedly will be deployed again and again to illuminate the ineffable.

Finally, I was dazzled by a tv program Thursday night on ABC1 called “Web Warriors.” The program reported earnestly on a computer worm virus that, although “undetectable”, was confidently asserted to have infected millions of PCs all around the world.

A stunning work of investigative journalism, to be sure!

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Who are ‘the Taliban’?

BBC correspondent Alastair Leithead tries to explain for a television audience:

... gradually over the last few years the Taliban have been growing in strength. We say ‘Taliban’, it’s a shorthand term, it doesn’t necessarily mean the same people who are [were] in government here. It’s a combination of criminal, of al Qaeda, of other groups of drug lords. It’s a hugely complicated picture across Afghanistan as to exactly who these insurgents are.

On the other hand, the picture doesn’t seem nearly so complicated in general news reporting. Regarding the recent attempt to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a “militant attack” at a parade, it was reported that:

The extremist Taliban said it had carried out the attack, in which three militants were also killed.

And regarding a later “suicide blast” outrage:

A man claiming to be a Taliban commander for the region said a Taliban loyalist had carried out the attack.

“We claim responsibility for the blast in Khogyani,” said the man, who identified himself as Qari Sajad. “It was a suicide attack carried out by one of our friends named Abdullah.”

One may wonder how rigorously the bona fides of someone claiming to be “a Taliban commander” are assessed. On the other hand, we all know ‘Abdullah’... don’t we?

Meanwhile:

The first US Marines of a new expeditionary force were deployed in Afghanistan’s troubled Helmand province yesterday, promising more aggressive tactics and implying criticism of the British operation there. ...

The extra US force in the south will make it easier for the Americans to press their allies to adopt common tactics, primarily those refined over the past few years by US forces against the Taliban and other groups.

Those “other groups” — whoever they may be — seldom seem to emerge from behind the blanket “shorthand” expedient of “the Taliban”.

Hopefully the NATO command in Afghanistan will have a better idea of exactly who they’re fighting in this “generational” conflict, than we punters back home, who only have the benefit of shorthand reporting.

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