Max Forte's Profile

That can transform once cowed people with something to lose into enraged revolutionaries devoted to destroying the government that ruined their lives. 

The first step is to heed the number one lesson of warfare articulated over 2,300 years ago by Sun Tzu to “know your enemy, know yourself.”

When Bush tried to explain the enemy’s nature to the American people, he presented an ideological rather than analytical portrait. In his televised address on September 21, he answered the rhetoric question,

“Why do they hate us?” by asserting that they “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other…These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way.” 

Actually Al Qaeda and other Islamists hate American more for what it does than what it is, although they do see the connection between American policies and culture.

Having assessed the nature of one’s enemy and oneself, the next step is to fulfill a maxim by that great theorist and practitioner of warfare, Carl von Clausewitz: “The statesman and the commander have to … establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, not trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”

That was not the kind of war that President Bush and his fellow neoconservatives were interested in fighting. The nature of their war was elaborated in the president’s “National Security Strategy of the United States,” released in September 2002. That document unequivocally declares: “The United States is fighting a war against terrorism of global reach. The enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism itself-premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetuated against innocents…We must persevere until the United States together with its friends and allies, eliminates terrorism as a threat to our way of life.”[4] 

Realists blasted the Bush team’s so-called “war on terror.” William Pfaff denounced the “intellectually incoherent elevation…of terrorism, a tactic or method of combat employed throughout the ages, to metaphysical standing as ‘Terror,’ a phenomenon which American arms were expected to conquer.”

Jeffrey Record criticized the neoconservatives for identifying “a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction…proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, regional, and, national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing, the administration has… subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a path of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no direct or imminent threat to the United States.”

For neoconservatives the notion of a “war on terror” made perfect political and ideological sense. The concept is so vague, open-ended, and scary for the average American that it could be and was used to justify virtually everything on the conservative agenda. As true believers they never questioned their own beliefs no matter how catastrophically they collided with reality. Instead they tended to project onto others their own inner demons by hurling accusations of weakness, cowardice, unpatriotism, and even treason against their critics. 

The lesson for Tehran and Pyongyang was that the United States under neoconservative rule bullied the weak and feared the strong. So the obvious policy to counter that American threat was to become stronger. Rather than be intimidated from developing nuclear weapons, Iran and North Korea accelerated their programs.

As Joseph Nye trenchantly observed, “deterrence is working. The only trouble is that we are the ones being deterred.”[6] 

The public relations campaign to market that vision took off when the original justifications for invading Iraq-that Iraq was linked with Al Qaeda and posed an imminent threat to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction–were proven to be either blatant lies or delusions. Now the justification for invading Iraq would be to impose a revolution from above, transforming Iraq from tyranny into a liberal democracy which would inspire similar revolutions across the Middle East and beyond. A half year after the invasion, Bush declared that in “Iraq, we are helping…to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East… The Middle East will become a place of progress and peace or it will be an exporter of violence and terror…The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and beyond would be a grave setback for international terrorism.”[8] 

We have neither the military capacity nor the political will to do any of that. Indeed, we probably do not even have the financial capability to do it.

What we can do is prolong the war and increase the misery of the Afghan people.

The Taliban disappears into the sea of the civilian population. The Taliban hides and waits. It yields land for time. It fights selectively. It evaporates when outnumbered. It reduces its operations. It lingers to fight another day -- when the Americans will be gone, when the poorly trained, corrupt, and easily infiltrated Afghan army will be the primary enemy. 

The reality of Afghanistan is that it is not a necessary war.  The Taliban did not orchestrate the events of 9/11. Osama bin Laden did

If we seriously want to defeat the Taliban, we must escalate the war, commit to staying there, and change the rules of engagement regarding civilian casualties. And then what? We will have so alienated the population that they will produce another insurgency

There is nothing patriotic about sending our young men and women to die in a war that will be fought in the absence of compelling military considerations, a war without resolution, a war where success eludes definition, and a war where the enemy and civilian population already know when we will be gone. 

Bring the troops home. There is much to do here to promote our own security, beginning with not further debasing our economic strength by spending money on needless wars.

Although Army officials don't blame the spike on repeated deployments to war zones, evidence is mounting to the contrary. Only about a third of Army suicides happen in war zones, officials note, and another third are among personnel who had never deployed. But that means two-thirds of Army suicides have deployed, many returning home with mental scars that make them prone to take their own lives, the Army's No. 2 officer said last week.

"Soldiers who are suffering from posttraumatic stress are six times more likely to commit suicide than those that are not," General Peter Chiarelli told the House Armed Services Committee on Dec. 10. "The greatest single debilitating injury of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is posttraumatic stress."

Nearly 1 in 5 soldiers — more than 300,000 — comes home from the wars reporting symptoms of PTSD.

Last week, an Army major's wife told of her husband's mental woes after returning from his second tour in Iraq in 2005. "I don't know what that mission was, other than riding around and getting blown up and shot at," Sheri Hall said her husband, Jeff, says even now. Speaking at a military trauma forum in Bethesda, Md., Sheri said when she saw him for the first time upon his return, Jeff's eyes revealed "a very lost person" who "wasn't my husband anymore."

Chiarelli, the Army's top suicide fighter, finds the challenge daunting. "This is horrible," the Army vice chief of staff said recently. "The challenge of suicides," added the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, "is without a doubt the toughest that I have had to tackle in 37-plus years in the Army."

Military suicides have even raised a question for the White House. President Obama's staff is reviewing a long-standing but unwritten policy that bars him from sending condolence letters to the families of military personnel who have killed themselves. Some families of suicide victims have pushed for an end to the policy, but there is concern that suicidal soldiers could feel less restraint knowing their families would get condolence letters from the President.

Bishop Venner said he was deeply grieved to have caused offence by suggesting
that the Taliban could be viewed in a more sympathetic light.

In his interview with the Daily Telegraph, he had said it would be harder to
reach a peaceful solution to the war in Afghanistan if the insurgents were
all portrayed as "pure evil."

"There's a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for
which none of us in the West could approve, but simply to say therefore that
everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it's not
honest," he said.

"The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith
and their sense of loyalty to each other."

Bishop Venner has issued a statement reiterating his support for British
forces and trying to limit the damage caused by his comments.

“I acknowledge that long-lasting peace will not be achieved without both
defeating the Taliban militants and, over time, by encouraging them to
forsake the path of war and to be involved in the future of Afghanistan.

However, Bob Russell, the Liberal Democrat MP for the garrison town of
Colchester, accused the bishop of giving "comfort and succour to the
enemy".

"What you never do is give comfort to the enemy. It is one thing for
people to have respect for their enemy, but there is a world of difference
here," he said.

"I accept that some things they do may not be as bad as others but
frankly I look at the Taliban in the round and I find nothing to admire
about them whatsoever.

According to the version of events repeated in Berlin since the attack, German Colonel Georg Klein ordered the bombardment of two tanker trucks that had been hijacked by Taliban insurgents. Allegedly out of fear that the tankers could be turned into "rolling bombs" used to attack a German base a few kilometers away, Klein called in US air support -- an order he was only authorized to give if there had been enemy contact ("troops in contact" in NATO jargon) or if German troops were in danger.

But the NATO report, which has been seen by SPIEGEL, makes it clear that Klein was primarily interested in killing the dozens of Taliban fighters who had gathered around the tankers in an effort to free the vehicles from the sandbank.

According to the NATO report, the US pilots who ultimately carried out the air strike asked their wing commander whether they were to target the vehicles or the people. They were told, on Klein's authority, to target the people. When the pilots asked if German troops had had contact with the enemy, they received the response, "confirmed." Yet no German troops had approached the scene from their nearby base.

Should that version of events be true, then Klein's order to attack countermanded both NATO's mandate in Afghanistan and the German military's mandate as provided by German parliament.

Targeted killings, whether carried out against Taliban insurgents or civilians, are not allowed.

Even more problematic, according to the NATO report, Klein likely knew at the time he gave the order that at least one civilian was present at the site. A translator working with an Afghan spotter used by the German military told NATO investigators that he told Klein's people that one of the two tanker drivers was still alive. The NATO report makes clear that the US pilots asked about the presence of the drivers, one of whom had been killed by the Taliban. They were told by their wing commander that he had no information as to their whereabouts.

Some in Berlin are now wondering whether the attack may be the result of a secret alteration of the German mission in Afghanistan. The NATO report also indicates that the Sept. 4 bombing was ordered under the auspices of "Task Force 47," a unit which includes both Bundeswehr reconnaissance troops and members of the German special forces unit KSK.

Andrea Nahles, general secretary of the opposition Social Democrats (SPD), has demanded that both Guttenberg and Merkel reply to concerns that the German mission has been changed to include a mandate to "liquidate Taliban leaders."

Gabriel also demanded that Guttenberg resign. "If Mr. Jung had to resign because he didn't adequately inform the public," Gabriel said in reference to former Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, who resigned from Merkel's cabinet in November after it became clear that he misinformed Germans about the possibility that the Kunduz attack had cost civilian lives, "and Mr. Guttenberg knew everything that we are now reading daily in the newspapers and didn't say anything, then he should be held to the same standard."

Guttenberg wasn't the only one who has had access to the NATO report for the past six weeks. It was sent to the Chancellery as well.

But although these incidents and the continuous stream of criticism from academics has dogged the program since its inception, they have also been useful in developing applied research training techniques for those working with the military, says Montgomery McFate, senior social scientist for HTS. But she adds that many critics fail to understand the nature of the work.

“Many of the concerns raised by academic anthropologists reflected a lack of knowledge about the role and mission of US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lack of understanding about the population of Iraq and Afghanistan and the conditions under which they live, and a set of preconceived ideas about the mission or goals of HTS fed by anxieties about the military’s historic use of anthropological knowledge during prior conflicts, including the British colonial period,” Dr. McFate wrote The Christian Science Monitor in an e-mail.

“The difference between HTT and us is that the HTT is very highly trained in counterinsurgency cultural studies,” he says. “HTT is more focused on the big picture, like, ‘How do we analyze this culture and this society so that we can apply these fundamentals of counterinsurgency to this area?’ ”

“The reality is [the war] happened and you can either sit by and do nothing or you can try to do something to help a little bit at least,” she says. “But other people are of the opinion, and fair enough, that to be involved is to kind of be a part of the problem.”

By Tom A. Peter
Correspondent / December 11, 2009

Baquba, Iraq

When the military began an experimental program in 2007 to give soldiers a better understanding of cultural sensitivities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many in the military and the media lauded it as a great step forward in the counterinsurgency effort.

Called the Human Terrain System (HTS), the program embeds anthropologists and social scientists in the US military to give soldiers vital local context for shaping their operations. But a group of anthropologists quickly attacked the nascent program, saying that partnering social scientists with combat forces caused them to violate the principal rule of anthropology: to do no harm. By working directly with frontline soldiers, some anthropologists worry that the information generated by HTS social scientists can be used to facilitate potentially lethal military operations or otherwise endanger locals.

Today the program enjoys a core of supporters, but it’s done little to address the concerns of anthropologists and, now, rising military complaints that the program has slowed the growth of the military’s ability to train culturally sensitive warriors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, US military leaders began placing increased importance on understanding local cultures and viewpoints as a critical component of their mission. The question for it is whether HTS helps or hurts that goal.

“I wish I could say I’ve seen something that made me feel better [about HTS], but I haven’t,” says Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who has had concerns about the program since its inception.

This spring, US Marine Maj. Ben Connable voiced concerns that the program was hurting the military’s ability to develop what he termed “cultural intelligence training programs” in an article published in the Military Review.

“HTS has sapped the attention or financing from nearly every cultural program in the military and from many within the military intelligence community,” wrote Connable, who argued that although the military lacked cultural intelligence abilities in the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve since improved in this regard.

Other critics point to the difficulty of determining the value of HTS due to the lack of empirical evidence about its performance. At the present time, the program does not track statistics about its impact. As a result, David Price, a longtime opponent of the program and co-author of “The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual,” says it’s impossible for anyone to objectively measure its merit.

to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the Army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro, the project manager at HTS.

Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised the project, and an Army colonel told Congress that one Human Terrain team reduced violent clashes encountered by his brigade in Afghanistan 60% to 70%

As President Obama revamps his Afghanistan strategy, getting ready to send 30,000 additional soldiers, HTS is poised to become a major part of America's war, helping troops navigate in a foreign land.

"We're pleased to find ourselves fully aligned with the goals [of the Obama Administration]," says Fondacaro.

The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics — a sort of Hippocratic oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month's 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather.

David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin's University in Washington state and one of the co-authors of the AAA report, says the Army appears to be using the anthropological information to better target the enemy — which, if true, would be a gross violation of the anthropological code

HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the Army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program "is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence."

But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a master's in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, "there's definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject," Wintersteen says. "There's no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field."

Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA's decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization's ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining.

"It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings," Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.D.s — many of the others came from a military background.

Because of the AAA, "there are a lot of highly motivated, ethical, critical anthropologists who are being discouraged from helping the program."

HTS project manager Fondacaro admits that finding recruits with regional expertise is "very rare," but he argues that HTS is creating a population of social scientists with firsthand experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where none existed before.

HTS is not the first instance of anthropologists' involvement with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administer and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later, in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt's decision to allow the Japanese Emperor's reign to continue as part of Japan's surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists were actively involved in the Allied war effort. One British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, even led a team of ruthless Kachin fighters — the indigenous group he was studying in Burma — against the nation's Japanese occupiers.

In 1964 the U.S. Army recruited scholars for Project Camelot, a program whose goals included helping the U.S. Army "assist friendly governments in dealing with active insurgency problems," such as in Chile, the project's test case. The project never moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist's office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military-funded programs. Over the past 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, "the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its ivory tower."

But McFate's larger point stands: for the past few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles.

"Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation," says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the military from asking for their help. "What's been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts," Fondacaro says. The traditional Army, he says, is good at treating "the symptoms of insurgency" — fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance — but "what HTS is focused on is the disease. There's a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence."

James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan (one of three HTS social scientists to die on duty), says, "The emphasis in previous wars has been more about how you defeat the enemy by controlling territory" but that recently, "the center of gravity shifted to a psychological territory."

cultural knowledge will need to be integrated into combat operations. And how do we do that exactly? Says Der Derian: "We're still trying to figure that out."

Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez said during a briefing in the Afghan capital that the slower schedule results from the logistical challenges the military faces in bringing in so many forces so quickly. In launching a 30,000-troop surge, the Obama administration had initially said it expected that all of troops would be in place within six months.

President Barack Obama had not cited that figure directly, saying in his Dec. 1 nationally-televised speech that the troops would "deploy in the first part of 2010 — the fastest pace possible — so that they can target the insurgency." White House aides had indicated the hope was for all the new troops to be in place by summer.

Military officials had already been hinting broadly in recent weeks that the escalation might take longer, but Rodriguez' comments indicated that the notion of a six-month rapid escalation was not realistic and that reality is now setting in.

Officials also said that plans to begin a process of withdrawal by July 2011 are not affected by the delay.

Painting a grim picture, Mullen said Afghan insurgents were dominant in a third of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and "the insurgency has grown more violent, more pervasive and more sophisticated."

"I remain deeply concerned by the growing level of collusion between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida and other extremist groups taking refuge across the border in Pakistan," Mullen said. "Getting at this network, which is more entrenched, will be a more difficult task than it was just one year ago."

Mullen's reference to militants based in Pakistan appeared aimed at U.S. efforts to press the Pakistani government to step up its crackdown on extremists who have long used their country as a refuge. The U.S. believes most of al-Qaida's top leadership has moved from Afghanistan to the lawless border area just inside Pakistan.

Last week, U.S. officials in Washington said the Obama administration was considering widening missile strikes on al-Qaida and other militants inside Pakistan and planning to bolster the training of Pakistan's forces in the key border areas. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was sensitive.

The 10,000-member Afghan army is expected to swell to 150,000 by March 2011.

More than 230,000 American women have fought in those recent wars and at least 120 have died doing so, yet the public still doesn't completely understand their contributions on the modern battlefield.

Aimee Sherrod, an Air Force veteran who did three war tours, said years went by when she didn't tell people she was a veteran. After facing sexual harassment during two tours and mortar attacks in Iraq, the 29-year-old mother of two from Bells, Tenn., was medically discharged in 2005 with post-traumatic stress disorder.

She's haunted by nightmares and wakes up some nights thinking she's under attack. She's moody as a result of PTSD and can't function enough to work or attend college. Like some other veterans, she felt she improperly received a low disability rating by the Department of Veterans Affairs that left her with a token monthly payment. She was frustrated that her paperwork mentioned she was pregnant, a factor she thought was irrelevant.

"I just gave up on it and I didn't tell anyone about ever being in the military because I was so ashamed over everything," Sherrod said.

The Defense Department bars women from serving in assignments where the primary mission is to engage in direct ground combat. But the nature of the recent conflicts, with no clear front lines, puts women in the middle of the action, in roles such as military police officers, pilots, drivers and gunners on convoys. In addition to the 120-plus deaths, more than 650 women have been wounded.

Female service members have much higher rates of divorce and are more likely to be a single parent. When they do seek help at VA medical centers, they are screening positive at a higher rate for military sexual trauma, meaning they indicated experiencing sexual harassment, assault or rape. Some studies have shown that female veterans are at greater risk for homelessness.

"People didn't come up to us and thank us for our service in the same way. They didn't give us free beers in bars in the same way when we first got back," said Williams, 34, of Ashburn, Va. "Even if you're vaguely aware of it, it still colors how you see yourself in some ways."

"We just want to know that when we come home, America has our back," Chase said. "That's the biggest thing. Women are over there. You want to feel like you're coming home to open arms, rather than to a public that doesn't acknowledge you for what you've just done and what you just sacrificed."

She described the attitudes as "Oh, you didn't do anything or you were just on base," said McNeill, who suffers from postconcussive headaches, ringing in her ears, and other health problems related to roadside bomb blasts. The 25-year-old from Hollandale, Wis., was a sergeant in the Army Reserves.

Sen. Patty Murray, a member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs committee, recently asked VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ensure that service members' combat experience is included on their military discharge papers, so later they can get benefits they are entitled to.

"What worries me is that women themselves still don't see themselves as veterans, so they don't get the care they need for post-traumatic stress syndrome or traumatic brain injury or even sexual assault, which obviously is more unique to women, so we still have a long ways to go," said Murray, D-Wash.

"Most of us, because we were women service members, are so used to not complaining and not voicing our issues, because in the military that's considered weak. Nobody wants to hear the girl whine," Chase said.