Americans’ energy concerns and the Iraq war were discussed by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in Virginia. McCain said that the United States must lower its dependence on foreign oil by increasing its domestic production. He also called for continued research on alternative energy sources. McCain restated his support for a gas tax holiday, a measure that would lower gasoline prices by temporarily removing its federal taxes.

To increase domestic production, McCain said that he will soon call for a lifting of a moratorium that prohibits states from exploring for oil and natural gas reserves offshore. He added that states with reserves should be given incentives to produce, saying that increasing the percentage of revenue states receive is one possible motivation. McCain called ANWR “pristine” and said the he opposes drilling for oil in a region that was set aside as a wildlife reserve.

McCain emphatically declared that the United States is winning the war in Iraq, saying that President Bush’s troop increases have brought greater stability to the country, reduced Iranian influence, and allowed for the growth of Iraq’s democracy. McCain said that Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama’s advocacy for a withdrawal date and Obama’s statement that a troop surge would fail were wrong. McCain noted that Obama has not visited Iraq in over two years and, to gain a complete and thorough grasp of the military situation there, suggested that Obama meet with General Petraeus. McCain said that US troops should come home with victory and honor and that a quick exit could lead to chaos and genocide.

McCain repeated his desire to hold weekly town hall meetings with Obama until each party’s convention is held, saying that he will continue to reserve one day a week for such an event. McCain remarked that town hall meetings are the root of democracy and that these discussions would clearly show the differences between the two candidates. In reference to Sen. Obama’s statement that small town Americans are bitter and thus turn to guns and religion, McCain maintained he would never suggest that people in small towns turn to guns and religion out of bitterness, telling those in small towns that his presidency would bring them a safe and prosperous nation.

Baksheesh, noun, (in parts of Asia) a small sum of money given as alms, a tip, a bribe. ORIGIN based on Persian ba k sis, from ba k sidan, “give.”

     Want to hear something about the new Afghanistan? First, you have to know a little about the old Afghanistan, and the word is, “baksheesh.” And first, baksheesh must be considered in all of its meanings: “alms, a tip, a bribe.”

Alms: Afghanistan ranks among the poorest countries on earth. According to the CIA World Factbook, 53% of Afghans are below the poverty line, there is 40% unemployment, and in 2007, per capita GDP was $1,490, USD. But the Western traveler needs few of these factoids to intuitively sense the ugly truth they represent. On crowded streets in Kabul, beggars, many of which are women garbed head-to-toe in faded and filthy blue burkhas, crowd the “rich” Westerner, extending gnarled, sometimes scabbed hands, pleading for baksheesh. Old men in rags bearing semi-conscious children on their backs, or amputees from wars past, and men unable to rise from the street also ask for alms. Appearance alone suggests that there are few fraudsters among these indigent. The price of a salved conscience is cheap: 10 or 20 Afghanis earns words translated as “thank you” or “Allah bless you.” Gratitude can be had for between 20 and 40 cents, USD. This is one meaning of baksheesh.
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Today at George Washington University, Former Indonesian President His Excellency Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, also known as “Gus Dur”, addressed an auditorium of Muslim students, onlookers and media members urging young Muslims to “reclaim authentic Islam.” President Wahid served as Indonesia’s “first democratically-elected president from 1999-2001 and remains the leader of the National Awakening Party (PKB), which he established after the fall of Suharto in 1998.”A highly-regarded and much respected Muslim cleric, he has led the Nahdlatul Ulama, the worlds largest Islamic organization with forty million members. He is a strong advocate for religious tolerance and a proponent of many democratic ideals. “When addressing Muslim audiences, Gus Dur invariably reminds his listeners that it is their sacred duty to respect others’ beliefs, and to avoid any form of discrimination or intolerance towards those who worship differently from themselves.” (continued)

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This week I travel to Afghanistan to begin my fourth stint as an embedded reporter for Talk Radio News Service, Inc. Long-time readers may recall that I was on the USS Kitty Hawk during the Shock & Awe phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was followed in 2005 by a stint with the Marines at Fallujah and in 2006 with the Army outside Buqubah. This time I’ll be reporting on the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division stationed near the Afghan city of Khost.

I’ll be producing several news products. First, I’ll be calling in to stations and networks served by Talk Radio News Service. Next, I’ll be blogging through the Afghan Journal, which will be posted to this website and updated as often as circumstances permit. My objective will be to chronicle the actual work of the 4th Brigade Combat Team. I will also be conducting interviews. My subjects will be just about any “important” person willing to talk. By important, I don’t mean merely top brass or politicians. Those who have followed my written work know that I have a keen interest in the folks who, in Civil War parlance, “make the machine run”–grunts, NCOs, chaplains, doctors of the mind and body, guys and gals who keep the vehicles running, weapons clean, and food on the table. I don’t speak Pashto, so unless I link with an interpreter, I’ll be limited to interviewing Afghans who speak English. All interviews will posted on the TRNS website as podcasts.

Serious consumers of news from Iraq and Afghanistan understand what soldiers, reporters and and onsite civil affairs personnel have long understood: these conflicts are essentially political and not military. Combat shares center stage with reconstruction, development, and something akin to plain old community policing. Thus to win a political war is place clean drinking water, 24/7 electrical power and plentiful food and health care on the same level with security. Warriors must serve as cops, contractors, city managers, and civil engineers. Of course, combat matters–the enemy is all too real. But these wars are actually won inside of power plants, sewage treatment facilities, courts of law, and schools. In short, soldiers must fight with both swords and plowshares.

A few promises. I’ve learned a lot since my first embed experience, beginning with an increasing disinclination to use the word “I” once in the field. What “I” may think about such and such is far less important than what in fact is happening or what the interviewee h/herself thinks. Next, reporting from the Middle East in particular has recently been pockmarked by instances of reportorial fraud: fake anecdotes, “fauxtography” and the use of local stringers with divided loyalties. I’ve gotten compulsive about sourcing stories: any experience that tends to the dramatic, counterintuitive or controversial will have real names attached, or I won’t run it. If I do source anonymously, I’ll state the reasons why I must do so, and will forgive any reader’s healthy skepticism. Finally, anything running under Afghan Journal will be as free from opinion as I can manage.

I do have a point of view. I am heartily biased against the Taliban and the kind of world to which they would like to return the Afghan people. However, it does not automatically follow that the Coalition or Afghan government, their strategies and tactics, personnel and execution, multinational coordination or relations with the Afghan people are efficient, well managed or wise. Embedded reporting has its limits in a political war–reporters may be at a distance from the objects of that war, the people whose loyalties are at stake. Nevertheless, “Being There” does not automatically render one a Chauncey “Chance” Gardener–there remains plenty to be seen, heard and thus reported.

One last matter. If any of you have any Afghanistan specific questions, feel free to post them as comments to the Afghan Journal. I’ll do my best to answer. Look for posts to begin sometime in early May. 

On 26 February, this column opined (”The Moral Side of War: Hillary’s Jihad Volley”) that Senator Clinton, unable to win the nomination, was determined to wage the kind of primary campaign that would prevent Barack Obama from winning the general election. Her motives might range from personal (if I can’t have it, you’re not going to get it either) to political (I’m only 60 years old and am young enough to run again; thus, I don’t want you to win and potentially hold the White House for eight years.) Either way the aim would be to discredit Obama the same way that John Kerry was discredited in 2004: sufficient damage to preclude his future viability as a national candidate.

Last night’s Pennsylvania primary debate advanced Clinton’s objectives mightily. Unwittingly (or otherwise) ABC hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos devoted the first 45 minutes to focusing on Obama’s negatives. Unfortunately for the would-be secular messiah, he didn’t perform well. Despite taking weeks of pounding about his racist pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the months of stories about his relationship with still-proud ex-SDS bomber Bill Ayres, and the flag-pin-in-the-lapel-flap, Obama’s answers were weak, sometimes contradictory and at times, not even credible. The silver tongue had tarnished.

For Jihad Volley purposes, it didn’t matter that Clinton looked less like the Heroine of Tuzla; all that mattered was that Obama didn’t look like an electable alternative to John McCain.

Today there was the predictable left-wing whining about an issue-free debate or ABC’s unfairness, or that Obama was suffering from the campaigner’s version of battle fatigue. Such complaints, while understandable from those who believe that St. Obama will usher the nation and world into the Age of Aquarius, nevertheless miss the point. Last night was exactly the kind of treatment that the junior–and increasingly, very junior–senator from Illinois can expect in the general election. If you will, analogize it to a soldier’s basic training: if he or she can’t stand the war games on Paris Island, you can bet that things will not go well in real-time combat.

On an unrelated note, I leave for Afghanistan next week, there to be embedded with the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne. I’ll have more to say about that and Afghanistan in general, very soon.

—Richard F. Miller, Military Affairs Correspondent, TRNS

One of the underlying tensions in U.S.-Iraqi relations has been a persistent, public questioning of the extent to which Iraqis, their government or themselves, will stand up for their own defense. Like so many other concerns, this too has a moral premise: the belief that those unwilling to stand up to defend themselves are unworthy of others’ assistance.

Some of this tension has been relieved by the success of the Surge. Yet given the optimism flowing from official sources in the past, few commentators have been willing to pronounce the effort an unqualified success. Indeed, when it comes to matters Iraqi, Americans have learned that all matters must be qualified, at least as we understand things. No better example exists than the wildly differing analysis of Prime Minister Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s efforts in Basra against the Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Did the Iraqi Security Force win, lose or draw? Was Maliki wise to even undertake this mission? Was Maliki in fact working with the Mahdi Army to eliminate dissident elements with in Sadr’s militia? Or was Sadr weakened by what happened? No one can be certain–it’s like “calling” an economic recession: the judgment is made only after, sometimes long after, the event takes place.

In the meantime, the war goes on, especially U.S. efforts to assist with creating a credible Iraqi COIN (counter insurgency) to defeat the enemy it faces: insurgents, not armored divisions.

Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Swanson, Deputy Director, Future Plans and Force Generation, as been working with the Iraqi Ministry of Defense to accomplish exactly that. We interviewed him this morning, and while some it is dry, all of it is worthy listening to, especially those interested in how a COIN force is built.

To listen to Colonel Swanson, go to: www.defenselink.mil/Blogger/Blogger.aspx.

—Richard F. Miller, Military Affairs Correspondent, www.millerrf.com

He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.
‘Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day:
—Henry V, William Shakespeare

As the above suggests, society has always been somewhat tolerant in permitting certain persons to embellish war stories–as long as they were veterans, bore arms honorably, and were actually present at the engagement. After all, few care if a soldier who actually fought his way out of the Bastogne exaggerates the number of enemy he may have killed, the cold temperatures, or the men whose lives he may have saved. And most readers of Henry V believe that the words, “he’ll remember with advantages/What feats he did that day” specifically refer to a right to embellish. Perhaps it’s something that one earns by simply having been there and survived. And actually being a veteran is the only thing that makes such talk acceptable, if not entirely respectable. I’ve known a number of combat journalists, and outside of their reporting, few will personally discuss their own experiences, let alone add to it in some way to pretend to valor. Such folks have seen the real McCoy and wouldn’t think of, to paraphrase a recent author on the subject, “stealing valor.”

However, war fakers seem to come in two varieties: there are younger people wearing ragged, current issue uniforms and whose MOS now includes Winter Soldiering (and turn out to have been either Fobbitts or in drug rehab without having served a day.) And then there are the politicians. Before the internet, there were arguably more such pols, because determining whether somebody served as a Navy SEAL or in the army of the Student Deferred was so much harder than now. Today, a pol is only an internet key stroke away from having his or her career wrecked.

But Hillary, Heroine of Tuzla, has given us something new: she never claimed to have served a day in uniform but there she was with Chelsea on a Bosnian tarmac, ducking sniper fire. You see Bill had to make tough calls as commander-in-chief. And in war, somebody is always expendable. (Hey, FDR did the same thing during WWII: when Colonel Everett F. Carlson’s Second Marine Raider Battalion was ordered to raid Makin Island, the president’s son Jimmy, never physically well, still went ashore. Well, I think it’s the same thing, isn’t it?)

Meanwhile, in an irony that could stand for just how morally corrupt our political leadership has become, when General Petreaus testified before Hillary last fall, she questioned his credibility.Some might call it pure, unmitigated chutzpah.

But I’m much more forgiving. Maybe last week Hillary was just suffering from PTSD.

Or channeling Queen Boudicca.

Today’s Bloggers’ Roundtable featured Major General Robert W. Cone, in charge of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan. [For the full audio of this interview, go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/Blogger/Index.aspx ] His effort there is the same as the anti-terrorist effort everywhere–from Afghanistan to Iraq to the campaign headquarters of Barak Obama: to persuade the locals to stand and fight, support and volunteer for their militaries, inform on the IED emplacers and jihadist cells, in sum, to create the security conditions that will allow economic development to root and grow. As one might infer from MG Cone’s comments, the next six months may tell the tale in Afghanistan. The weather turns warm and the Taliban, unable to operate during Afghanistan’s harsh winter, are expected to gather and fight. This year there will be more and (one hopes) better trained Afghan National Army (ANA) units there to meet, engage and destroy them.

Although only the most naive fools somehow believe that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq will produce “peace,” even such fools are spared that delusion in Afghanistan. The world knows exactly what to expect in the wake of a Taliban victory. During the Taliban’s five years of running Afghanistan, the world was given a preview of the marvels of an Islamic Caliphate: the virtual enslavement of women, a Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge banning of Western technology of any kind, and the minute regulation of its citizens that even a Stalin or Hitler would envy. Multiculturalism is the more easily praised the further it is from one’s own door.

The moral question is this: what is America’s responsibility to a nation that refuses to mount its own defense? Increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan, more effective militaries, police, and private militia groups are being formed to undertake this job. Truly, one of the (many) great tactical mistakes of the Bush administration in waging war in both Iraq and Afghanistan was its naive belief (and the retailing of same to the public) that building an effective foreign army (”to stand up” in current parlance) would take the same amount of time as building a fort from Leggos. Not so.

General Cone is hopeful that this year the ANA, local cops and others will distinguish themselves in killing some bad guys and pacifying others. And given the fact that the under the Taliban, Afghanistan served as a virtual aircraft carrier for launching various jihadis, we can only wish them well.

A note: I will be in Afghanistan for the month of May, and will be blogging daily here under “Afghan Journal.”

Heard this morning from Baghdad and MG Rick Lynch, well-known two star and commander of the 3rd Infantry Division. Talk Radio News Service listeners tired of getting the “If It Bleeds, It Leads” treatment from the Dead Tree Media or Brain Dead Cable Networks can click the link below for the other side of the story, the one that the denizens of the Obama-tank at the New York Times aren’t terribly anxious for you to hear.

General Lynch comments about media coverage, Iranian weapons and agent infiltration into Iraq, as well as the Sons of Iraq program—the real heart of the Surge’s success.

Hey, given a choice between believing the New Republic’s Scott Beauchamp or Rick Lynch, my money’s on the general.

http://www.defenselink.mil/Blogger/Index.aspx

“Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induced him to desert[?]”
—Abraham Lincoln

I was reminded of Lincoln’s exasperation after reading Alan Dershowitz’s “Worshippers of Death” in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Dershowitz quotes a Lebanese mother whose aspirations for her children do not include medical school, teaching, business success or even winning a Nobel Prize. “[I]f you’re not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs,” she advised her son, “then I don’t want you.”

This Mom’s advice–obviously taken by enough Islamists to create jaw-dropping suicide attacks from Bali to New York–has the effect of turning the various Geneva Conventions governing warfare against civilians on their respective heads. Here I’m thinking specifically of the 1949 “Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War,” a product of World War II’s atrocities against civilians. If human beings ever needed evidence that man’s fallen condition is not limited to Islamists then consider the toll that began with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 until the the nuclear bomb concluded the homicidal festivities in 1945: Axis powers Germans, Italians, and Japanese, the collaborationist populations of Western and Eastern Europe, some allied air raids targeting German and Japanese civilians, Stalin’s treatment of occupied populations—the list goes on. And in 1949 the world thought it recognized the bright line that separated “soldier” from “civilian.” (more…)