Ann Marlowe

originally published in the New York Post 2/14/2010

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/soldier_story_BuPwxrlCouHPi3odiNwuHK

It’s a very difficult moral dilemma, to weigh the life of a young man of great promise against the chance of Afghan children to go to school and gain the chance of entrée to a larger world than their poor farming villages.

But an outstanding 28-year-old Army officer, Captain Daniel P. Whitten of Grimes, Iowa, beloved husband, son and brother, chose to put his life in this balance.

He was killed by an improvised explosive device on Feb. 2 in Zabul Province, Afghanistan.

I met Dan in late November 2009 while embedded with the military in Zabul, where he lead Charlie Company of the 508th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division. For three days, I trailed Dan and some of his subordinates as they prepared for an air assault on a dusty Ghazni town, Faisabad.

Dan was full of good humor and vitality, and seemed to relish almost every aspect of his job. It wasn?t an easy one ? commanding a company of 120 paratroopers spread out over four remote combat outposts, many hours drive from other American bases. In my time with Dan?s men, I stayed at a forward operating base called Nawbahar, which was a 19th century British mud brick fort out of the movies. There was no running water, just a well; no toilets, just burn bags; and the paratroopers slept in extremely cramped quarters. Yet they enjoyed their life.

Something civilians often don?t understand ? and I didn?t until I did embeds ? is that a lot of men in their twenties enjoy living in rough conditions in the middle of nowhere, as long as they are given responsibility and have the sense that they are doing meaningful work. Dan seemed to me to have found a calling ideally suited to his temperament; he seemed sure of his purpose in a way few of us are, especially so young.

Dan was special, even among the high caliber of officers I knew from the 82nd Airborne, almost all of whom are Army Rangers. Tall, big-boned and handsome, he had the West Pointer?s confidence and the ideal American officer?s ability to put others first. He had already earned two Bronze Stars for his efforts. Yet when it came time to edit my article, I realized I had far more material on Dan?s subordinates than him. That was as he?d intended.

Dan was kind and witty and socially at ease, and remembered everything I told him. We?d talked about my writing on Afghan archeology, and so, in the helicopter that took us back from Faisabad, he drew my attention to a mysterious large tower he had passed on previous trips. I could tell at once that it was very old. This tower isn?t known to Afghan archeologists: Dan?s sharp eyes and intellectual curiousity may have made a discovery.

According to Capt. Derrick B. Hernandez of the 1-508, Dan and his men had finished a three-day operation on the Ghazni Province border when his Humvee struck an IED that wounded one of his men.

?Dan then jumped into another vehicle and recovered his original vehicle. Seven kilometers later, his truck again struck another IED, this one instantly killing Dan and Pfc. Zachary Lovejoy and seriously wounding three others.?

Dan died doing work that had meaning to him. As Derrick pointed out in a speech he gave at Dan?s memorial in Zabul, Dan could have had any assignment he wanted. He chose to return with 1-508 to one of the most remote and insecure places in Afghanistan.

On his first Afgthan deployment Dan was aide-de-camp to Major Gen. Joe Votel, and was marked for a bright future. Gen. David Petraeus was among those at Dan?s funeral in a packed Cadet Chapel this Friday at West Point, Votel said Dan had the ability to ?make the unbearable bearable.? Unfortunately no one was around to do that on Friday.

I don?t know how many people in Southern Afghanistan appreciate what our military are doing over there; some mutter that the US is in Afghanistan because we want their land. What?s certain is that it?s only in areas with an American presence that government schools are operating in Zabul.

Dan knew there was a significant risk that he would be killed more or less at random, without the chance to meet his enemies in a fair fight. He was murdered by evil men who literally want to keep the people of Afghanistan in the Dark Ages.

We have lost 696 men like Dan in Afghanistan. I would suggest that one way to honor them is not to enter into negotiations with his murderers, or to give Afghanistan back to them.

originally published in The Wall Street Journal, 2/4/2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703389004575033222236113024.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

We are rapidly lurching toward disaster in Afghanistan. We’re on the brink of losing the country, not to mention the lives of some of our finest young men and women.

Between the spring of 2002 and 2006, I saw nothing but progress. Afghanistan never would be Switzerland, but it was on the road to becoming a normal developing country.

But from last year to this, we have made the wrong choice at a number of junctions.

First, we allowed a fraudulent election to occur. Worse, we allowed Abdullah Abdullah to think we did not back his candidacy, pushing him to withdraw from the runoff he had earned. Under Mr. Abdullah, Afghanistan would have had a chance for a fresh start.

Many said that Mr. Abdullah, as a non-Pashtun, couldn’t rule Afghanistan. Well, they used to say a non-Sunni couldn’t rule Iraq. Non-Pashtuns are 60% of the Afghan people. It’s time one of them had a chance to rule.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama claimed, “We will reward good governance, reduce corruption, and support the rights of all Afghans—men and women alike.” Starting when?

A second mistake was when Mr. Obama decided that sending more troops was the answer but spent little time figuring out what these troops were supposed to do. Are security problems best addressed through military action, or could we accomplish more with tribal leverage and improved governance? This remains unexplored.

A third problem is that the timetable laid out by Mr. Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal ignores the clear unreadiness of the Afghan National Army (ANA) to take over security responsibilities. The commanders I’ve talked with in Southern Afghanistan estimate that it will take at least three years for the ANA to fly solo, and longer for the police. So why is Mr. Obama still referring to July 2011 as the date the ANA can take over?

A fourth mistake: Last week, we caved in to the Pakistanis yet again. We pledged to give them aid and even drones, even as they say they’re not mounting any more assaults on the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas this year.

Fifth, and worst, Gen. McChrystal seems to be doing his best to hearten the insurgency and dismay Afghan progressives. Our commanding general told the Financial Times last week that the point of the surge was to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, rather than clearing and holding insurgent-ridden areas of Afghanistan.

Gen. McChrystal gets it wrong on other issues. He envisions Pakistan—a country that provides sanctuary to the Taliban—as a facilitator of talks, though most Afghans believe Pakistan is trying to destabilize their country. He imagines the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia—both the source of dubious charities that fund the insurgency—as venues for the talks. And he remarks that insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is “most likely to cut a deal,” noting that he is a “former prime minister.”

Hekmatyar is better known as a psychopath who began his political career by throwing acid in the faces of female students when he attended Kabul University in the 1970s. He’s on our list of international terrorists and should be captured or killed—not negotiated with.

Happily, some officials see the situation for what it is, as shown by the recently leaked November cables from U.S. Ambassador (and retired Lt. Gen.) Karl Eikenberry to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his Nov. 6 and 10 cables, Mr. Eikenberry wrote: “More troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain.” I was told in November by Lt. Col. Dave Oclander, a battalion commander of the 82nd Airborne in Zabul province, that about a third of the insurgents are in Pakistan on R&R at any given time—a luxury our troops and the ANA don’t have.

The ambassador suggested that the administration invest in development (electricity, water and education) and governance, since they are a direct path to stabilizing the country. He deplored “further militarization of our effort, instead of civilianization and Afghanization which are our real aims.”

When the American Embassy requested $2.5 billion for the budget for development and governance last summer, the request was rejected. But the surge will cost perhaps 10 or 20 times that much annually, without building a government Afghans can trust. Why should we send 30,000 more Americans to hand over the country to its worst elements?

originally published in Forbes.com, 12/24/2009

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/23/avatar-neo-con-military-opinions-contributors-ann-marlowe.html

James Cameron’s new sci-fi film Avatar is exhilarating fun in the darkest days at the end of a depressing year, but it also says quite a lot, in an inchoate, American way, about the cultural moment. You should see it especially if you are “right of center” or conservative. Forget the sneering reviews–this is the most neo-con movie of 2009, or perhaps ever, because it illustrates, rather than argues, the point we neo-cons made in Iraq: that American blood is not worth more than the blood of others, and that others’ freedom is not worth less than American freedom.

How universal are the values we Americans cherish? Avatar says they are completely universal–extending to another planet called Pandora. What is the responsibility of an American and how far does it reach? Avatar says, again, across the universe. Are we all brothers and sisters under the skin? Avatar answers yes, in the most concrete way, when protagonist Jake Sully decides to enter his Na’vi body permanently and stay on Pandora rather than returning to Earth.

Like the election of a black man as president of the United States, and like its great precursor Bladerunner, Avatar presents a physical answer to a philosophical question. Barack Obama’s election was seen by many, both Democrat and Republican, as a way of bringing the American conflict over race to an end. (Of course it couldn’t do this, no matter what you think of Obama–and I think very little.) Bladerunner was an attempt to cover some of the same ground, asking who is human in the context of an “ersatz” race hounded by bounty hunters.

Avatar makes a similar move, but a contextually smarter one, offering us a bigger, better race to decide to join or not. Jake’s metamorphosis gives flesh to what in our world must remain a metaphor. “I want you to learn these savages from the inside out,” the tough former recon Marine Colonel tells Jake. And the metaphor–entering the skin of another–couldn’t be timelier, or for that matter more appropriate to the Christmas season. Much blood was spilled in centuries past about what happened in the transubstantiation of the Catholic mass. Though Avatar has been charged with “pantheism” its mythos is just as deeply Christian.

I should say that I had my doubts going in. Avatar sounded anti-military. Advance reviews were sloppy–Roger Ebert, for example, said “we … send in the military to attack and conquer them. Gung-ho Marines employ machine guns and pilot armored hover ships on bombing runs.” Who’s the “we”? The movie is clear on the fact that a mining company employing mercenaries is the one doing the attacking. Jake Sully is a former Marine, now working as a security contractor on Pandora. But perhaps Ebert didn’t notice the uniforms of the mercenaries on Pandora aren’t U.S. Army uniforms, that the “colonel” doesn’t wear the appropriate insignia, and that the men aren’t all in uniform anyway.

Avatar is actually both pro- and anti-military, but in an insider’s way. Even the scenes that raise some reviewers’ hackles as the most gooey, where the Na’vi gather in circles around a sacred tree and plug their braids into its roots, read to me as a metaphor for the networked military. Speaking of which, Avatar gets the look and mood of military environments just right. Everything from the unapologetically claustrophobic space travel and avatar-driving pods to the laconically witty banter rings true to what I’ve seen on five embeds in Afghanistan and various bases here.

Some reviews make Avatar sound like a wimpy pacifist fantasy. To the contrary, I think it’s the kind of movie men who’ve gone through Ranger training will love. The movie’s Na’vi people are devoted to hunting and feats of physical daring, like, say, the Maori of New Zealand before European contact. I loved the footage of the Na’vi running, flying and jumping through the forest for the same reasons I loved the parkours-inspired chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale.

More interestingly, Avatar struck me as the bubbling up of our military subconscious. There is the wish to be free of all the paperwork and risk aversion of the modern Army–much more fun to fly, unarmored, on a winged beast! What civilians often don’t realize is that your average captain or major isn’t upset about the possibility of getting hurt or killed so much as he or she is upset about spending 15 hours a day in a tactical operations center, staring at screens.

There is also the wish to be on the easy side, the insurgents’ side, which is an understandable reaction to the deadly slog of counterinsurgency. The OAS (Organisation de l’Armee Secrete)–the short-lived French terrorist organization that opposed France’s abandonment of Algeria–was full of French army officers who had taught and written guerre revolutionaire theory. They turned from analyzing how to defeat terrorists to becoming terrorists themselves–much as if Petraeus’s brain trust decided to overthrow the U.S. government. Avatar makes the conceptual leap easier because Jake works for a private company, not the American government. Perhaps it is only me, but doesn’t the wintry ash of the destroyed sacred tree call to mind the aftermath of Sept. 11? And doesn’t the image of the helicopters dwarfed by the huge tree evoke the attacks?

Conservatives are scornful of the environmentalism of Avatar. But the so-called extremism reflects American laws in force nearly a century, which prohibit destruction of sacred Native American sites or the territory of threatened fauna. And since when is flattening nature a conservative position, anyway? Are we supposed to be “against” nature just because lefties are “for” it?

When it comes to the environment, the Republican party has turned its back on its heritage in a particularly disastrous way. Does anyone remember that five of our National Parks were founded by a Republican president who also passed the Antiquities Act that was used to preserve Indian monuments? And would today’s Republican leadership nominate Teddy Roosevelt, a Harvard-educated scholar, hunter and explorer who campaigned on the promise of “a square deal” for Americans?

Ross Douhat attacked Avatar in The New York Times for being “pantheistic”–which seems deliciously irrelevant, as though he were writing in the waning days of the Roman Empire. For Douhat, pantheism is an abandonment of our “tragic self-consciousness”– nevermind that the folks who gave us the word and the concept of tragedy, the ancient Greeks, were pantheists of a sort. Or that the boughs of holly and Christmas trees in many of our houses are one of the survivals of ancient European pantheism in today’s Christian practice. Besides, in the film’s Na’vi context, pantheism is rational. The Na’vis’ bodies literally tap into the flora and fauna of their world. And as an agnostic who doesn’t have a dog in this fight, I have to say, what our world needs now is less fundamentalist monotheism and more pantheism.

Reihan Salam condemned Avatar in Forbes as anticapitalist and against innovation, which strikes me as equivalent to saying The Philadelphia Story is against thrift. Lighten up–it’s a fantasy. And since the Na’vi seem to have found a way to defeat death in some cases, and send data using their minds, intergenerationally, it’s not clear they need to take lessons from us in technology. What’s interesting is why Salam feels so threatened by the noncapitalist Na’vi as opposed to other fantasy races on screen.

The right-wing attacks on Avatar show a frightening tone-deafness to what most Americans find inspiring, cool or exciting–the same tone-deafness expressed by the tired visuals of the McCain campaign and Web site and the tired dogmas that substitute for a Republican vision. We on the right have lost sight of the fact that politics is as emotional as intellectual. The theater I saw the movie at for the second time was sold out at 10:30 p.m. on a freezing Tuesday night, at $16.50 a pop, because Avatar shows a man standing up for what is right, a quintessential American act, in a context of beauty and wonder. Conservatives need to take the measure of this movie’s appeal, not deny it.