The fall of Kunduz is no surprise

The Taliban's taking of the northern Afghan city of Kunduz is not surprising. As I wrote in Above the Din of War, the Taliban has controlled 75 percent of the country since 2009.

While no one wants to report it, the government has had only a marginal control of the major urban areas.

In my extensive interviews with Afghans, their frustration with US and NATO forces was loud and clear.

Why, they asked, can't the combined forces of the world's most powerful countries defeat the untrained, ill equipped, ragtag Taliban? They concluded that these foreign forces didn't want to, and preferred to keep the country in a constant state of war.

But the answer was even more simple. The US took it's eye off the ball back in 2003 and invaded Iraq, stayed for a decade, and accomplished nothing but completely destabilizing the Middle East.

Back in Afghanistan, the Taliban regrouped and came back. They were also able to take advantage of most Afghans' disgust with a grossly corrupt government lorded over by Hamid Karzai, who with his friends and family, drained the country dry.

The Taliban is now flexing their muscles.

This will be the theme during the coming years until they finally overwhelm an Afghan government that few like or respect. Afghanistan will eventually be fragmented much like it was prior to the US invasion.

I argued in my book that the focus on Afghanistan has been on the military, not development of the civilian side.

Everyone looks at the military to win, stabilize, or whatever.

Meanwhile, Afghans wonder what happened to the billions (trillions?) of dollars spent there over the past 14 years. Their lives have not improved.

They're victims of endless attacks from both sides, truly caught in the middle. Many argue that if "peace" means getting rid of the US and a return of the Taliban, they'd prefer that to the current situation. I don't blame them. At present, they have little to look forward to but more bloody war.

More western troops isn't going to change that.

If the west focused more on improving the economy and lives of average Afghans, rather than more soldiers and weapons, Afghans would feel very differently.

The bottom line is that you can't win a war without the support of the local populace. The policy makers and the military know this, but aren't doing anything about it.

That's why I find it hard to argue with Afghans who think the west only wants endless war. America fights wars. Sadly, anything else is secondary.

Kony and the LRA: Truth, Lies, and All the Rest

Ugandan authorities think they've found the remains of Okot Odhiambo, one of the most ruthless deputies of Joseph Kony's army of child soldier, the Lord's Resistance Army.

Odhiambo is rumored by the Ugandan army to have been killed or died about a year ago. But like Odhiambo's former comrade-in-arms, Vincent Otti, neither Otti's nor Odhiambo's remains have been found or identified.

While the news may be a step toward the elimination of Kony and his horde, the news has to be viewed with skepticism.

This kind of news from the Ugandan army is designed so that Kony's name does not fade from the pages of international news for more than a month or two. That the news emanates from the Ugandan army gives the impression that the Ugandan army is on top of the situation. It's not.

The recent French Press Agency story on the Odhiambo discovery quotes a Ugandan defense/military official saying that Kony is on the run and moments away from capture--something the Ugandan government has been saying for two decades.

"It will not be a surprise that he (Odhiambo) could be dead, because the UPDF [Ugandan army] has in the past killed many top LRA commanders and he cannot be an exception," Defense Minister Crispus Kiyonga said last year. "The LRA's strength has diminished and the remaining force, including Kony, are on the run."

These kind of statements are wishful thinking. Similar rumors were spread about ten years ago, about the time my book, First Kill Your Family, was published. Military leaders who were supposedly fighting Kony claimed that each of Kony's devastating counter-attacks were nothing more than the "final kicks of dying horse." The horse was not dying and the kicks were not final.

Some of those old rumors concerned Dominic Ongwen, who at one time was reportedly captured and/or killed when his unit of the LRA had lingered in northern Uganda after Kony and Otti had decamped to the Garamba National Park in northern Democractic Republic of the Congo.

Today we know that Ongwen, known as the "White Ant," is where he belongs in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.

How Ongwen ended up there illustrates the convoluted mis- and dis-information about the LRA.

Initial reports suggested that Ongwen had been captured by the U.S. Special Forces backing the Ugandans who are tracking the LRA through the jungles of Central African Republic. In fact, Ongwen surrendered  after a 30-minute firefight to the Christian militia Seleka rebels who had and have been fighting in the CAR.

The Seleka rebels turned him over to the U.S. Special Forces and demanded the $5 million reward that had been offered for Ongwen's capture.

"I did not want to die in the bush, so I decided to follow the right path and listen to the calling of the ICC," said Ongwen, in the Acholi language on a video taken by the Ugandan army, according to reports.

In Dominic's own words, he did not want to die in the bush. Many others who have defected from the LRA have said the same thing. They're tired of running. That's not the same thing as saying they're afraid of the Ugandan army and certainly not any goofy programs orchestrated by U.S-based "humanitarian" groups.

They're just tired.

Given the choice between  a life of endless scavenging in the bush and living in an apartment in The Hague, Ongwen chose the apartment.  He knows the ICC won't kill him, no matter how many people he killed or ordered killed and watched while they died horrible deaths.

But he knows that Kony would eventually kill him, as Kony reportedly did with Otti. Ongwen was not humane, but the court would be. Ongwen knew that.

With the desertion/surrender of Ongwen, it's been interesting to see who's lined up to take credit.

Of course the Ugandan military is first in line, even though Kony still fights as he has since 1985, when the earliest incarnations of what became the LRA battled the Ugandan army of President Yoweri Museveni. Museveni has been unable to stop Kony since 1985. Why could he succeed now?

Next to take credit has been the international community, starting with the U.S. government. It's been quickly followed by the international humanitarian community.

As I wrote in First Kill Your Family, the only way Kony will be defeated is when and if he decides to give himself up--or if and when he's killed. Kony is a self-professed prophet and militia leader. He knows only one life -- killing, plunder, and abduction. He won't change because he can't.

He won't come out of the bush because he fears he'll be killed. And the Ugandans won't go after him because they fear Kony's mystical powers. Kony lives, and for the time being, that won't change.

What and why we write

The title caught me. It contained the word international, as in International Blog Hop.

It came via writers I know only through Facebook, such as JD Rhoades and Elizabeth Lynn Casey aka Laura Bradford.

Blog about writing and pass the pen. No Bogarting allowed.

I like the international thing. I spent 10 years knocking around largely forgotten, yet unforgettable corners of world, like Albania, Slovenia, Moldova, Armenia, Afghanistan, Uganda, the Congo, South Sudan, and Somalia, with a pit stop in Zanzibar and a trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro.

(My wife Dina finally said I had to unpack that carry-on I kept next to the bed. I didn't grumble much.)

Staring at this blank screen, I thought of the writers and journalists I've worked with in far-flung places. They're fearless scribes who face unimaginable difficulties -- the ever-present threat of being killed for broadcasting or writing the wrong thing (aka the truth) about a maniacal president or warlord.

Here in the U.S. the biggest problems are Internet speed, occasional heartburn, and too many choices.

Yet, these writers had a refined sense of beauty and art, and an appreciation of the time it takes to create it -- notions lost in our headlong rush into the digital age.

So....

1) What am I working on?

Fiction. After six books of narrative nonfiction, I've conceded that Americans don't care much for what happens in the next county, let alone on another continent. It's an unfortunate fact even if we have 100,000 troops in a country for more than a decade to fight a nebulous "war on terror."

Never mind that we don't know who the enemy is, what language they speak, or why they hate us.

For international issues to find a place in the American psyche demands delivery by mythological creatures known as super agents. They're typically misfit ex-CIA-turned-contractors or rogues brought back from obscure locales like Uruguay or Monte Negro for one last chance. (Normal people don't live and work in places like that, do they?)

They often have special knowledge and experience of the countries or regions, even if only bits and pieces of that are revealed. No matter, though. They're really good at knocking off the bad guys, who are always potent and plentiful.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Other than it brings to light global tragedies that compel reconsideration of our role in the world, which no one wants to do?

With my fiction foray, I've deviated from the cop/agent as the central character and substituted a journalist. (Write about something I know, right?) But journalists don't carry guns, even though they're good at digging up dirt and getting into trouble. So, my guy's got a special agent friend with weapons and he knows how to use them.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Nothing is more satisfying than going into a global hot zone, and getting paid to do so, then emerging with the story-behind-the-story. But enough of that. My move toward fiction is explained above.

4) How does my writing process work?

Nonfiction requires organization and preparation: detailed book proposals and sample chapters. Not a lot is left to the imagination, but manuscripts are malleable. Chapters are whacked and others added. Then there's the logistics of finding contacts and meeting sources. I've had the luxury of working in places and at jobs that afforded me time to develop the books on the side. But not always.

For fiction, I like three things: an issue/theme, a beginning, and an end. The rest happens at the keyboard. I start in the morning and don't quit until I have at least 1,000 words. By then I can usually hear a glass of Cabernet calling my name.

We'll see soon enough how the process works, though. My agent specializes in nonfiction. She flinched when I told her I was working on fiction. There's always Amazon.

The nightmare of the Navajo

Twenty years ago I was asked by a remarkable man named Michael O'Shaughnessy and his wife Marianne if I would write a book about the devastation caused by uranium mining on the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners Area.

I was thrilled at the prospect. At the time I had been working as a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper covering the battle to bury so-called low-level radioactive waste in underground salt beds near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The stuff to be buried was the contaminated debris -- tools, gloves, beakers, etc -- used by the plutonium handlers in America's nuclear weapons factories.

(The controversy surrounding that project, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), is far from over since now the site, just as many opponents feared, is being mentioned as a burial site for high-level radioactive waste.)

The story of the Navajo uranium miners was a compelling aspect of the same story. With the waste burial project, I had been writing about the end-game of America's Cold War nuclear arsenal. The Navajo people and their lands told of the front end, the source of of America's Cold War weaponry.

I researched and wrote the book on the fly, making frequent trips to the reservation to meet with former Navajo uranium miners who were dying of lung cancer. They lived in all corners of the reservation, in communities that were left with contaminated water supplies and piles of  uranium ore and processed waste.

I visited one family that had used the chunks of discarded uranium to build a house. It had exposed the family and others similarly situated to constant bombardment by low levels of radiation, the effects of which are only now becoming apparent.

I visited dozens of abandoned mine sites, which was easy to do. There were more than 1,000 on the reservation due to its unique geography that had left the Navajos sitting on rich deposits of uranium that were critical to America's nuclear arsenal.

Most mines were small. They called them "dog holes." They'd been dug by crews of miners who worked with picks, shovels and wheel barrows, loaded the ore in trucks, and drove it to one of the processing plants built on the reservation.

Some were bigger mines, but the techniques and tools were the same. The uranium was found in horizontal layers of sandstone, which cracked and crumbled easily with dynamite. Eager to earn profits quickly, the miners often scrambled into the mines shortly after the blasts and inhaled choking clouds of dust laden with silica and uranium.

The silica from the sandstone lacerated the miners' lungs and left deadly particles of uranium lodged in the delicate tissues. Some miners died within years. Others died after decades of dwindling health.

The Navajo uranium miners knew nothing of the dangers they faced, since few spoke English. Their ancient language lacked a word for radiation. Yet the government was well aware that the miners were in trouble. But rather than insuring miner safety, the government conducted a secret study that charted the deteriorating health of the miners. It was a well documented death watch.

Despite the destruction of environment and the death and health problems caused by the uranium mining, little was or has been done to rectify these problems. Two massive lawsuits filed on behalf of the Navajos by former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, resulted in no award of damages or cleanup.

The major mining companies were not held responsible because the Navajo miners had not filed their worker compensation claims in time. The government was excused when a federal judge ruled that in times of national emergency, such as the Cold War, certain people were expendable.

The only relief came in 1993 when the U.S. Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provided one-time payments of $100,000 to stricken miners or their surviving families. Qualifying for the compensation was yet another nightmare for the Navajos.

The results of my work became the 1994 book, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans, published by Red Crane Books, the publishing company that the O'Shaughnessys created. The company's amazing book list was ultimately turned over to the Museum of New Mexico Press.

The story of the Navajo and uranium is far from over, however. As was once again made clear in an article this past week in the New York Times, the uranium and radioactive pollution continues to plague the Navajo. Rather than cleaning up the mess, the U.S. government is now moving the Navajos off of their land.

This situation on the Navajo lands is undoubtedly one of the darkest chapters of U.S. history. It is an on-going human and environmental disaster that neither the public nor the government wishes to acknowledge.

It is absurd that these original Americans have been subjected to such an on-going horror. As the government drags its feet, refusing to face the problem, the radioactive pollution continues to creep across the Navajo lands and leach into the ground water.

This nightmare began in the mid-1950s, nearly 65 years ago. Several generations of Navajos have suffered, and many more will as well. When will the nightmare end?

The deafening silence

Yesterday evening I was a guest at KGNU, a community radio station in Boulder, CO. The talk show topic was Afghanistan, where the U.S. has fought its longest war.

With me on the show by phone was Noor, an Afghan law student who worked with me as a fixer and translator for my book, Above the Din of War, a collection of wide-ranging interviews with Afghans about how they see their lives, their country, and their future.

Their view is bleak, and rightly so.

I wrote the book because the Afghan people are the most important, yet most ignored piece of the Afghan puzzle. Yet their views, their wants, and their needs are ignored as the debate over Afghanistan flares and fades from day to day.

It is as if 30 million or so Afghans don't exist. Yet, they have suffered the brunt of nearly 13 years of war that the U.S. and the international community have waged in a futile effort to defeat the Taliban.

Afghanistan is slowly but surely disintegrating. As the U.S. and international community prepare to decamp, President Hamid Karzai flails and wails and his corrupted and disconnected government crumbles.

The U.S. is on a trajectory to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. It is not only a strategic and diplomatic mistake on a monumental scale, it also will open the door to a humanitarian disaster that will make Afghanistan's horrific civil war of the early 1990s look tame.

This became clear as Noor told the tragic tale of one of his best friends who died at the hands of the Taliban. The radio host had asked why, if most Afghans hate the Taliban, don't they rise up against them?

Noor explained that his friend had worked for one of the many private security firms operating in Afghanistan that collect exorbitant fees to protect people and materiel vital to the war.

When a relative died in Kabul, his friend's family took the body to be buried in their home village in Paktia province, one of the most deadly and dangerous for U.S. and Afghan forces. Paktia is on the border with Pakistan and in the rugged mountains where the Taliban holds sway.

When the Taliban learned that Noor's friend was in the village for the burial, they beheaded him. He was accused of being traitor and spy because he had worked for an international security company that supported the war against the Taliban.

The village was horrified, but crippled with fear and helpless to fight back, Noor explained. The villagers lacked the weapons, supplies, and men to resist the Taliban. The Afghan army unit in the area only sporadically fought the Taliban there and spent most of its time in a secured compound. The village was at the mercy of the Taliban.

No one in the village knew who the Taliban were, Noor said, since they were not locals and spoke a foreign dialect of the Pashtun language. The Taliban traveled freely across the border into Pakistan where they were supplied and armed. The local villagers were defenseless.

His friend's family was left destitute. His friend's widow and children now beg on the street and rely on handouts from friends and relatives.

This story illustrates what can and will happen many thousands of times over as U.S. and international forces complete the Afghan draw-down.

Noor is one of the lucky ones. He recently obtained a visa that will allow him to live in the U.S. and he stays in daily contact with his family and friends in Kabul. Everyone there is preparing for the worst, he said. Many are making arrangements to flee the country.

Meanwhile, the White House and the Pentagon tell the American public that the Afghan army can handle things, that a new president will be elected in April, and that all is well. Mission accomplished.

Sadly, the only accomplishment will be leaving Afghanistan in worse shape then when we arrived, a country edging toward civil war with tens of thousands of lives at risk.

When it came time for the call-in portion of the show, the station phones were silent. It was not surprising.  America grew tired of the war in Afghanistan long ago.

Yet, the silence was deafening.  
 

Karzai's desperate moves

It should come as no surprise that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been engaged in supposedly "secret" talks with the Taliban, as reported in today's New York Times.

A survivor, Karzai is desperately trying to save himself, his friends, and his family. And, I doubt that US intelligence was not aware of Karzai's actions. What's fascinating, however, is that Karzai's actions are newsworthy.

As the article points out, these behind-the-scenes talks have produced nothing. One of the reasons that they've been fruitless is that Karzai and the US have had no luck in finding anyone of any substance who truly represents the Taliban's seemingly untouchable leader, Mullah Omar.

But that too, should not come as a surprise. As I wrote in Above the Din of War, one of the Taliban's best games has been to pose impostors as their inside men, people who supposedly have direct access to Mullah Omar.

The funniest one was when US and British intelligence services sent a mission into Pakistan to pick up a man who was said to be a Taliban insider. The man was handed a bag of $100s and whisked into a series of high level meetings with US and Afghan officials.

Though this man did little more than grunt and nod, he was touted as a breakthrough. In the end, however, it was revealed that this man was little more than a Pakistani shopkeeper. His story is the Pakistani version of Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure.

The Taliban is still laughing over that one. But there's more. Take, for instance, the death of the former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the man who Karzai appointed to head up his Peace Council.

After a couple of years of trying, the Taliban sent an envoy to meet with Rabbani, who was kind enough to let the man stay at his home while he was away from Kabul. When Rabbani returned and met with the man, the envoy detonated a bomb hidden in his turban, killing himself and Rabbani.

Hmmm. Could there be a message here?

Then there was the time when Karzai killed talks that the US State Department had arranged with the Taliban in Qatar. In one of the few instances where I have agreed with him, Karzai said no because the Taliban had essentially set up what amounted to an embassy-in-exile in Qatar. The Taliban wanted to conduct talks posing as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Karzai refused.

So, why would Karzai continue to reach out to the Taliban after all of this?

As I've written in earlier posts, Karzai has lost touch with reality. He lives exclusively inside the confines of his fortified palace, yet is able to see the writing on the wall. The Taliban's grip is growing stronger each and every day. It is only a matter of time before their strangle hold on Afghanistan is once again complete.

Karzai knows that when the Taliban takes over again, his life and that of his extended family and associates is over. What can be confiscated of his will be taken by the Taliban. If he escapes alive, he'll be lucky. In an effort to forestall this inevitability, Karzai has reached out to the Taliban.

As the Times points out, this may help explain why Karzai has refused to sign the agreement that would put the US forces inside Afghanistan for another decade. It would also explain why he has so steadfastly insisted on releasing dozens of Taliban prisoners the US has kept locked up in Baghram.

By delaying the signing and ranting against the US, Karzai has foolishly tried to curry favor with the Taliban. Sorry. It won't work.

The cost of corruption

This past week, a US government oversight agency issued a quarterly report on the handling of US aid to Afghanistan that underscores the abject failure of America's longest and perhaps most tragic war.

The report was produced by the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, SIGAR, and its report can be found on-line: http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2014Jan30QR.pdf

Among the reports key findings are:

--USAID contractors assessed 16 Afghan ministries and found they are unable to manage and account for funds; they identified 696 recommendations for corrective action -- 41 percent of them rated "critical" or "high risk."

--USAID's own risk reviews of seven Afghan ministries concluded each ministry is unable to manage U.S. direct assistance funds.  The reviews identified 107 major risks -- 99 of them rated critical or high.

--USAID said it would not award direct assistance dollars to these Afghan ministries "under normal circumstances." USAID waived its own requirements for providing direct assistance funds.

--USAID has not required the Afghan ministries to fix most of the risks identified prior to receiving U.S. money.

--USAID’s assessments revealed a high risk of corruption at the Afghan ministries.

--USAID failed to fully disclose to Congress that none of the ministries it assessed are capable of managing direct assistance funds.

--USAID insisted that SIGAR withhold key information from Congress and the public, even though USAID shared it with the Afghan government.

If one looks beyond the bureaucratic language, it is clear that those in the Afghan government are stealing US funds with wild abandon. USAID knows  it, yet by its own admission, the agency continues to dispense the funds, even against its better judgement and in violation of its own rules!

This might be an argument for an immediate cutoff of funds and a speedy withdrawal. But not so fast.

War time corruption is nothing new. Iraq was rife with corruption and it drove the cost of the war both in Iraq and and Afghanistan to dizzying heights. Corruption in the Afghan government also is not new. In fact, it has been going on for much of 13 years of this war, everyone knows it.

As I wrote in Above the Din of War, the corruption has been so pervasive that the vast majority of Afghans divorced themselves from the government long ago. And along with that estrangement, most Afghans pulled back their support for the US efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Their thinking was quite clear and straight forward. After the initial excitement of a country having been liberated from the oppressive and fundamentalist Taliban regime, the vast majority of Afghans felt their country was on the verge of prosperity and new found freedoms.

Instead of building on that all of this goodwill, the US inexplicably diverted its military and civilian resources to Iraq. This was undoubtedly the worst possible move the US could have made. The decision's dreadful economic impact was such that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal must someday be held accountable.

While the Iraq war was waged, Afghanistan was put on the back burner. Afghanistan's puppet leader, President Hamid Karzai, was left to run the show. He took advantage of the situation by surrounding himself with family and friends who helped themselves to largess of America and the international donors.

America simply looked the other way. But the Afghans did not. They saw the billions of dollars that they had thought would help them and their fellow Afghans recover from decades of war being stolen each and every day by the people the US had put into power.

They were not only Karzai and his pals, but the dozen or so warlords that still control Afghanistan. These former warlords were handed various and sundry ministries much like spoils of war.

The Taliban took advantage of the growing discontent and rampant corruption. They rightly asked their fellow Afghans to once again join them to help root out those who have been corrupted by the westerners and their money and their armies.

Slowly but surely, the Taliban was resurrected and now controls and estimated 80 percent of Afghanistan.

With Karzai refusing to sign a bilateral agreement that would let the US stay in Afghanistan for another decade, the Taliban is salivating. In the coming months, the Taliban knows, it will be able to quickly pounce and again claim Afghanistan, having driven the corrupted westerners from their land.

But the US cannot and should not let that happen. As I wrote in earlier columns, there is too much at stake to be lost, not only in Afghanistan and the region, but at home and around the world.