Op-Ed Contributor: Finally, a Fighting Force

 

None of the killers seem to have been Taliban infiltrators, but that alone is not terribly reassuring. The United States’ exit strategy for the war in Afghanistan depends largely on the performance, competence and trustworthiness of the Afghan security forces, and critics of the mission view such episodes as evidence that the Afghan forces are generally unreliable — ineffectual in combat and too often unmotivated, erratic or corrupt. The issue looms over President Obama’s decision about troop reductions in Afghanistan, which he is expected to announce by July.

But there is reason to be hopeful. I was in Helmand Province last week, traveling with Gen. James F. Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, and despite the recent setbacks and other problems, my impression of today’s Afghan security forces was encouraging.

?Helmand Province, for years a Taliban stronghold, has in the past year or so seen remarkable progress. Almost all of the populated parts of the province are now under the control of the Afghan government and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

The region is not completely safe, to be sure. But most major roads are serviceable, and government officials now generally use them instead of NATO helicopters to get around. Markets are open; schools have increased almost 50 percent in number since late 2009; twice as many Afghan officials work in local governments as did a year ago; and poppy production is down.

?The even better news is that Afghan forces deserve an increasingly large share of the credit. The message from the Marines and British soldiers I spoke to in the province was one of growing appreciation for the skills and fighting spirit of Afghan soldiers and police officers.

Last year in southern Afghanistan, Afghans made up about half of all the combined forces used to clear the region of most Taliban weapons caches and strongholds. According to the International Security Assistance Force, roughly two-thirds of all Afghan Army battalions nationwide now score at least a 3 on a military-readiness scale from 1 to 5, meaning that while they still require outside help, they are quite effective when conducting missions with NATO troops.

Police and army pay is now adequate by national standards, and local recruiting goals for the Afghan Army and police in Helmand Province have been largely met this spring for the first time since the war began. Desertion rates are still too high, and Afghan troops too often overstay their military leaves, but the trends point in the right direction.

?During my travels, several Marine officers who also had experience in Iraq told me that Afghan police officers and soldiers were better fighters than their Iraqi counterparts. Routinely, in towns like Musa Qala that are still tense, Afghans provide half the personnel on most foot patrols — and I was told that they do not shrink from fighting when they run into trouble.

I heard many anecdotes that spoke to the growing effectiveness of the Afghan forces. Recently, for instance, in the town of Marja, intelligence indicated the presence of Taliban forces in the vicinity. An Afghan unit responsible for that sector leaped into action. A few hours later it returned with Taliban captives.

The unit’s American partners told me that they would have preferred more of a plan — the Afghan forces were somewhat reckless in their response. But the important point was that the Afghans did not avoid combat or expect NATO soldiers to do their fighting for them.

Does this mean the United States should prepare for an immediate drawdown of troops?

No. What I saw and heard in Helmand Province supports the exit strategy — but not for this summer or fall.

An American commander told me that in his estimation, after an area is first cleared of the Taliban, NATO can substantially draw down its forces there 24 to 30 months later. That gives NATO enough time to recruit and train Afghan Army and police units, allows Afghan citizens to gain confidence that the Taliban is not coming back and gives the civilian government a chance to get off the ground. The time frame implies significantly reduced NATO forces in southern Afghanistan by next year.

In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, many Americans have argued that the country should cut its losses in Afghanistan and bring our troops home. But while the United States does need a better political and diplomatic strategy for the mission (in particular, for dealing with Kabul and Islamabad), this is not the time to jettison a military strategy that has finally hit its stride.

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man

  THE TEAM LEADER Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, on patrol in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, 2010.

Last May, in the small village of Qualaday in western Kandahar Province, a young Army lieutenant and his sergeants met with several elders to discuss the recent killing of a local mullah. The desert heat was fierce, and the elders led the soldiers across their village to sit under the shade of nearby trees. Three days had passed since they were last there; during that interval the place appeared to have been abandoned. When they sat down, some of the soldiers removed their helmets, and a few elders their sandals and turbans. A freelance photographer was permitted to make an audio recording of the discussion. The lieutenant wanted to know where everyone had gone. One elder explained: People left because they were afraid.

THE INVESTIGATION Soldiers with the Third Platoon speak with Afghan elders about the death of Mullah Allah Dad. Staff Sergeant Gibbs is seated against the wall.

“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his legs and badly disfigured his face. The soldiers claimed that Allah Dad was trying to throw a grenade at them. Two days after the killing, however, a company commander attended a council during which the district leader announced that people believed the incident had been staged and that the Americans had planted the grenade in order to justify a murder.

“Tell them it’s important that not only the people in this village know, but the people in surrounding villages know, that this guy was shot because he took an aggressive action against coalition forces,” the lieutenant told his interpreter. “We didn’t just [expletive] come over and just shoot him randomly. We don’t do that.”

Last month, in a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., 22-year-old Jeremy Morlock confessed to participating in the premeditated murder of Mullah Allah Dad, as well as the murders of two other Afghan civilians. In exchange for his agreement to testify against four other soldiers charged in the crimes, including the supposed ringleader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the government reduced Morlock’s mandatory life sentence to 24 years, with the possibility of parole after approximately 8. The rest of the accused, who are still awaiting trial, contest the allegations against them.

The story that has been told so far — by Morlock in his confession and by various publications that relied heavily on the more sensational accusations from interviews hastily conducted by Army special agents in Afghanistan — is a fairly straightforward one: a sociopath joined the platoon and persuaded a handful of impressionable subordinates to join him in sport killing as opportunities arose. There may indeed be truth to this, though several soldiers in the platoon give a more complicated account. Certainly it’s a useful narrative, strategically and psychologically, for various parties trying to make sense of the murders — parents at a loss to explain their sons’ involvement and lawyers advocating their clients’ innocence and a military invested in a version of events that contains and cauterizes the problem.

On the day of Jeremy Morlock’s confession, I watched as several of his friends and relatives took the stand to vouch movingly for his character and struggle to fathom how the young man they knew could have committed the crimes to which he confessed. I watched, too, as Morlock himself recounted his failed ambition to follow in the footsteps of his father, a former master sergeant who died in a boating accident not long before Morlock deployed. “If he had been alive when I went to Afghanistan,” Morlock told the judge, “I know that would have made a difference. . . . I realize now that I wasn’t fully prepared for the reality of war as it was being fought in Afghanistan.”

Among the witnesses who testified that day was Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociologist who specializes in war crimes. Mestrovic was allowed to study an internal 500-page inquiry into the Fifth Stryker Brigade’s “command climate,” the purpose of which was to assess whether shortcomings in leadership might be partly to blame for the murders, and to identify any officers who should be held to account. In court, Mestrovic said he was shocked by how dysfunctional the brigade appeared to have been, and he added, “In a dysfunctional unit, we cannot predict who will be the deviant — but we can predict deviance.”

Luke Mogelson (luke.mogelson@gmail.com) is a freelance writer who has written, most recently, about prison reform for Washington Monthly. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

 

Fighting Flares on 2 Fronts in Libyan City

Government forces attacked a convoy of rebel fighters and supply trucks at the checkpoint at Wazen in midmorning, said Tarek Bodrani, the fighter, who was reached by telephone. Mr. Bodrani said a pro-Qaddafi force with about 30 vehicles struck from the north and south, and seven pickup trucks carrying antiaircraft machine guns followed rebels toward the Tunisian town, Dhiba, roughly three miles away.

One government pickup truck crashed and the others were stopped, and the pro-Qaddafi soldiers were detained after being confronted by a roadblock operated by the Tunisian military and local residents. Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, a rebel spokesman, said Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fired mortar shells onto Tunisian soil during the chase.

Outraged Tunisian officials summoned a Libyan envoy to complain about the incursion, Al Jazeera reported. Libyan ordnance reportedly fell in Tunisian territory on Thursday as well, when fighting for control of the Wazen post began, wounding some civilians and potentially further imperiling the Libyan government, which is already fighting on multiple fronts and facing a NATO air campaign.

The rebels had captured the post with hopes of opening a supply route for opposition fighters battling Colonel Qaddafi’s troops in Libya’s western mountains. The fate of that ambition is now unclear, as was the status of the captured Libyan soldiers.

In Libya’s most violent area, in the besieged coastal city of Misurata, fighting erupted across a broad front along the city’s south and west, as rebel fighters pressed toward the city’s airport and faced a fresh ground attack on their western flank.

The fighting in Misurata began early in the morning and raged throughout the day. The city’s edge became a cacophony of machine-gun and mortar fire, punctuated by the rolling explosions of ground-to-ground rocket strikes in neighborhoods behind the front lines.

As the two sides fought, Misurata’s troubles appeared to deepen further as NATO said that pro-Qaddafi forces had been caught Friday mining the waters around the harbor to harass traffic from the sea, which has been the sole lifeline for a city otherwise cut off by loyalist ground troops.

Three mines were discovered and were being disposed of, NATO said in a statement, adding that the devices were being laid two to three kilometers offshore when the inflatable boats on which they were being carried were deliberately sunk.

At least one vessel with humanitarian aid scheduled to enter the port on Friday delayed its arrival and waited off the coast for an all-clear sign from NATO, medical officials in the city said.

Supplies from the sea have been integral to the city’s survival during the two-month siege, as internationally chartered aid ships have delivered food, water, medicine and ambulances, and evacuated thousands of migrant workers and many wounded Libyans in need of treatment not available in the city.

A flotilla of rebel fishing vessels and tugboats have also smuggled in weapons, ammunition and other military equipment, allowing the sparsely supplied rebels to push forward against Colonel Qaddafi’s conventionally equipped troops.

The fighting on two fronts in the Misurata area on Friday appeared to signal simultaneous thrusts, in different places — one by the rebels and the other by loyalist troops.

The loyalists, backed by at least three tanks, struck first, trying to push into and through the village of Zawit al-Mahjoub early in the morning, fighters and medical officials said. The rebels repelled the attack, but not before three tanks entered the village, six rebel fighters were killed and at least 10 more were wounded, a doctor treating them said.

As the battle in the village continued, rebel groups were pushing southward toward the airport, which is still held by the loyalists, and meeting stiff resistance from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops dug in around the airfield or garrisoned within.

By midmorning, a large battle had been joined, and mortar fire was landing, in explosion after explosion, near rebels clustered and hiding in buildings and behind walls.

C. J. Chivers reported from Misurata, and Scott Sayare from Tunis. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels, and Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya.

 

In Fighting Anorexia, Recovery Is Elusive

For many years, she did not take laxatives constantly to lose weight, as she did in the mid-1980s, and her health was “relatively O.K.” Thoughts about her weight did not occupy every second of every minute of every day.

But in 2005 she relapsed, losing one-third of her body weight in six months. She took off 19 months from her job as an emergency room physician at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor to devote herself to getting her life back in order.

Like many patients with eating disorders, however, she is not sure what recovery means.

“Does it mean ‘functional?’?” asked Dr. Dooley-Hash, 45. “I’m a physician at a really high-powered institution, and I’ve published in well-respected journals — I’m functional. I don’t think functionality is necessarily a good measure.”

Dr. Dooley-Hash is not alone in her confusion. Most medical experts agree that a third of people with the disorder will remain chronically ill, a third will die of their disorder, and a third will recover — with one significant caveat. There is surprisingly little agreement as to what “recovery” means for people with anorexia.

Indeed, just a handful of studies on long-term recovery rates have been conducted over the last decade or so, and different parameters were used in each one.

“Without consistency, it’s hard to compare across studies,” said Dr. Michael Strober, a professor of eating disorders and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “You just have to know how recovery is defined in each study to have a balanced interpretation.”

It is difficult to define recovery from an illness that has both physical and mental dimensions.

If, for example, a patient reaches “normal weight” — which researchers define as either 85 or 95 percent of a person’s ideal weight — and starts menstruating again, she would be considered to have recovered in most studies.

But what if she still weighs herself daily, monitors her calories with a vengeance and obsesses about food and the size of her ankles? Or, as is often the case, moves from anorexia to bulimia or binge-eating disorder?

“About 50 percent of people with anorexia will be able to reach and maintain a normal weight, but most of them are very preoccupied with the calorie content of food,” said Dr. Katharine Halmi, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Still, she added: “Many people who’ve never had anorexia watch their diet carefully. So the big issue is, how do you define recovery? Maintaining a normal weight, recurrence of menstruation is easy to document. Mental status is a different problem.”

With that in mind, many with anorexia prefer to view recovery as many alcoholics do — the disease may be in remission, but the potential for relapse always lurks in the background.

“Some people find comfort in saying ‘recovering’ so they don’t have to be responsible for being recovered, which means ‘I will never relapse,’?” said Aimee Liu, 57, author of “Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives.” Others, she said, liken their eating disorder to managing a chronic illness like diabetes, requiring constant vigilance.

“I say to patients, ‘This is your Achilles’ heel,’?” said Dr. Daniel Le Grange, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago and director of the eating disorders program at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “If you have another crisis, you’re predisposed to resorting to starvation as your way of managing that issue. It would be foolish of us as clinicians not to prepare our patients that they should be on the lookout for a recurrence.”

Most doctors believe recovery from anorexia is rarely absolute and more often occurs by degrees. While patients may get better, aspects of their disease will continue to nag at them.

“The literature suggests you can have physical recovery from the weight loss, but the cognitive symptoms might not continue to get better,” said Dr. Kamryn T. Eddy, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “They definitely do improve, but one of the things we wonder is, how well does one have to be to be ‘recovered’? And how well does one actually get?”

In the absence of expert consensus, patients and caregivers have come up with their own definitions of recovery.

Harriet Brown, author of the recently released “Brave Girl Eating,” a memoir of her 14-year-old daughter’s bout with anorexia, defines it as “absolutely ordinary relations with food.”

And what exactly is ordinary? “That thinking about food does not consume large quantities of your time and energy,” she said in an interview. “You enjoy food, you don’t undereat or overeat often, you don’t meet any of the diagnostic criteria for anorexia. Your weight is in a healthy range for you. And most of all, you’re able to live life in a way that’s not completely organized around food and eating.”

For Ms. Liu, recovery is a “full restoration of nutritional, physical, emotional and psychological health.” But in a telephone conversation, Ms. Liu, who was actively anorexic from age 13 to 20, acknowledged that without good treatment many people spend years in what she called the “half life” of anorexia.

“They recover nutritionally and suspend the behaviors of starving, bingeing and purging,” said Ms. Liu, who suffered a relapse 11 years ago. “But the self-criticism, self-abuse, perfectionism, judgmentalism and restrictive mind-set persist.”

Still, both doctors and patients emphasize the importance of believing that full recovery is an option.

Kathleen MacDonald, a policy assistant at the Eating Disorders Coalition in Washington, was anorexic and then bulimic for 16 years, but considers herself fully recovered since 2004.

“People always said once you have an eating disorder, you’re always going to have an eating disorder,” she said. “I tell people, ‘There was a time in your life when you didn’t have an eating disorder, and if that’s possible, anything is.’?”

For Dr. Dooley-Hash, the future feels a little murkier.

“I feel like I can’t ever be off guard,” she said. “The next time I’m overwhelmed and stressed, my first instinct is going to go back to restricting. I think I would be na?ve to think it would ever not be a part of my life.”

 

At Least 55 Killed in South Sudan Fighting

 VOA News ?April 24, 2011

Officials in south Sudan say the army has killed at least 55 rebel fighters during a clash in volatile Jonglei state.
Hundreds have died in fighting between the southern army and various rebel groups since January, when southern Sudan voted to split from the north.? Southern leaders accused the north of supporting the rebellions to destabilize the region ahead of independence in July.

The latest fighting raged for several hours Saturday, as soldiers battled gunmen led by Gabriel Tanginya, who led a pro-Khartoum militia during Sudan's long north-south civil war.

Tanginya agreed late last year to integrate his fighters into the southern army.? Media reports say Saturday's fighting began after the militiamen refused to report to the southern capital of Juba.

Southern officials say five of Tanginya's generals were killed in the clash. ?

The French news agency quotes an official in south Sudan's Upper Nile state, Peter Lam Both, as saying 34 government soldiers and 43 civilians were wounded.

 

Global Update: Syria: Fighting the Fungi That Threaten Wheat

Fungi that attack wheat are growing as a threat to the hungry inhabitants of poor countries. At a conference this week in Aleppo, Syria, scientists will be planning a counteroffensive.

The unusual venue was chosen both because Syria has been hit hard by “yellow rust” fungus and because Aleppo is home to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. The center was built in 1977 because the area has the right climate for research and because Aleppo is in the heart of the so-called Fertile Crescent, where agriculture began 10,000 years ago.

The fungi have damaged wheat grown in a broad ribbon of dry climate from Morocco to northern India, where as much as 60 percent of the crop has been lost, said Mahmoud Solh, the center’s director. The prevailing theory is that wetter winters caused by climate change are helping the fungi persist until new crops are planted.

Rich countries can afford fungicides and new resistant varieties of wheat; poor ones cannot. Food prices are being driven up by other factors, including summer fires and farmers growing crops for ethanol instead of food.

Before his death in 2009, Norman E. Borlaug, the plant biologist who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize partly for his role in creating more vigorous varieties of wheat, called one particular fungus — known as Ug99 for its 1999 discovery in Uganda — “a looming catastrophe,” even more dangerous than the strain that destroyed 20 percent of American wheat in the 1950s. Since then, Ug99 has been joined by other fungal strains, like stem rust, above.