Fedor Bondarchuk: '9th Company' / '9 Рота' (2005)

Fedor Bondarchuk's 9th Company / 9 Рота (2005) takes us on a war tour in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, from the perspective of Soviet Red Army troops. It's a fascinating movie. Yes, true, we've seen much of this kind of thing before in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Pork Chop Hill (1959), Go Tell the Spartans (1978), Gallipoli (1981), Heartbreak Ridge (1986),  Full Metal Jacket (1987), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), and so on, but this time it's with Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union, fighting in Afghanistan in modern times -- where, indeed, even now US and Allied troops are still fighting thirty years later. I am always thrilled to see variations on a typically American theme, done internationally with a few twists.

9th Company does the usual trick of bringing recruits through basic training -- here with their "comrade drill sergeant" suffering from post traumatic stress previously garnered "in country" in Afghanistan. He doesn't mince words when there's a problem: "This is a real fuck-up, soldier." By the time he's done with them, they're ready for war. They've also gotten to know "Snow White," a prostitute who works at and near the training camp. One of the soldiers, an artist, calls her "Venus emerging from the sea."  

The next phase of 9th Company is set in the Afghanistan war zone proper. Afghan Army troops ("the greenies") are depicted as not very reliable allies (sound familiar?). The Soviet soldiers face the shock and surprise tactics of "the muj" (mujahideen), including ambush, landmines, and decoys; and their escape tactics, utilizing holes, caves, tunnels, villages, dust and darkness. The Soviet recruits join seasoned veterans, who the viewer may more quickly feel empathy for, because they seem more like fully developed adults rather than dimwitted youth.     

9th Company doesn't sugar-coat the misery of campaigning in Afghanistan, nor the violence of combat.  Definitely worth checking out. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

Frederick Forsyth: The Afghan, 2006 (Part II)

The Afghan, Frederick Forsyth's 2006 novel, delivers a wild ride, filtered through the very evident scrim of the author's patriarchal, Anglocentric, conservative outlook.

It's very much a man's world that Forsyth focuses on. There are no major female characters in the book. In general terms, it's sexist, but there's no sex. It's James Bond or Clint Eastwood without their "social interests" -- certainly, there are no Bond girls on either side of this rather austere novel.

While reading, I had a strong impression that, via the near-totally omniscient narrator, Forsyth wants nothing more than a quiet return to the height of the British Empire, say between 1860 and 1900. Women seem of little importance in his grand scheme of manly things. Protesters, the general public, news outlets and international organizations are considered annoying nuisances bent on fools' errands. The most important thing to the narrator is security of country -- the United Kingdom above all -- as represented by security agencies and military and police forces.    

Back in 1997, Forsyth admitted: "These days I care only about six things. They are: belief in the Almighty, my country’s sovereignty, parliamentary democracy, the monarchy, preservation of the countryside, and protection of my family." (Saga, December 1997).

Islamic "Sword Verse" extremists, the villains of The Afghan, dream of a return to the imagined heights of Islamic empire and culture. Turn the clock back a thousand years or more. 

So in The Afghan there are two preferences pitted against each other: go back 100 years (good) or go back 1000 years (bad). In both cases, this is the nature of deep conservatism -- a nostalgia for a past that never was quite as delightful as imagined.*

Finally, the idea of universal entropy or friction: 

"Anyone who has ever been involved in what Kipling called 'the Great Game,' and what James Jesus Angleton of the CIA referred to as the 'wilderness of mirrors,' will surely agree the greatest enemy is the UCU. . . The Unforeseen Cock-Up has probably wrecked more covert missions than treachery or brilliant counterintelligence by the other side. . ." (page 223).

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

*In reverse, the nature of progressive liberalism seems more like nostalgia for an enlightened future that may never come to full fruition. How It Never Was vs. How It Never Will Be, perhaps. 

Frederick Forsyth: The Afghan, 2006 (Part I)

Given the similarly-themed events unfolding in Canada these past few days, the happenings depicted in Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan (2006) carry a very contemporary and ongoing feel. The novel is filled with details about hunters and hunted, ships and jets, couriers and satellite surveillance, infiltrators and fanatics, terrorism and counter-terrorism, attack and counterattack, interception and evasion. It ranges around the world, so there's a lot of geographical detail, and historical: things such as the destruction of Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the Great War of 1914-1918, due to the explosion of an ammo ship (in 1917), to counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, the Falklands/Malvinas War (1982), Afghanistan (1980s-present), the "West Side Boys" in Sierra Leone (2000), pirates of the Pacific, a CIA prison nestled in the Rockies of the USA, and commandeered fuel ships in the Atlantic.

Observations along the way are fully relevant in 2014 and will continue to be so. Of the Taliban, Forsyth reminds us that under their rule, women could not [and cannot] move in public without being fully veiled and having a male relative as escort, "[a]ll singing, dancing, the playing of music, sports and kite flying . . . was forbidden . . . Beards on men were compulsory. The enforcers were often teenage fanatics in their black turbans, taught only the Sword Verses, cruelty and war" (page 105). (Just what everyone wants -- violent, aggressive and narrow-minded young males in charge of one's day to day life).

This is the modern world: "For terrorism, the Internet and cyberspace have become must-have propaganda weapons. Every atrocity that can be broadcast . . . is good; every atrocity that can be seen by millions of Muslim youths in seventy countries is gold dust. This is where the recruits come from -- actually seeing it happen and lusting to imitate" (page 305). 

Note: several of Forsyth's novels have been made into movies. Consider his first three novels, for instance: The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974). 

Today's Rune: Partnership.

When You Do Have to Live Like a Refugee

People tend to move or migrate for several reasons, including work opportunity or survival and sometimes to find hope within a nested support system. 

People are refugees or forced into relocation because of the effects of war, revolution and persecution -- the latter including slavery and religious or other cultural attacks on a scale ranging from harassment through coercion to genocide.   

As of mid-2013, the biggest mass refugee movements radiate from just a handful of countries. That is, more than half of all new and recent refugees have been displaced by upheavals in Somalia and Sudan (plus South Sudan), Afghanistan (still), Iraq (still) and Syria. (Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Displacement: The New 21st Century Challenge. Global Trends 2012 [2013]).

All refugees have stories to tell. Anyone can become a refugee. In addition to wild variables such as effects of war, revolution and persecution, we can add natural disasters, global warming, climate change and mass toxic events, or even slow seepage.

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Gitmo and "The American People"

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts.  It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.

Now, Congress determined that they would not let us close it -- and despite the fact that there are a number of the folks who are currently in Guantanamo who the courts have said could be returned to their country of origin or potentially a third country.

I'm going to go back at this. I've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively. And I'm going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that's in the best interest of the American people. And it's not sustainable.

The notion that we're going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no-man's land in perpetuity, even at a time when we've wound down the war in Iraq, we're winding down the war in Afghanistan, we're having success defeating al-Qaeda core, we've kept the pressure up on all these transnational terrorist networks, when we've transferred detention authority in Afghanistan -- the idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.

Now, it's a hard case to make because I think for a lot of Americans the notion is out of sight, out of mind. And it's easy to demagogue the issue. That's what happened the first time this came up. I'm going to go back at it because I think it's important.  

News Conference by the President, James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Washington, DC. Link to full remarks just to the right of this colon: News Conference by the President | The White House

So I ask any representatives of "The American People" to weigh in here. Shut Gitmo down or not?  Do something about the prisoners or do nothing and let the chips fall where they may? And: why?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

The First and Last Casualties

Coverage of wars and poverty, of competing ideas and political conflict is all over the map.  Attention Deficit Disorder and entropy on one hand, pre-existing ideological prejudices and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder on the other.  Avoidance on the one hand, oversaturation on the other.

Some of the most memorable wartime investigative journalism can be epitomized by the work of Seymour Hersch, who has, during his career, written a number of penetrating stories for United Press International (UPI), the Associated Press (AP), The New York Times, The New Yorker, and more. Prime examples: exposing the My Lai Massacre (1968). Investigating the context of what led to the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983). Digging into the false pretenses and cynical manipulation of public perceptions by the Bush-Cheney Administation that led to the Iraq War (2003-2011). Delving into the ghoulish facts of the Abu Ghraib POW scandal. And so forth. This is not to say that Hersch is always completely accurate in his reporting, but rather that he's done more good investigative work relating to war and abuse of power than most. Under the banner of the First Amendment, we need more people doing this kind of work.

Today's Rune: Flow.

The Iliad Becomes An Iliad

A little more about the Undermain Theatre production of An Iliad in Deep Ellum. Bruce DuBose does the talking and Paul Semrad plays most of the instrumental mood music.

As you can see from the theatre card pictured above via the electrical outlet, this version of The Iliad has modern connections. Most of them are subtle, but two stand out from what I saw this past weekend. First, when the Poet (DuBose) begins reeling off where the Greek contingents arrayed against Hittite Troy (Ἴλιον aka Ilion or ILIUM) come from, it dawns on him (his persona): the audience may not be familiar with these ancient lands or peoples. So he updates them to different locales around today's USA -- the more to drive home the universal relevance of the epic story, song and poem of the Trojan War. The audience immediately connects the Trojan War to, say, the Afghanistan War, or the Syrian Civil War. And indeed, later on the Poet reads the names of wars from a long scroll, a representative sample only of what seems like a hundred of them from the Trojan War right up to Syria and the burning of Aleppo. The audience winces during this litany, chilled to the bones, and for good reason. It would seem that humankind is doomed to keep clawing itself to pieces down through the ages and right off into the future. Or as George Santayana noted in 1922, between the Great War to End All Wars and WW2: "only the dead have seen the end of war." But we were and are and will be human all the way. An Iliad also reminds us to live life while we can, because mischief awaits us at every turn. Be hospitable to poets and other artists, Homer seems to be saying, and they will make the way more palatable in return. Good one.

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).         

Go Tell the Spartans

Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans (1978), adapted from Incident at Muc Wa, a 1967 novel by Daniel Ford, is from those I've seen the most thoughtful American feature film yet made about the US-Vietnam War. Its strong script overcomes a relatively low budget and production values that look more like something from a 1970s TV series such as M*A*S*H than a big-budget blockbuster like Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). In fact, the latter's budget was twenty times higher, yet Apocalypse Now is nowhere near as coherent and down-to-earth as Go Tell the Spartans.   

                                                                                                                                                             

Burt Lancaster stars in Go Tell the Spartans, and he's on top of his game as a crusty Korean War veteran charged with sending a motley Vietnamese and American detachment into the middle of nowhere to reoccupy an old French outpost last fought over in 1953, all on a whim of the high command. It's now 1964, well before the major US troop buildups, but the story arc serves as a microcosm of the larger war to come. And it includes Vietnamese soldiers and civilians as important characters, key to understanding the conflict -- doh!  Multiple perspectives -- something I love to see in a war movie. Go Tell the Spartans is the closest in US-Vietnam War movies to the best World War II movies, ones like Oliver Hirschbiegel's Der Untergang / Downfall (2004) and Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (2006).   

                                                                                                                                                                   

Craig Wesson and Burt Lancaster as American soldiers, two of the strongest characters in Go Tell the Spartans. 

 

In Go Tell the Spartans, American GIs refer to the Vietnamese -- friend and foe alike -- as "dinks," "gooks," "Charlie" and "slopes." From the Viet Cong point of view, sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me. ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) soldiers are depicted as capable, though "Cowboy," their interpreter and de facto squad leader, "gets his jollies" torturing suspected VC and, in one instance, beheading a wounded enemy. Militiamen are poorly armed and remain in civilian clothes, but are seen as doing the best they can regardless. The only real foolishness, beyond a certain naïveté shared by several of the American GIs about the nature of the war unfolding, comes with the higher ups, both South Vietnamese and American. Unfortunately, Go Tell the Spartans could easily be updated to include the current Afghanistan War, with drones added. The more things change . . .

Today's Rune: Partnership.       

In This World

On a shoestring budget, Michael Winterbottom and his small film crew have created a riveting docudrama -- In This World (2002) -- that combines specifics with universals. The main story line follows the efforts and harrowing (mostly overland) journey of Afghan cousins Jamal (Jamal Udin Tarabi, who looks sort of like singer Eric Burdon of The Animals) and Enayat (Enayatullah) from a Pakistani refugee camp, with the intention of finding de facto asylum in London during the still-ongoing Afghanistan War. Will they make it safely through Iran and Turkey and beyond?

In the tradition of John Steinbeck and many others, Winterbottom and crew's efforts are effective. By the end of this film, any alert viewer would learn a lot about the desperation and resilience of refugees and immigration efforts. From an international perspective, changing one's situation is hard, a long shot, unless one is extremely fortunate to begin with. On the other hand, if one doesn't make the attempt, one has no chance at all.

Today's Rune: Opening.   

Lost Command/Les Centurions: Take II

If Mark Robson's Lost Command / Les Centurions (1966) -- like his Peyton Place (1957) and Valley of the Dolls (1967) -- could be tweaked here and there, it could be very sharp indeed. I'd start with a whole new soundtrack, something from the mind of Ennio Morricone (who is still with us) probably. In any case, the Algerian Revolution / Guerre d'Algérie (1954-1962) war scenes are particularly strong. Watching them, I couldn't help but see the real similarities with the Iraq War (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-present).

Together with Gillo Ponecorvo's masterful La battaglia di Algeri / The Battle of Algiers (1966), Lost Command / Les centurions gives a clear picture of how this kind of conflict plays out. It's not a pretty sight.

Surprise, ambushes, reprisals, bombings, assassinations, murder, civilian deaths: it's all there, and we're seeing plenty more of the same reality in 2012.

Today's Rune: Signals.

Through the Radar: The Rogue Gunmen Three

We are now confronted with fresh incidents of horrifying violence committed by three rogue gunmen: the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, USA, by "neighborhood watchman" George Zimmerman; the massacre of seventeen Afghan civilians (including eight children) in Balandi and Alkozai, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, by US soldier Sgt. Robert Bales; and the slaughter of three children and a rabbi at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France, preceeded by the killing of three French paratroopers earlier the same week, by self-proclaimed Islamist militant Mohammed Merah.

Of the three rogue gunmen, Merah was killed by French Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion (RAID) police in a final shootout; Sgt. Bales has been charged with seventeen murder counts and is now in US military confinement; Zimmerman, at the time of this post, remains uncharged but is under close scrutiny.  

Horrible. All three of these perpetrators were "on the radar," yet managed to sneak by the "red flags" anyway without anyone stopping them. 

Zimmerman had been capitalizing on Florida's seemingly ignorant "Stand Your Ground" law, which permits people to freely walk around with guns and shoot anyone who they feel is threatening them; he communicated freely with local police, almost like an insider vigilante. Bales aparently joined the US Army not as a patriot, but as a way to avoid owning up to business scams, and had a volatile history. At the time of his killing  spree, he was on his fourth deployment in a war zone. Merah was another loose cannon who had earlier travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan and had a criminal record.

Final note. There is a serious contemporary problem with the idea of the "Hero."  To any sane person, killing children does not a hero make; but what does make a hero?  These three men were probably carrying delusional notions of "heroism" in their psyches.

Herein lies a great deal of cultural confusion.  Many in war, law enforcement and society at large who commit acts of violence are labelled heroes in social media, movies, and news programs. I hope that these three recent violent incidents lead to some cognitive dissonance on the subject. Hero is a word that should be used much more sparingly, and with greater care and precision. However, calling these rogue gunmen cowards doesn't help much, either. But more on all this at some point. It's just sad.  

Today's Rune: Signals.            

The Iran-Contra Scandal

"I went down to the demonstration /
to get my fair share of abuse . . ."

And this is why: the Reagan Administration. Its support for the Contras and similar death squad entities in Latin America. 

Iran-Contra.

What was that again?  Israel-US-Iran-Iraq-Nicaragua involved in a bizarre, intricate scheme that came down to trading weapons to Iran for cash and a trickle of hostage releases in Lebanon; the cash was to be rerouted to the Contras secretly as a way to get around US legal restrictions against sending weapons to either Contras or Iranians. It was so brazenly stupid that even now, looking back, I'd be amazed except for continued blunders and stupidity, such as how an American officer -- after US forces have spent more than ten years in Afghanistan -- could be so dense as to burn Korans and basically hand a political victory over to the Taliban by inciting serious unrest throughout the region. And we wonder why the Afghan Army being trained by the West for an entire decade is either A) not ever going to be up to the task we "assigned" them; or B) prefering not to, like an army of Bartleby the Scriveners?  Or that three out of four Republican presidential candidates (excepting only Ron Paul) in this year's national nominating process have already loudly announced their intention of participating in or even gleefully starting an Israel/US-Iran war?  Good God, folks!  How else can we define collective madness?
   

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god!"

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Pat Paulsen in 1968 as Mitt Romney in 2012

Today's Rune: Journey.

Is it Over?

And so the US is seemingly pulling its last combat troops out of Iraq after nearly nine years of invasion and occupation. It's been so long many were born into this debacle and have no idea how it all happened.

After the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 -- in which Iraq's military was badly defeated in response to its invasion of Kuwait -- no fly zones (NFZ map above courtesy of wikimedia) were created by the US, UK and France to keep the battered Saddam Hussein regime's remaining armed forces in check. One aspect of the NFZ: Kurds were to be more protected in the north and Shiites in the south from continued Hussein regime revenge attacks. Hussein's Iraq had earlier fought a brutal eight-year war with Iran and was still its primary enemy, so its eastern flank had to be covered, too. 

Into this mix -- which had the effect of keeping Hussein's government penned in while remaining a counterbalance to Iran -- came the events of 9/11/2001. The George W. Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, even though there was no direct link between Iraq and 9/11; the attacks had been devised and managed from Afghanistan, where bin Laden was based under the auspices of the Taliban. 

France, Turkey and several Arab states refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq (France did and does participate in Afghanistan operations). The US-led invasion of Iraq by a "coalition of the willing" removed Saddam Hussein from power, but emboldened (and made nervous) the Iranian government, which is still even now moving toward a nuclear weapons capability and engaged in a shadow war with its opponents.

Was the 2003 invasion of Iraq a wise move? Could the US afford such an adventure? Was it worth the cost in blood and treasure? Five and half years after the start of the invasion, the US economy took a nosedive, as did the economies of many of its allies. Today, the Obama Administration welcomed home some of the last US troops to be pulled out of Iraq.

Looking back, Turkey's position has risen. Some may not now remember or know that Turkey refused to allow US ground forces to invade northern Iraq through its territory. Now the Turkish government is in a stronger position to influence events in the entire region, including Syria, Israel-Palestine, Egypt and Iraq. The Turks and Kurdish elements continue to fight along the borderlands, as well. The Iraq War -- wiser to avoid than to plunge into.

I was opposed to an invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, protested in the streets along with many many others to no avail and continue to think it was a terrible decision.

Today's Rune: Strength.
    

The Tillman Story

Seeing them back to back, one can see how Amir Bar-Lev's The Tillman Story (2010) parallels Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon (2011) and vice versa: documentary format, three brothers, divorced parents, fame; but instead of being raised Pentecostalists like the Followills, the Tillmans are freethinkers; and instead of forming a rock band like the Followills, two of the Tillman brothers (Pat and Kevin) become US Army Rangers, and one of them is killed by his own men.

The Tillman Story is a compelling documentary (with subtle narration by Josh Brolin) about the Tillman family, but it also provides insight into soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan, and specifically a clear focus on the "friendly fire" death of Pat Tillman in 2004, its subsequent coverup, and distorted reshaping as a propaganda tool.

Today's Rune: Defense.    
     

Time for a Global Perestroika

I remember this day twenty years ago, the day of the attempted Soviet August coup d'état -- when Mikhail Gorbachev was placed under house arrest and all his ideas about perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness) were put in danger of being completely overthrown by conservative hardliners. Though Gorbachev survived (he's now eighty years old) and the putsch collapsed, he never fully regained political power; Boris Yeltsin took the reins and almost simultaneously the Soviet Union broke into pieces. 

Yes, that was all in 1991. I was in England doing a library internship for the Central Architectural Practice of English Heritage thanks to a USA-ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) award.  Afghanistan was plunged in civil war and British troops were returning from the Persian Gulf War, parading through the streets of London.

If the world felt surreal twenty years ago, it feels -- and looks -- far more so now.

The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable. It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few, on unrestrained exploitation of resources and on social and environmental irresponsibility. . . The current model does not need adjusting; it needs replacing. I have no ready-made prescriptions. But I am convinced that a new model will emerge, one that will emphasize public needs and public goods, such as a cleaner environment, well-functioning infrastructure and public transportation, sound education and health systems and affordable housing.

-- Mikhail Gorbachev, "Time for a Global Perestroika" (2009). Is anyone else so optimistic out there?

Today's Rune: Fertility.

22 Thermidor CCXIX

What makes a red letter or banner year? Years like 1968 pop to mind, and years wars start or end -- 1945 of course, continuing all the way back like that to beyond the mists of early calendar time. Today, 22 Thermidor / Fervidor, Revolutionary Year 219, known in the parlance of our day as August 9, 2011 and to some as Nagasaki Remembrance Day -- lest the world forget that day an atomic bomb was dropped on a (second) Japanese city filled mostly with civilians during a cataclysmic conflict in 1945 -- today we pull back and consider 2011 as another red letter year perhaps more along the lines of the 1968 upheavals. But who knows? There are several months left to go.

What have we learned this year?  What has happened?   The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has got to take the radioactive cake; surely the Arab Spring / Arabic Rebellions roil the status quo; and, of course let's not forget climate change (mostly bad news) . . .  But what else "big" has happened or will happen this year?  In the words of one Detroiter: What else you got?

Today's Rune: Journey.

Ten Year War to Nowhere

Chinook Down: Earlier today, guerillas shot down a US helicopter in Afghanistan, killing thirty-one Americans and seven Afghan government soldiers. Eight insurgents were also killed in related fighting, according to a Taliban press report. Other guerillas attacked and destroyed sixteen NATO fuel tankers near the Khyber Pass. These incidents are nearly identical to ones reported thirty years ago, only they were Soviets who were killed in the previous incidents, and the insurgents then were more commonly called "freedom fighters" and Mujahideen in Western press reports.

Consider this: In the Soviet War that lasted from 1979 to 1989, Afghan guerillas suffered more than 150,000 killed; civilian losses topped that by several times. The Red Army lost more than 14,000 killed and 50,000+ wounded. That war (or that phase of the meta-war) helped bankrupt the Soviet Empire, leading to its collapse.

The Soviet Union's Afghan allies lost approximately 20,000 killed in the first ten year cycle -- then many thousands more in the Afghan Civil War (Phase I) of 1989 to 1992. The 1992-1996 Afghan Civil War (Phase II) brought the Taliban into power. More fighting continued into 2001; then began the US/NATO phase that has lasted from October 7, 2001 through this very August 6, 2011 post -- and off into the future. Note: Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011 in neighboring Pakistan. US/NATO killed to date exceed 2,600, with 13,000 plus Americans wounded (the highest in the NATO group).

Finally: The only forces who can/will keep fighting at this cost in terms of casualties and finances are the guerillas. For them it is a cheap war, and there are plenty of recklessly macho volunteers in a permanent pipeline that cost little to train and maintain on the job. The population of Afghanistan is too large to "pacify." It's now pushing close to thirty million -- nearly double the population since 1979, when the Soviets moved in for their long shot at pacification.

Like its predecessors, the 2001-2011 conflict has been a long road to nowhere for all parties involved, but only the Afghans themselves, in all their factions, will decide if and when to end the fighting. I am dubious of a peaceful settlement, let alone a "successful" one. How about you?

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Daniel Ellsberg Speaks

Daniel Ellsberg spoke on June 26, 2011, to members of the American Library Association in New Orleans. I wooshed into town in time to attend his early Sunday morning lecture, which succinctly covered the Pentagon Papers, American foreign and military policy from 1945 to the near future, the US-Vietnam War, Iraq, Afghanistan, WikiLeaks, and more. I thoroughly enjoyed his cogent, well-argued presentation.

Bottom line: US policmakers overall tend to do the same blindered things over and over again as part of a consistent whole, without worrying too much about the historical consequences. Ellsberg sees most of US war making since 1945 as a big mistake, more about serving corporate military-industrial-political interests than anything else.  

Ellsberg, now eighty, has a lot of energy and focus and makes many good points. Here's a link to his website: http://www.ellsberg.net/ 

Today's Rune: Flow.  

Afghanistan and Iraq

Afghanistan, June 2011: NATO International Security Assistance Force

Under the Obama Administration, bin Laden has been killed and tonight, the President announced troop reductions in Afghanistan. The US and its NATO-led allies are making a socio-economic and political move that is pragmatic, a compromise solution -- they are all drawing down. The various home fronts have been clamoring for this and in country the majority of Afghans want it, too. Meanwhile, the Libya war ought to play out this summer. If this is surely not the best of all possible worlds, it's better than escalating what are already two (Iraq and Afghanistan) of the longest running wars in US history. Anyone out there disagree with the drawdown? 

Today's Rune: Possessions.