For the last week, the election debate has been focused on the
existential question of how much impact will result from Mitt
Romney’s “47%” remark. The campaign suffers from a malaise that can
only be cured by a real crisis such as Obama replacing Joe Biden
with Paris Hilton or Dave Letterman.
In that same week, there’s been a steady flow of SGO (“s**t
going on,” in the comprehensively useful acronym coined by former
SEAL Al Clark), events far more important which are going almost
unnoticed. Consider just a few.
The treacly flow of information from the Obama administration
about the war in Afghanistan is more reminiscent of Vietnam each
day. “I think we are on track,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said
last Friday in announcing that the last of our 33,000 “surge”
troops have been withdrawn. Panetta also said that the surge had
met “…its objectives of reversing the Taliban momentum on the
battlefield and dramatically [increasing] the size and capability
of the Afghan national security forces.”
The latter remark would be comical if it didn’t come in the
context of cessation of joint operations with Afghanistan forces
below the battalion level, resulting from another “green on blue”
attack on U.S. troops by the Afghan troops they are supposed to be
training. Training operations have been slowed as well, while new
“vetting” procedures are used to re-clear Afghans who are supposed
to be trainees.
The context includes the Taliban attack on Marine Camp Bastion
which resulted in more U.S. deaths and the destruction of so many
Harrier aircraft that the Marine air squadron, VMA-211 whose
aircraft they were, is now out of action. The last time VMA-211 was
combat ineffective was in December 1941 when it was almost wiped
out in defense of Wake Island.
The squadron commander, Lt. Col. Christopher “Otis” Raible, and
Sgt. Bradley Atwell were killed in the 16 September attack. (Raible
was killed while inspecting the flight line at 10 pm, as was his
custom. According to an e-mail from a direct source that was
forwarded to me, Raible was armed only with a 9mm pistol and died
fighting.)
The “green on blue” attacks — Afghani soldiers and policemen
attacking our troops — account for 51 U.S. deaths so far this year
and the frequency of these attacks is increasing.
In Barbara Tuchman’s epic history The March of Folly,
she recounts that in 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a
memorandum for President Eisenhower (which he may have never read).
In part, the memo said it was “absolutely essential” to have a
“reasonably strong stable civil government in control” in Vietnam.
As Tuchman wrote, the memo said that it was “hopeless to expect a
United States training mission to achieve success,” unless — in
Tuchman’s words — Vietnam “could effectively perform all functions
necessary to recruitment and maintenance of its own forces.”
The Karzai regime, like Diem and his Vietnamese successors, has
utterly failed to perform those functions, with the entirely
predictable results that parallel our involvement in Vietnam.
We have been defeated in Afghanistan. Obama has succeeded, with
Romney’s complicity, in keeping the Afghanistan war out of the
campaign debate. Obama’s White House has also succeeded in claiming
ultimate credit for the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden
while, at the same time, leaking an enormous amount of classified
information about that operation, going so far as to bring in
Hollywood producers of the coming movie about the raid, Zero
Dark Early.
Those leaks damaged national security. Alleged leaks by former
SEAL “Mark Owens” in his book about the raid, No Easy Day,
briefly stirred that concern. But “Owens’s” book has done something
else. It has angered the SEAL community because it breaches a
trust.
Special operators — SEALs, Army Special Forces, Marine Recon
and Air Force special ops — share a code of silence. It’s not like
the Mafia’s “omerta” code of silence, which is a code of fear, a
tyranny. It’s a code of honor that compels the spec ops guys to
serve without discussing, even with their families, what they do.
It’s a large element of the pride they take in their job. The
pseudonymous “Owens” — a real hero, a warrior’s warrior by all
reports — broke that code. From what I’m hearing, he will be
ostracized for violating the code, and he should be.
Though “Owens” will be ostracized, the Mujahedin e-Khalk, an
Iranian opposition group, shouldn’t be. The MEK was listed as a
foreign terrorist organization by Bill Clinton in 1997 as a sop to
the Tehran regime, which didn’t change its behavior toward us or
the MEK.
After the Iraq invasion of 2003, MEK forces were bombed by U.S.
forces, surrendered and were disarmed. In captivity, they were
designated by the U.S. as “protected persons” under the Geneva
Convention. The MEK were transferred to Iraqi custody and have been
attacked repeatedly by Iraqi forces. They have also reportedly been
deprived of medical supplies and other humanitarian aid. Despite
their maltreatment — and abandonment by America — the MEK have
been a source of valuable intelligence information from inside Iran
on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Britain and the EU nations removed MEK from their terrorist
lists in 2008 and 2009. Now, after a long legal battle, the US
State Department is about to delist MEK as a terrorist
organization. That is a good step, but what else will State do?
The question is not rhetorical. The MEK members still in Iraq,
who may number as many as 3,000, have been relocated in Iraq to
Camp Liberty. But they are still vulnerable to attack and — as the
MEK fears most — to deportation to Iran where they will be
imprisoned or murdered. We may not have a strict legal
responsibility for their safety, but having declared them
“protected” under the Geneva Convention, we have at least a moral
responsibility to ensure their safety. That we have not done. As a
result, we may be responsible for their eventual massacre.
While all this is going on, wars both large and small are
brewing around the world. The Chinese and Japanese dispute the
Senkaku Islands off Okinawa, under which are enormous oil and gas
reserves. Japan is about to declare clear ownership of the islands,
and the Chinese have signaled that war may result if it does. While
we sit mute, that dispute could erupt in fighting all too soon. If
it does, that war would briefly overshadow the coming war between
Israel and Iran.
But it won’t overshadow the coming release of about one-third of
the terrorists now confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Obama
administration is reportedly about to announce the release to Yemen
of about 55 of Gitmo’s inmates, coming closer to Obama’s goal of
closing the facility. Will this make us safer? Will Yemen confine
these men or release them as so many others have been released once
transferred to their native countries?
That question is answered definitively by the recent attack on
our consulate in Benghazi, Libya in which Ambassador Stevens and
three others were killed. Sufyan Ben Qumu, a leader of the al Qaeda
connected Ansar al-Sharia terrorist group, is suspected to have
been the planner of that attack. He was a prisoner at Gitmo until
he was released to Libya in 2007.
I am confident in predicting that none of these issues will be
part of the campaign debate this week or at all before Election
Day. Instead, we’ll probably be hearing about Mitt Romney’s tax
returns or Joe Biden’s remark that cheerleaders are the best of
collegiate athletes. On Saturday, Biden said “They are amazing. You
think I’m joking. You think I’m joking. They’re almost all
gymnasts. The stuff they do on hardwood, it absolutely blows my
mind, thinking, you know, they’re up there without a net. You
know?” Yes, Joe. We know.
