Afghanistan

Schools call off Taliban debate

by Michael Fumento on December 15, 2009

in Odds & Ends

“A principal in Arlington County, Virginia announced Monday that she will call off an assignment that asked students to represent the views of the Taliban during a mock United Nations after some parents called it inappropriate,” reports the Washington Post.

Yeah, you could say that.

Next week’s debate subject: “Resolved, the killing of 12 million people in the Holocaust was icky but nevertheless necessary.”

Obama Blunders in Honduras and Afghanistan

by Hans Bader on June 29, 2009

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The U.S. is meddling in Honduras to prop up an anti-American ruler backed by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. After Honduran president Manuel Zelaya attempted to expand and perpetuate his rule by holding a referendum declared illegal by his country’s supreme court, and ignored objections by his country’s Congress (and even members of his own party), he was removed by his country’s military and replaced by the Congress. Now, Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are seeking his reinstatement.

This makes no sense at all. How would we in the United States feel if foreigners attacked us for removing our President (as Congress came close to doing with Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, who were both impeached), for seeking to make himself a dictator? Why should the U.S. meddle in other countries to help hostile rulers who have mismanaged their own countries and never helped us?

The Obama Administration is also needlessly undermining our intelligence-gathering capabilities by giving Miranda warnings to terrorists in Afghanistan. That can only harm our national security. Nothing in the Constitution or international law gives such enemy combatants Miranda rights on foreign soil.

Obama Administration Gives Miranda Warnings to Enemy Combatants in Afghanistan, Even Though They Are Not Legally Required

by Hans Bader on June 19, 2009

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty

The Obama Administration is now requiring investigators to give Miranda warnings to some “captured foreign fighters” in Afghanistan, advising them that they have the “right to remain silent” rather than cooperate with American investigators! (Congressman Mike Rogers witnessed this while on a fact-finding mission in Afghanistan). Congress wasn’t told about this bizarre policy shift, which is apparently part of the Administration’s “global justice initiative.” But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that this development “would not surprise him.”

This is extraordinarily stupid. As Obama himself once recognized, foreign terrorists do not have Miranda rights.

Miranda warnings are NOT required by international law for anyone, much less enemy combatants who do not follow the rules of war. Most countries not only do not require such warnings, but regard them as being at odds with the goal of getting at the truth. Miranda warnings are not a requirement of customary international law or international human-rights law (unlike torture, which is clearly banned by treaties like the Convention Against Torture). You don’t get Miranda-like warnings even in many European countries. (The word Miranda refers to Miranda v. Arizona, a controversial 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1966 that for the first time mandated such warnings). Even in countries that do have similar warnings, they are generally mandated only by statute or the common law, not by the country’s constitution, and thus can be rescinded at the will of the national legislature (and thus can hardly be deemed to be a universal or inalienable “human right”). French anti-terror laws are much tougher than U.S. laws like the Patriot Act.

And these captured foreign fighters are neither U.S. citizens nor on American soil at the time of their capture and interrogation, so the U.S. Constitution gives them no right to Miranda warnings, either.

Destabilizing Afghanistan: the Quagmire Expands

by Hans Bader on May 5, 2009 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Economy, Features, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Trade

The anti-American Taliban extremists are resurgent not only in Afghanistan, where they once sheltered Osama Bin Laden, but also in neighboring Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons) as well. Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing the Swat Valley, which is dominated by the Taliban.

But the Obama Administration stubbornly refuses to learn from the Bush Administration’s mistakes in Afghanistan. It’s stepping up efforts to wipe out the mainstay of the Afghan economy, by eradicating the opium poppies that Afghan farmers cultivate. Afghans are so poor that the poppies are 60 percent of their economy: a bigger fraction of their economy than agriculture and manufacturing combined are of the U.S. economy. Many Afghans have little choice but to grow opium: the Soviet invasion and occupation destroyed their irrigation works (and roads), making large-scale food production and transport extremely difficult. And when food prices went up in 2006 and 2007 as a result of ethanol mandates and rising demand for food in India and China, thousands of Afghan children starved to death. The Bush Administration’s attempts to eradicate the poppies turned many Afghans against America, and helped fuel the Taliban’s resurgence.

Jacob Sullum gives a number of reasons why the Administration’s anti-opium campaign will backfire and is probably doomed to failure, such as:

2. “The terrain is a guerrilla’s dream. In addition to acres of shoulder-high poppy plants, rows and rows of hard-packed mud walls, used to stand up grape vines, offer ideal places for ambushes and defense.”
3. “The opium is tilled in heavily populated areas…The prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population.”
. . .
5. Opium poppies are “by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm.”
6. “The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say.”
7. “The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.”

Some will argue that the U.S. supported drug-eradication programs in Colombia, despite its civil war, so why not in Afghanistan. But the two countries are vastly different. Colombia was and is a much more prosperous country, with income levels ten times greater, and life expectancies 30 years longer, than in Afghanistan, which is one of the world’s poorest (and most warlike) countries. There are viable alternatives to growing drugs in Colombia, unlike in arid, impoverished Afghanistan.

In a war, you can’t be too fastidious about local customs. In World War II, the U.S. fought the Japanese with the assistance of Naga headhunters. We didn’t give them lectures about their practice of collecting the heads of their enemies (not that I would suggest that growing drugs is as bad as killing people). In the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied itself with tribesmen in Laos and Vietnam who grew opium and other drugs. We didn’t try to destroy their drugs. That would have made them kill us rather than support us.

If you want to win a war in a country you are occupying, sometimes you have to try to win the hearts and minds of the local people, rather than telling them what to do.

For those who think that tolerating drug cultivation is somehow an extraordinary measure: is it remotely as extraordinary as using torture, as the Government did in the aftermath of 9/11 (producing false information and bogus orange alerts in the process)? Keep in mind that for most of American history, there were no bans on drug cultivation (the federal government did not regulate marijuana until the 1930s), but torture to obtain confessions has always been illegal in the U.S.

If we can do something like torture (which I opposed) to win the War on Terror, why not something far less extreme and less historically-unprecedented, like allowing Afghan farmers to keep cultivating opium poppies?

And for those of you bleeding-heart liberals who objected when the phone companies were given protection against lawsuits for assisting the federal government in its antiterror surveillance programs (something I supported; such surveillance would be perfectly legal in many countries, like Sweden): is it not far worse to make Afghan families starve by destroying their crops?

Obama Insults America’s Allies, Endangers Economy

by Hans Bader on March 9, 2009 · 4 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, International, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

Not content with endangering the economy by pushing through $8 trillion in bailouts and welfare, Obama has now insulted the British, our only major ally in fighting the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.

Obama did this by dissing both the late Winston Churchill, who led Europe’s fight against the Nazis, and the current British Prime Minister. Staffers then compounded the offense by deriding Britain as being no more important than any of the world’s 190 other countries. (That’s right. The country that invented parliamentary democracy and whose troops fought and died with ours in Korea and other bloody wars against totalitarian regimes is deemed no more important than a tiny county like Nauru, which has only 14,000 people and survives through money laundering and selling passports to non-citizens).

The only European country that has really helped the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq is Britain. France, Germany, etc., have only sent token contingents to Afghanistan (for non-combat roles) and nothing to Iraq. The less Britain is willing to do for us in the future, the more of our own troops we will have to put into Afghanistan in the future.

By the way, Obama’s election won’t get us anything from the French. The French president effusively praised Obama before his election, but then refused to send any additional troops or personnel to help the U.S. in Afghanistan after the election.

I recently visited my French relatives, who live near Nice. All of them –- ranging from my wife’s avowedly Marxist father, who called me the night of Obama’s election at 2 a.m. in the morning to congratulate me, to her centrist, more distant relatives –- say that Obama’s election doesn’t entitle the U.S. to any additional help or cooperation, whether it’s ending bans on American products, or sending more French troops to Afghanistan.

My wife’s dad takes Obama’s election as America’s confession that we were wrong all these years – a racist, imperialistic, oppressive, hegemonic power that deserves no help.

My wife’s more distant relatives, many of whom like the U.S., nevertheless say that France should look after itself and its own industries, and let the U.S., which is wealthier and more powerful, take on the exclusive role of rooting out the Taliban. And they think now is not the time for France to end its trade restrictions on U.S. products, even those that the WTO has said are invalid, since France needs all the jobs it can get.

Obama campaigned on the theme that he would get our allies to help us more, by replacing George Bush, whom he claimed had singlehandedly antagonized the world. But Obama’s election is getting us nothing from our “allies,” and only serves to embolden hostile countries like Russia, which ridiculed the Obama Administration for a recent gaffe in which the State Department incompetently translated the Russian word “reset,” with embarrassing results.