Brain Food for a Sunday Afternoon

Lt Col. David Anderson, Kanani Fong, and family

This Sunday as the Eastern seaboard begins to relax and restore power and pump out flooded basements in the wake of Hurricane Irene, an article in Southern California's Orange Country Register remind us that we are just two weeks away from pausing to remember the day modern America changed forever. The article was penned by my good friend and fellow blogger Kanani Fong, who in addition to being a gifted writer, is the wife of Lt. Col. David Anderson, an Army surgeon who just returned from his second deployment to Afghanistan. Her story told in her own words show the depth of commitment that many Americans have felt to their country and fellow citizens since September 11, 2001. She begins.

Loving someone at war is the second-worst kind of missing you will ever experience. The worst kind of missing is if they die. We don’t like to think of it, but we do.

My husband, Lt. Col. David B. Anderson, joined the Army as an active-duty surgeon when he was 52. Since then, this midlife turn of events has taken him to two areas of conflict. First was Kunar, where he was the surgeon in charge of the 759th Forward Surgical Unit. The second, from which he just returned, was in Herat. Both were in Afghanistan.

Deployments have a rhythm: Inhale, he’s here; exhale, he’s gone.

Kanani continues by explaining how she came to be an army wife in what she calls middle age and I call just reaching your plateau. In a few short paragraphs she explains how she has managed to raise their two teenage children and maintain both their home and still find time to lend her support to the troops and their families. Take the time to read the article and visit her blog the Kitchen Dispatch where she will keep you abreast on her life as an Army surgeons wife.

Read more:
An Army doctor's wife explains war at middle age

Rents in the fabric of Globalization

This next post comes by way of Steve DeAngelis who write the Enterprise Resilience Management blog. In this post Steve examines the rents in the fabric of Globalization and what America can do to mend them.

Overall globalization has been a good thing for the world. Millions (if not billions) of people have emerged from poverty's grasp as globalization washed over the shores of the better part of the world during the last several decades. Admittedly, globalization's effects have varied by region and state. Along with winners globalization has created some losers. As a result, globalization's fabric has become threadbare in spots. Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known advocate for the underprivileged and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, points out, for example, that unskilled labor in developed countries like the United States has been hit hard by the consequences of globalization. ["Tripped up by globalisation," Financial Times, 18 August 2011] Sachs insists, "The path to recovery now lies ... in upgraded skills, increased exports and public investments in infrastructure and low-carbon energy."

Steve continues his post by building off  the original prescription by Jeffrey Sachs, where he brings much needed insight from someone who is fulfilling a calling to help develop a future worth living.

Although I agree with Sachs on the basic thrust of what is required to bring real recovery to the U.S. economy, we differ in some particulars. Sachs, for one thing, believes corporations should be taxed more heavily. I fear that would only make matters worse since corporations would likely send more of their money to tax havens overseas. Clearly, tax revenues need to increase and government spending needs to be reeled in if basic government needs and essential social services are going to be provided; but the best way to increase tax revenues is to put people back to work. Corporations that create jobs should be rewarded for their efforts rather than be penalized. I've argued since the beginning of the recession that more needed to be done to encourage entrepreneurs to start businesses and hire employees. Unfortunately, it looks like politicians are more interested in pointing fingers of blame at each other than they are about trying to work together to stimulate job creation. Getting off the soapbox, let me return to the subject of globalization.

Read more:
The Holes in Globalization's Fabric

Have we reached this point in our history?

Finally, comes this guest post over at Zenpundit written by Pundita who uses an amusing video to introduce and illustrate her point.

The title of this post refers to the punch line in a series of TV commercials in the USA for Sears Optical eyeglasses. The ads feature amusing skits of people in serious need of a pair of glasses, such as the woman who mistakes a police patrol car for a taxicab. But helped along by bravura performances from Tara L. Clark as a blind-as-a-bat cat owner and Squirty as a wild racoon who can’t believe his luck, one of the skits is so funny it’s gone viral on the internet:

Pundita notes the contribution of the master of zenpundit Mark Safranski to the discussion with this comment.

Over at ZenPundit, Mark Safranski has again expressed concern about what he calls an emerging American oligarchy, an elite that’s manipulating the rest of the American populace to accept its rule. Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria is seriously proposing that America replace its president with a prime minister and Congress with a parliament — with an upper house, I suppose, to be stuffed with Mark’s oligarchs, duly elected of course, so that Americans will stop the troublesome habit of vehemently disagreeing with one another. 

Read and watch for a final desert of brain food.
Missing Something?

A Sirocco wind of change blows across the Middle East

Bahrain Protests

Lybian Protests

Egypt after the fall

Changes are afoot in the Middle East, or are they? As millions of what Professor and author Oliver Roy, has called the post-Islamist generation have taken to the streets to protest and call for immediate change in the governments that for some, have ruled since aniquity. Professor Roy writing in the New Statesman declares what we are witnessing is not an Islamic Revolution that threatens to underpin the West.

Look at those involved in the uprisings, and it is clear that we are dealing with a post-Islamist generation. For them, the great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history, their parents' affair. The members of this young generation aren't interested in ideology: their slogans are pragmatic and concrete - "Erhal!" or "Go now!". Unlike their predecessors in Algeria in the 1980s, they make no appeal to Islam; rather, they are rejecting corrupt dictatorships and calling for democracy. This is not to say that the demonstrators are secular; but they are operating in a secular political space, and they do not see in Islam an ideology capable of creating a better world.

The same goes for other ideologies: they are nationalist (look at all the flag-waving) without advocating nationalism. Particularly striking is the abandonment of conspiracy theories. The United States and Israel - or France, in the case of Tunisia - are no longer identified as the cause of all the misery in the Arab world. The slogans of pan-Arabism have been largely absent, too, even if the copycat effect that brought Egyptians and Yemenis into the streets following the events in Tunis shows that the "Arab world" is a political reality.

Read More:
This is not an Islamic revolution

And along the same line, comes this first of several reports that will be filed by Andrew Exum, whose blog Abu Muqawama, has been a daily read since Andrew was a student at Kings College in London. Today, Exum is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is currently in Egypt where he filed this report.

First, there is a sense you get that many Egyptians honestly feel the only thing standing in between the Egyptian nation and greatness was the sclerotic Mubarak regime. Now that Muabark is gone, the military -- and whatever government that follows -- will naturally struggle to meet those expectations.

Second, the Egyptian people have now witnessed a dramatic display of people power: mass demonstrations effectively removed from power a man who seemed immovably secure in his post just one month ago. The incentives are there for every group of people in Egypt with a grievance (which is to say everyone) to now strike or demonstrate to see, in effect, what they can get. The military is growing increasingly frustrated with these demonstrations and has ordered them to cease. But the incentive structure is all wrong: even if you don't think you'll get anything, why would you not demonstrate right now? The worst case scenario is, you get nothing. But heck, you might get something!

One of the sources of the military's frustration leads to my third concern, which is the fact that even if the people have a valid grievance, there is no real authority to negotiate with at the moment. Egypt needs a transitional government of some sort, but right now, you've got people agitating for higher wages, back pay, and more reforms on the one hand, and a military on the other hand that is not prepared in the least to hear these concerns and act on them.

Read more:
Egypt Trip Report Part 1

UPDATE ON EGYPT TRIP
Report Part II

How this will all play out is transformational history in the making. Will leaders emerge to consolidate the youthful passion and start the Egypt down the long road to connecting with the greater global community? As Exum points out the army of Egypt like our own army in Iraq and now Afghanistan is not equipped for nation building. As a measure of the kind of security needed to secure a country and begin recovery, we can pause and look at the U.S. Army in Germany after World War II. We had two armies made up of 12 divisions from 1945-1948 just in the American Sector. Troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan were spread to the thickness of cellophane in comparison.

After many wobbly starts Iraq seems to have a functioning government that is counting the days to when the last American soldier leaves. Afghanistan is a horse of a different color and a people historically and socially operating in a different universe that either Iraq or Egypt and any other Middle East country. Afghanistan a country whose fractured mountain ranges make it's people as remote from each other as if they were living on islands.

Two things caught my eye this week about Afghanistan. Bing West has a new book The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan that looks at the war, the people who are fighting and the way out. Andrew Axum from the the previous piece reviewed West's book for the Wall Street Journal.

Bing West's "The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan" is one of the best books yet written on the war in Afghanistan. I disagree with the way Mr. West characterizes the war at times, but "The Wrong War" is filled with both vivid descriptions of the Afghan fighting and sound advice concerning how counterinsurgencies should be waged.

First, the grit. "The Wrong War" contains some of the most compelling descriptions of small-unit combat that I have ever read. Mr. West has argued in the past that the U.S. armed forces have lost their "warrior ethos" and calls them here "a gigantic Peace Corps." But these claims in no way square with what he depicts.

Read more at.
Small Wars Journal

Going hand in hand with West's book is this article from U.S. Army Combined Arms Center's Military Review. Lt. Colonel Michael C. Veneri, USAF wrote this about his tour of duty training officers at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan this past summer. His observations are the basis for what he describes is a metaphor for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

I spent a summer as the physical education (PE) mentor to the National Military Academy of Afghanistan’s (NMAA) Physical Education department. My predecessor had recommended that I bring some equipment, so I brought along 30 basketballs, 12 volleyballs, and 12 soccer balls, as well as a few American footballs. Another previous U.S. mentor had provided the PE department with an electric air compressor, one that charges a car battery, has a floodlight, and probably retails for about $50 at any auto store. I used this to pump air into a few balls when I first arrived. About a month later, I needed to fill up a few basketballs for some drills I planned to show the PE instructors. One of the Afghan PE instructors, a lieutenant colonel and the overseer of the air pump, grabbed the balls and began to fill one of them up.

I had been talking with my interpreter for a few minutes when I noticed the basketball was not getting any air. I pulled the pin out and found the clamp at the end of the fabric hose had come loose and some of the fabric had frayed. The pump was pushing air out but, because of the frayed fabric, air was not making it into the ball. The Afghan lieutenant colonel came over and told me it was not broken but that it would take time to fill up the basketball. I told him the pump was broken. He said no, it would take time. The equipment manager, a 47-year-old senior NCO who had been a colonel prior to Karzai’s arrival, came over to see if he could fix the pump, as did the boxing instructor. For the next ten minutes, three men, all 40-odd years old, sat befuddled before this air compressor as if it were some sort of an oracle.

After turning the air pump on and off several times, turning it upside down, and shaking it, the Afghans’ perplexity seemed to diminish when, through my translator, I said the fabric hose was frayed and was preventing a good seal. Ah, they could fix this problem. The boxing instructor knew what to do. He grabbed a role of scotch tape, provided courtesy of the U.S. government, and wrapped the frayed end with scotch tape—not duct tape or maybe even masking tape. While those products may have had a chance at temporarily fixing the problem, such items were unavailable at NMAA, unless a U.S. mentor provided them. In the spirit of the often-cited Lawrence of Arabia—that better they do it tolerably rather than I do it perfectly—I kept my mouth shut, waited, and watched as these three men worked the problem.

Lt. Col. Veneri goes on to discuss a fundemental difference between American and Afghan decision making.

Initiative.

Initiative, as a value, permeates American culture. In every aspect of U.S. society, someone thinks there is a better way; not so with the Afghans. I did not get any sense of a “can do” attitude from the PE department or from any other Afghan I encountered. They readily took what I provided— lesson plans, equipment, textbooks—but when I asked them how they planned on improving their lessons or expanding their curriculum or figuring out a supply system, they had no answers, no notion of how to improve, and no institutional mechanisms to foster improvement. The PE instructors told me I could provide them with improved lesson plans, but they would not do it themselves. I finally figured out that the level above them had to approve every change, which ultimately made the dean the one who determined what was best for the PE department, not the PE instructors themselves. This strict hierarchy prevented any type of decentralization of authority or primary level decision making. It also quashed any initiative from bubbling up from the bottom. While hierarchy is not new to military organizations and is a fundamental trait throughout Afghan culture, it proved incapacitating when I was trying to make changes within the PE department. Instructors could not change their syllabi or their method of teaching without supervisor approval.

Read the whole article
Multiplying by Zero
Major H/T to Kanani at Kitchen Dispatch for sending me this article. She has a major stake in what we are doing in Afghanistan as her "hubs" an army surgeon, just started his second deployment

Reads for a Sunday Afternoon



President Obama greeting President Hu









Nick Kristof

North Orange County Military Support Group

  The following stories caught my eye and in turn I share them with my readers and casual visitors.

With the state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao last week just over, I thought this post by Feng of the information dissemination blog was a very insightful view of U.S. China rivalry.

As President Hu Jintao visits USA this week, I have seen a wave of articles about China vs US. They often try to explore the following the following subjects:

1) Has China surpassed USA?

2) China's unfair trade policies and currency manipulation.

3) China may seem impressive on the outside, but the communist system is hiding a lot of brewing problems.

4) What should US do about the growing PLA?

5) Is a crash imminent in China?

Read more
Some Thoughts About Growing US China Rivalry

And in a continuing thread about China comes this from Tom Barnett who notes that respected journalist and China expert Jim Fallows are of the same mind.

Jim Fallows was supposed to be on that NPR segment with me and Gideon Rachman, or so I was told by host Guy Raz. It didn't happen for whatever reason, but clearly Mr. Fallows was tuned in and came away feeling that we shared a very similar perspective on China.

Read more:
Fallows and I are of similar minds on China

And to show that China with all it's contrivances about advancements, is still provincial as any of their ancient dynasties ever were when it came to freedom of expression. Nicholas Kristof gets "harmonized" for starting a blog in China.

Psst. Don’t tell the Chinese government, but I started a Chinese-language blog here in China, and it contains counterrevolutionary praise of dissidents. It’s at http://blog.sina.com.cn/jisidao.

Now let’s count — 1, 2, 3 ... — and see how long my blog stays up. My hunch is that State Security will “harmonize” it quickly. In Chinese, Web sites are mockingly referred to as “harmonized” when the government vaporizes them so as to nurture a “harmonious society.”

Read more:
Banned in Beijing

Turning to home. This next read comes from blog friend Kanani Fong from the Kitchen Dispatch where she reports on the recent United State Army suicide study.

"Psychologists will tell you we're putting them (soldiers) under as much stress in a six year period as if they were 80 years old and living their entire life in Seattle, Washington. But what's hopeful is our programs are beginning to work, and our leaders are fully engaged with the problem, and we're getting at the stigma associated with the issue." -GEN Peter Chiarelli

Here is a sketch of some of their findings

As stated by MG Carpenter, among the Army's finding were:•There was no single cause for suicide, rather it was a combination of things.

•Most of the suicides in the study took place among soldiers who had not yet deployed.

•Most of the suicides took place early in a soldier's career.

•The economy alone could not be pointed out as a reason for a person taking their life.

•Families claim that the Army was something the person had been very proud of.

•The majority were young, white males.

•Over 50% had a relationship problem with a spouse or partner.

Most helpful is the view from the surgeon's wife, who peels away a layer of general terms to reveal one of the root causes of suicide.

While the Army was very good at concretely describing triggers for stress, they did not use the word depression. This was akin to giving a definition without using the word itself. Perhaps they didn't want to couch it in such general terms, but talk about it in specifics.

However, while one may talk about "resilliency training," to not mention depression misses the mark when it comes to expunging the stigma of mental health. In 2008, Dr. Ian Cook, a psychiatrist at UCLA stated that untreated depression is the leading cause of suicide.

Kanani concludes with this caution.

In a time of funding cuts, mental health services is one of the areas that states often cut first. Not only does the public, but all military families and friends need to be made aware of the threat being made to mental health services, as well as keeping tabs on whether or not the insurance industry is increasing or decreasing coverage.

Read more:
Generals Reveal Findings of Suicide Study

Kanani is putting more that her keyboard to use when she is writing about service people and veterans. She recently single-handily founded the North Orange County Military Support Group.

OC MSG is a non-political support group is for families and friends of those who serve in the U.S. Military. We also welcome families of military contractors. Positive, supportive and project-oriented, we meet to send letters and boxes to troops. In addition, we focus on stress reduction through wellness; help people find creative outlets for their experiences; and give moral support for those whose loved ones who are deployed.

The NOC MSG honors the men, women and families who opt to serve their country through the military even though each of us has a different perspective about war and politics.

This group will gladly work with other troop and veteran support groups such as VFW, American Legion, Blue Star Mothers, Gold Star Mothers, Quilts of Valor, and IAVA to name but a few. No dues are required, and meetings will happen as soon as we have a dozen or so like-minded folks.

I urge anyone who is in the area of North Orange County California and wants to offer a hand and support for Kanani's group to get involved.

Visit the site
North Orange Country Military Support Group




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