Part 6 (1/2)
His arrogance seems boundless. He is so convinced that we are stuck with him that he feels emboldened to threaten to join the Taliban himself. Our actions are partly to blame. Rather than provide our aid through his central government, such as it is, we have to start making end runs around Karzai and deal directly with the tribal leaders at the district and provincial levels. To the extent that we cut him out of the deal, we can prove to the Afghan people that we're not his ”enablers.” We can offer a ”third way,” a practical alternative between the Karzai regime's greed and corruption and the Taliban's oppressive medieval rule. With cooperation at the local level, we might be able to bring about a peaceful, smoothly functioning society in which music is allowed, girls can go to school, and towns have clean water and electricity.
Meanwhile, relations with Pakistan, though frequently challenged from different quarters, are better now than at any other time since the low point of September 12, 2001. That's when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to bomb the country back to the Stone Age if it didn't help us by turning against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Officially, the Pakistanis did indeed join our side; secretly, they continued to play both ends against the middle, especially through their intelligence agency, the ISI. When we invaded Afghanistan, the Pakistanis provided safe haven to terrorists who fled. There were two reasons for this behavior. First, preparing for when we would eventually leave Afghanistan, they wanted to stay on good terms with the Taliban; that would give them a friendly neighbor to their west, balanced against their dismal relations.h.i.+p with India to the east. Second, they needed the terrorists to become involved in their proxy war with India, especially in Kashmir.
But the monster has turned against its master. Our relations with the Pakistanis have been improving-not because of anything the Obama administration has done but because they've finally acknowledged that they have no control over the Pakistani Taliban. At last, they've seen the light: The most significant danger to the survival of their government and the security of their nuclear weapons is not India, the external threat, but the Pakistani Taliban, the threat right at home.
To be fair, the administration has certainly taken advantage of the Pakistanis' awakening and willingness to work more closely and effectively with America. It is often thanks to good intelligence from Pakistan that our drone strikes are so effective. Currently, we have several hundred Special Operations forces in the country working as advisers and trainers with the Pakistani army. We need more, if the Taliban is to be defeated, but progress is being made.
And there are still gaps in the increasing cooperation. In December 2009, seven of our CIA officers were killed in Khost, Afghanistan, by terrorists in the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan, Pakistan. It was also in North Waziristan that Faisal Shahzad trained with the Pakistani Taliban. It gets more complicated. The Haqqani network is loyal to Mullah Omar, head of the Afghan Taliban. Should not our allies join with us in getting some payback in Waziristan for both the CIA murders and the Times Square attempt? They will not go after the Haqqani network for the simple reason that when we leave Afghanistan, they hope that the Afghan Taliban will return home and oppose Indian influence there. Obama's announcement of a withdrawal date only encourages this kind of thinking. So our former fault lines with Pakistan may be opening again.
Moreover, even as we've been cooperating more with the country in many ways, the various terror groups, unfortunately, have also been cooperating more with one another, sharing resources and capabilities. Greater numbers of them are engaging in attacks beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. This greatly troubles Bruce Riedel, who helped formulate President Obama's AfPak strategy and is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy: The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And this is disturbing because it is a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.
In other words, even as we seem to be getting more help and cooperation from the Pakistani government, we face an increasingly complex challenge.
The Price of Freedom So based upon what we know, or think we know, what would I say to Rick Rescorla about our handling of the war on terror? That's a conversation that, frankly, I wouldn't want to have right now. I would be ashamed to admit the truth to a man who gave his life protecting those in his care. And that truth is that our government has acted with neither his resolve nor his focus on the task at hand. Our leaders have overestimated the value of political correctness just as they continue to underestimate the nature, motives, tenacity, and capabilities of the enemy. The two misevaluations, I believe, are closely related. At times, it seems that our strongest, most effective defense has been the frequent inept.i.tude of our enemy. The clock's running out on that strategy.
Remember, the 1993 truck bombing in the World Trade Center was widely derided as an amateurish failure, even though six people were killed. After all, the two towers still stood proud. Rick Rescorla drew a different lesson, and we are in great peril if we cannot follow his example. He redoubled his efforts because he recognized that this was not the end of it but the beginning. Because of his clarity of vision, many families of Morgan Stanley employees were spared the pain of losing a loved one. Will the same be said of the intelligence operatives and other security officials who have been given a lesson, and some valuable breathing room, by the three lone terrorists we've seen in this chapter?
Nearly a decade has gone by since Rick's pa.s.sing, but the lesson he taught us-and that is still an invaluable teaching tool, if we pay heed-is as important right this moment, as you read, as it was on September 11, 2001. Vigilance is indeed the price of freedom. Preparation is the guarantee of survival.
CHAPTER TEN.
When the Bullets Are Real, There Aren't Any Toy Soldiers We Need an Effective Military Policy and Strategy
In early February of 2008, I was in the heat of the presidential campaign as one of the few remaining Republicans still in the hunt for the nomination. I had received word from a former cabinet member and staff member that his son, who was a captain in the U.S. Army, had just arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Was.h.i.+ngton having been severely wounded in Iraq by an improvised explosive device (IED) and had in fact lost an arm and suffered other serious injuries. I was scheduled to be in Was.h.i.+ngton a few days later and arranged to visit Captain David Underwood at Walter Reed. I wanted the visit to be personal and private, with no press tagging along or even knowing that I was going. This visit was not a political photo op. It was an opportunity to pay respect and check on the son of a dear friend and colleague, and I hoped to bring some encouragement and appreciation to a true American hero.
As I visited with David that afternoon and watched his wife and children fill his room with their presence and love, I was reminded of the enormous sacrifice our men and women in uniform make on behalf of the rest of us. Though David had lost an arm and would carry shrapnel from a bomb in his legs and body for the rest of his life, here was a soldier who didn't complain of his loss but expressed his grat.i.tude that none of his men had been killed while under his command. These are the men and women who make our country and our world safe and free. We can't do enough for them.
Over two million men and women have served in our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. And despite what some on the left might say, they haven't been sent there to fight ”culture wars.” These are wars fought with real bullets and real bombs. Death, disfigurement, and lifelong disabilities are among the heavy prices paid in the struggle. With so much at stake-and with additional threats no doubt looming around the globe-our soldiers can prevail and survive only by staying focused on their core mission. They should not be relegated to the status of advanced social workers. Those in our military are, of necessity, trained primarily to ”kill people and break things”; that's the plan. ”Winning hearts and minds,” though they can do it well, is a luxury when people are trying to kill them; making friends among the local population is not the main thing when the enemy is paying no attention whatsoever to the traditional rules of engagement or the Geneva Conventions.
Giving Back to Our Veterans To make their jobs even more difficult, we've stretched our military-both as individuals and as a united fighting force-almost to the breaking point. It is common for a soldier to be a.s.signed two or three tours on the battlefield; four and even five total tours are not all that unusual. Fortunately, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has promised a much-deserved (and saner) new protocol: Soon, our troops will enjoy two years at home for every year served overseas.
Thankfully, he has also addressed the military's past shortcomings in dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health issues caused or exacerbated by war experiences. ”This is a debt the country owes them for their service,” he has said. ”It needs to be the first check we write.”
Amen to that! A RAND study in 2008 found that about 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan vets suffer from either PTSD or depression; worse, a later Stanford University study concluded it was likely closer to 35 percent. Soldiers serving the multiple deployments I mentioned are, according to the American Journal for Public Health American Journal for Public Health, three times more likely to suffer from PTSD and depression than those on their first deployment. As I write, the Department of Defense (DOD) is officially listing 35,000 as wounded in action. Add those who suffer mental health problems, however, and the total wounded increases by hundreds of thousands. Almost 20 percent are affected by a traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by proximity to an explosion. Mental health problems of one sort or another, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, have been diagnosed in almost 250,000 veterans of the two operations in the Middle East. Of these, tens of thousands have both both PTSD and TBI. PTSD and TBI.
These statistics, alarming as they are, leave out part of the harsh truth: To this day, despite all of the information available to the public, the stigma of mental health problems is still with us. One result is that too many servicemen and -women are afraid to seek help or talk honestly about their issues; such openness, they fear, will hurt their chances for career advancement inside or outside the military. Perhaps this kind of fear is often justified. All of the press about veterans' mental health issues is a double-edged sword: Important as it is for these problems to be brought to light, wary civilian employers may hesitate to hire the soldiers who are victims. (Vietnam vets had much the same problem after that war, when seemingly every hourlong TV drama and many major high-profile movies featured a soldier home from Nam who, unable to cope with civilian life, eventually went ballistic.) The military, at least, is trying to avoid the stereotyping within the ranks. The DOD has updated its security clearance application, no longer asking a veteran whether he or she has been treated for mental health issues in the preceding seven years. It's a start.
Homeless Veterans Not everyone, however, can benefit from such an enlightened approach. For veterans who remain deeply affected, and for their families, the damage caused by severe mental problems can be even more troubling. Mental and neurological problems can result in spousal abuse, divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness, and suicide. For those reasons, as mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2010, the military now requires confidential, in-person mental health screenings of all troops when they return home. Even so, the military does not have nearly enough medical personnel to provide the necessary mental health treatment, especially for veterans who don't live in or near urban areas.
Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are at especially high risk for homelessness. Some have portrayed homeless veterans as very likely to have a drug or alcohol problem. In fact, that is often an incorrect stereotype. While some vets are indeed homeless because of service-related mental health issues, including addiction, others are servicewomen who, with their children, have been victimized by foreclosures. Because subprime loans were heavily marketed to military families, the rate of foreclosure in military neighborhoods rose four times faster than the U.S. average rate in 2008. Veterans' advocates are calling for a one-year moratorium before the home of a veteran returning from combat can be put into foreclosure. I think this is a great idea; in fact, it's the least we can do for people who have sacrificed and risked so much for the rest of us.
But not everyone, it seems, is grateful. Sometimes the homes of troops serving abroad have been seized because they were not in residence to comply with the rigid rules of homeowners' a.s.sociations. If such wrongheaded groups cannot respect the debt they owe to their neighbors in the military, who are protecting their lives, perhaps laws should be enacted to protect their absent neighbors' property rights.
In 2009 the military vowed to end homelessness for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. As I write, it is estimated that about 130,000 of these men and women remain homeless every night. We definitely have a long way to go.
The System Is a Mess If you think the government bureaucracy will do a good job of handling your health care (that would be ObamaCare), one look at the VA system will change your mind. The existing system is both extremely frustrating and flagrantly wasteful, as you may know from your own experience or the challenges faced by family and friends. Good care is available, but only after waiting up to six months for the first appointment. Often, veterans must travel great distances to get care. The situation is worse for women than for men; as more women have joined the ranks, the system has not kept up with their needs. In general, processing of claims takes between four months and a year, while appeals of claims take, on average, two years. In the meantime, some vets are so badly injured that they can't work and have no income.
Incredibly, the DOD's and VA's separate systems for health records are not yet fully compatible. Files are lost as veterans move from the DOD system into the VA. The DOD does not even keep electronic records, now considered an essential component of health records. To fix this mess, all patient records should be electronic and easily transferable between the two departments.
A further complication is that there are two parallel disability benefits systems, each with its own medical examinations and rates of compensation based upon disability ratings. There is a pilot program in place to create a single system, but it has to be expanded nationwide in order to cover all veterans.
Speaking of disability, let's examine the effectiveness of the VA itself. Officials readily admit that almost 20 percent of its disability ratings are wrong wrong. It's also true that the outcome of a claim depends heavily on the region where the claim is decided. Believe it or not (considering the time it typically takes to process claims), the VA evaluates claims processors by how quickly they process the paperwork, not not by the correctness of their decisions. Obviously, claims processors need better training. The VA needs to create a system that values accuracy above all, no matter where the claimant lives. by the correctness of their decisions. Obviously, claims processors need better training. The VA needs to create a system that values accuracy above all, no matter where the claimant lives.
Not everything is grim for veterans, however. Just as NASA's ”race for s.p.a.ce” led to the development of our modern world of computer technology, satellite communications, and so much more that we now take for granted, the long recoveries endured by our injured veterans have led to amazing advances in trauma care, burn treatment, and prosthetics. It is never less than heartbreaking to see the injuries of a soldier wounded in ambush or battle. Yet centers like the facial prosthetics lab at Lackland Air Force Base are developing remarkable techniques to ease the wounded patients' transition back to normal life, when possible. ”Our goal is to give them the best of the best,” says lab director Dr. Joe Villalobos. ”We're going to give them the ideal treatment.” Our veterans deserve nothing less.
Coming Home: Education and Employment The t.i.tle of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, pa.s.sed in 2008, suggests a creditable program. In fact, an expansion is in order. On the one hand, the benefits to pay for veterans to go to college are excellent, but these checks often arrive very late, leaving the beneficiaries scrambling to pay for tuition, food, and housing. There's just no excuse for that. Also, other worthwhile forms of education, such as vocational schools and Internet-based learning, still aren't covered. They should be.
As for employment, it's proved very tough for veterans to come home from overseas and find themselves smack in the middle of the Great Recession. During 2009, the unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans almost doubled. Let us recognize and praise companies that do the right thing for our veterans by giving them opportunities for employment. And let's offer them tax credits in return, so that other potential employers will be motivated to join in. Congress should be amenable to this idea, since it has already pa.s.sed the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act, giving veterans preference in hiring for government jobs. Of course (and I hope you're not surprised), it exempted congressional staff jobs-an act so shameful I hope it's been rectified by the time this book reaches print.
Where employment is concerned, too many servicemen and -women don't know their rights, and too many businesses don't understand their obligations under law. The situation is most complicated for National Guardsmen and reservists: According to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, businesses are required to take them back when they return home from a tour of duty, but many employers aren't complying. Some companies refuse to hire them, period, because they don't want the ha.s.sle of replacing them if there's another deployment.
A veteran can pursue an employment claim based upon the law, but the burden is on him to prove that he lost the job because of his service. This is backward. The burden should be on the employer to establish a legitimate reason for not taking him back. Yet there's another factor that discourages veterans from making a claim: Incredibly, it can take two years for such employment claims to be resolved.
National Guard and Reserves In addition to the daunting employment picture for the National Guard and reserves, their overuse in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a tremendous drain on them and their families, their communities, and businesses that would have liked to put them to work. In their civilian lives, a great number of them protect us as our police, firefighters, and paramedics. But since 9/11, as you may be amazed to read, there have been times when almost half of our combat troops in Iraq and more than half of those in Afghanistan have been either National Guard or reserves.
I saw this firsthand during my ten-and-a-half-year tenure as a governor, which included serving as commander in chief of our eleven thousand men and women of the Army and Air Force National Guard. Repeated deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and domestic duty, such as helping out in the aftermath of Katrina, wore heavily not only on the guard personnel but also on their families and employers.
Forgive me for bragging here about my guardsmen, but I'm going to anyway. The 39th Brigade of the Arkansas Guard were actually the first National Guard troops to make it to New Orleans from outside Louisiana. Later, when General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, and I were on a flight to Iraq, he told me a terrific story about the timing of their arrival. He was being quizzed by President Bush at the Katrina national command center in Texas as to when the guard would get to New Orleans. Then, at that very moment, the TV screen showed the 39th rolling into town. ”There they are, Mr. President!” the relieved general shouted. When he told me the story, he said, ”I will always love your guys from the 39th!”
As that event proved, we need our National Guard at home for emergencies. Did you know that at the time of Hurricane Katrina a third of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan? This is insane, since they're the go-to guys when disaster strikes: hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, ice storms, earthquakes, and man-made catastrophes like the horrendous BP oil deluge. Naturally, when large numbers of the guard are overseas, our governors are less able to respond to a crisis quickly and effectively. Getting help from other states eats up precious time and requires lots of red tape. (Oh, I forgot. . . . There's always the White House to provide a timely and worthwhile response!) Yet thank the Lord, there does exist an avenue that most people are not aware of: a very useful, efficient system known as the Emergency Management a.s.sistance Compact (EMAC). EMAC allows governors to share a.s.sets with other states on a moment's notice without the endless, time-consuming nonsense that so often slows things down when the federal bureaucracy is involved. Governors know that EMAC, though almost never mentioned in the media, is effective, quick, and responsive. It can make the difference between life-saving response and failure.
By the way, when our guardsmen are deployed overseas, their equipment goes with them. Much of it-including items you'd think we just might need sometime back home, such as helicopters and trucks-somehow gets left over there. So these tours of duty deprive states of both the personnel and the equipment required for emergencies. And without the latter, we can't even train new recruits.
Finally, there's one more reason to keep our National Guard here, and that's law enforcement, particularly along our troubled border with Mexico. It is the law, by the way, that our active-duty military and our reserves cannot partic.i.p.ate in actions there.
What Is Our Mission?
”We'll know it when we see it” may work as a definition of p.o.r.nography, as a Supreme Court justice once suggested, but not as a definition of victory in a war. And if we don't know the precise end our military is trying to achieve, we can't focus on the means to achieve it.
For example, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we've been following the strategy of ”clear, hold, and build.” In other words, we do it all! That is a dangerous lack of focus. Instead, the goal given to our troops should be to clear the enemy from targeted territory-just that alone. Next, the host country's troops and police should hold that cleared territory while civilians build, or rebuild, its infrastructure and inst.i.tutions. To put it bluntly, we've had too many of our troops spending too much of their time painting schools and digging wells. They should be allowed to focus on killing Islamic extremists who want us all to die.
Because of this scattershot, imprecise mission, a small group of Americans has borne the brunt of these wars by deploying again and again. The problem is that the DOD is calling on them to do tasks that should instead be undertaken by U.S. civilian agencies and our NATO allies.
As the former top commander of our forces in Afghanistan and a retired army general, Amba.s.sador Eikenberry is in a unique position to know exactly what our military should and should not be doing. For that reason, he's asked for more civilian personnel so that our troops can concentrate on their military mission, but he's so far received only about one civilian expert for every hundred troops-nowhere near what he needs. To carry out the many nonmilitary goals of the war in Afghanistan, the DOD needs more support from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.
We could also use much more military support from our NATO allies, but most have shown an aversion to combat. Most of the fighting is in southern Afghanistan, but both France and Germany have been unwilling to go there. (Think there's a connection? Oui, oui!) Okay, if NATO won't send or effectively deploy combat troops, let it contribute to stabilizing the country by at least sending more personnel to help with training the police, building infrastructure, and establis.h.i.+ng civilian inst.i.tutions. Then we can get back to the dirty work of fighting and defeating terrorists.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell . . . Don't Serve Under the Obama administration, the question of whether or not openly gay men and women should be able to serve in the military has become one of the hot topics of the day. I have asked numerous military men and women ranging in rank from generals to fresh recruits what they thought about this very controversial and divisive issue, but the real question to be answered is what's in the best interest of the military mission. The military is not about individual preferences but about cohesion of the unit. Let me attempt to address this controversy and shed some light on the likely impact of any policy change.
In 1993 Congress affirmed that the unit comes before the individual, pa.s.sing legislation that argued ”[since] military life is fundamentally different from civilian life” and imposes ”little or no privacy,” h.o.m.os.e.xuals cannot be allowed to serve. If they were, they would create ”an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”
But President Clinton contradicted that law by introducing the absurd concept of ”Don't Ask, Don't Tell” (DADT), which President Obama now wants to rescind. Before you applaud, understand that he does not intend to overturn a policy that allows for the recruitment of h.o.m.os.e.xual soldiers but rather to let them serve openly rather than (as now) discreetly. His aim cannot possibly be to strengthen our military, because it would do just the opposite: create unnecessary tensions, divisions, and stress among men and women who must depend on one another in order to survive. His motivation is purely political, a ploy to strengthen his support from the left. This is the liberal ”core” that has been disappointed with him because they expected him to cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan and close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo. In other words, he is using our servicemen and servicewomen as p.a.w.ns in shoring up his political base.