Peace Later!

Every time there’s a scandal among our military overseas, the stereotypes pop up. One of them is that most of our warriors suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and have been broken by repeated deployments to combat zones. Another is that they represent the poorest and least educated segments of our society and have chosen the military because they can’t get other jobs.

I’ve found all of this to be false in my time with the Army in Afghanistan. And a survey of military families released on May 9th suggests that, contrary to the stereotype, military families are healthy and resilient, and have much higher rates of civic engagement than most Americans.

In the wake of the Wal-Mart Mexican bribery scandal, there’s been renewed attention paid to the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). As law professor Peter Henning pointed out earlier this week in the New York Times, there have been more prosecutions recently than in the first years of the act’s life. In fact, government actions increased 85 percent between 2009 and 2010, with 74 prosecutions brought and more than $1 billion in fines collected. “Depending upon the violation,” according to the law, “a company can be fined up to $20 million, and an individual can be fined up to $5 million and spend up to 20 years in jail for each violation.”

TRIPOLI, Libya — One of the best omens for Libya’s eventual development of a robust democracy is the grassroots civic activism in Zwara, Libya’s so-called “Berber capital,” a seaside town of 50,000. Spearheaded by a grad student in economics, Riad el-Hamisi, locals have successfully pressured the Ministry of Industry to investigate and clean up toxic waste dumping at the town’s largest employer, the archaic, barely functional Abu Kamesh Chemical Complex.

Bu Kamesh, as it’s locally known, was using mercury in one of its reactors up until the economic disruptions of the 2011 revolution forced the shuttering of the plant. It may have been the only PVC plant in the world still using the toxic substance, and at least a dozen former employees are now seeking treatment for mercury poisoning. The United States, one of the world’s major exporters of mercury, has banned its export beginning in 2013.

One of the tragedies of the irrational Qaddafi dictatorship was that so much of the damage it caused didn’t even make economic sense. 

ZWARA, Libya — Arab fighters, apparently from the nearby towns of Jumyl and Ragdelin, which remain loyal to the defeated Colonel Qaddafi, are shelling Zwara, a Berber port city located in Libya’s far northwest, less than 40 miles from Tunisia.

General Sensussi Mahrez, the highest-ranking military officer in the western coastal region to defect from the Qaddafi forces during the war last June, told me that the fighting broke out on Sunday. As I sit in his home in Zwara, I can see where shells exploded just 100 yards away yesterday. One fell on a school, but because this is a vacation week no one was hurt.

Fighters tell me that the shelling of Zwara has been steady for two days. Skirmishes outside of town today have apparently left eight Zwari fighters dead, and more than 100 were treated at the town’s little hospital, normally staffed by just a half dozen GPs. Today, a couple dozen volunteer doctors from Tripoli and Zawiya poured in to treat the wounded. An air ambulance took 15 critically wounded to Tripoli and about 60 others were transported by ambulance to bigger hospitals in Zawiya and Tripoli.

There are some easy explanations for the killings of Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in the 3rd Stryker Brigade. They describe an unbalanced individual reaching the breaking point in a stressful environment. Yes, the 38-year-old shooter from Joint Base Lewis-McChord had too many deployments in Iraq in a short period, and a traumatic brain injury (we don’t know how serious), and rumored marital trouble can’t have helped. But there are tens of thousands of soldiers who have had multiple deployments and many of these have had personal issues. They haven’t murdered any civilians.

In the wake of the slaying of 16 Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, some soul-searching into what’s gone wrong with our Army is appropriate. Talking to officers that I have come to know over the course of the last five years in Afghanistan, several issues not well known to civilians emerge.

One is that the Army lowered its standards and took on youths too troubled to be molded into good soldiers, especially during the 2007–09 period. The good news here is that since most of them enlisted for two years, they are reaching the end of their term, and with our withdrawal from Iraq and drawdown in Afghanistan, the Army no longer needs to lower its standards to fill its ranks.

I wasn’t a bit surprised by the news of the horrific massacre of Afghan civilians by a deranged noncom in a Stryker brigade. Not because I think this sort of thing goes on all the time: in my seven embeds with American troops in Afghanistan, I’ve seen unbelievable patience with hostile locals. But because it was only a matter of time before the inherent frustrations of “counterinsurgency” in Afghanistan collided with some individual who was at the end of his tether, and who joined derangement with weaponry.

Mali is so obscure to the Western world that if you google the name of its president, Amadou Toumani Touré, you only get 202,000 entries, about the same as a mid-level well known American. The country has been afflicted by a civil war for long stretches of the past few decades, most notably from 1990 to 1996, but no one in the US has much noticed. Coverage of the political situation is particularly lacking. So I have been reading Roger Kaplan’s dispatches from Mali for the Weekly Standard, most notably a feature in the current issue, with great attention. As a French speaker with long experience in Africa, Kaplan comes with some credentials. And my knowledge of Mali is fragmentary and way out of date—I was first and last there in 1989.

Unfortunately, Kaplan’s piece “Mischief in Mali” seems more likely to perpetuate American ignorance of what is going on in this part of the world than to dispel it. And because our military is involved, it seems important to critique Kaplan’s reasoning.

It may seem strange to profess mild confidence in Afghanistan’s future even as the Koran-burning riots and slayings continue. But it is precisely the archaism of the country that may be its best hope.

While Americans of my neocon stripe, as well as many Afghans, warn that Afghanistan is in danger of collapse when we withdraw our forces, I am more inclined to say that the country will muddle through, and indeed improve in some respects, despite our grave mistakes in politico-military strategy.

The best outcome would have been for the US to scale down its military presence after 2003, instead of ramping it up. But we decided that if there were more Taliban attacks, this meant that we needed more troops. And we followed this line of reasoning all the way down the line to the surge of 2009. Instead of leading to a safer Afghanistan, this strategy has led to a more dangerous one.

On the eve of February 17th, the anniversary of last year’s Libyan revolution, Tripoli was a dangerous place. “Three men were shot outside my house last night,” a businessman told me. “And outside the Rixos, there was so much celebratory gunfire that I could not leave the hotel for hours”—the Rixos being the five-star hotel where many members of the transitional government live.

While Libyans are organizing political parties to compete in the June 23rd parliamentary elections, many describe the current situation as a power vacuum where there is no real law or order. Especially in western Libya, highly armed militiamen duke it out, often over disputes that have nothing to do with politics. Even in Zwara, the tightly knit Amazigh town of 50,000 that constitutes a separate cultural enclave, the police have not returned to work. Tripoli? Forget about it.

NEW YORK — “Can you imagine what just a few words from Hillary Clinton to the Libyan goverrnment would mean?”

Allen Moucer was referring to the cause that had brought him about thirty other members of the small, East Coast Amazigh community out to demonstrate in front of New York’s Plaza Hotel. Libya’s largest ethnic minority, the Amazigh (or Berbers), were not given any ministries in the newly named second transitional government of Libya, although they represent 10 to 15 percent of the population and speak a distinct language. Libyan Amazigh have been protesting ever since the new government formed, on November 23rd, and over the weekend held solidarity demonstrations in New York, Toronto, Montreal, and Paris.

The United States sometimes seems to make foreign policy in the light of Groucho Marx’s adage that he wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have him: we reward those who hurt and betray us while ignoring our real friends. We put up with murder from the likes of Pakistan and Russia, while giving the cold shoulder to India and the democracies of Eastern Europe.

We seem to be heading this way in our approach to Libya and North Africa too. We’re turning a blind eye to the endless missteps of Libya’s National Transitional Council, especially those that empower Islamic extremists. And we ignore the Libyan ethnic group that are our natural allies, the Amazigh (or Berbers). Recently they have got the short end of the stick, with zero government ministries in the lineup of the new seven-month cabinet. The Amazigh, including the more diffuse Tuaregs spread across the vast southern desert, may number as many as 800,000 of Libya’s close to six million citizens. Anecdotally, the Amazigh of Zwara and the Nafusa Mountains seem more educated than average Libyans. Yet they are vastly under-represented in nearly every branch of government.

It was easy to drink the Kool-Aid offered by the Libyan revolutionaries. With savvy slogans, hip combinations of camo uniforms and T-shirts, and engaging personalities, the young fighters, known as thuwar, were ideal for TV and photos. A good number of the revolutionaries were foreign-educated, others had close relatives in the US or Britain, and almost all had the Libyan pride and directness that strikes a familiar note with Americans particularly. When Libyans spoke of democracy, of the fact that they would “win or die,” it was natural to believe that their attitudes were much like ours, just suppressed by 42 years of a crazy dictatorship.

Now, nearly three months after Tripoli rose up on August 19th, bringing the Qaddafi years to a close, it’s possible to make a more realistic assessment of Libya and the Libyans—and what their future might hold. A few observations stand out.