very belated change of address

Somehow I disappeared from this blog quite some time ago without leaving a forwarding address. I'm sorry about that.

Find my ongoing blogging at too many Daves (URL: http://www.davidquigg.com). I gave up on trying to limit myself to a particular subject. The blog's subtitle goes like this:

David Quigg is a writer. David Quigg is a photographer. David Quigg lives in Seattle. David Quigg devours audiobooks. David Quigg is an armchair warrior and diplomat. David Quigg used to be a newspaper reporter. David Quigg resorts to satire. David Quigg is a dad. These are their stories.

The wide-open approach works best for my personality. So I'm thriving -- creatively and intellectually, if not financially.

To see only my AfPak posts, point your browser to:

http://www.davidquigg.com/tagged/afghanistan

or

http://www.davidquigg.com/tagged/pakistan

You will also find some AfPak posts on Global Pedestrian, a world affairs blog I wrote for Big Think.

Again, though, too many Daves is the place to see new work. My Twitter feed is here.

archive of my Iraq writing

To supplement a piece I'm about to write for Huffington Post about Thomas Ricks' new book on the Iraq War, I'm posting this archive of my own writing about Iraq. While none of these pieces focuses on Afghanistan or Pakistan, I'm posting the archive here for anyone who wants an extra way to check up on whether I manage to make a bit of sense about matters of war and peace. I mean, for heaven's sake, I invoked Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride in the most recent of these posts. And not as a joke. You're entitled to question my judgment and really scrutinize this stuff.

"The Iraq Infomercial and the Bush Legacy" (4/2/08)

"McCain's Premature Surge Adulation" (7/30/08)

"McCain, a Fish Story, and Iraq"(9/28/08)

"Washington Times: Bush & Cheney Secretly Decent Human Beings" (12/22/08)

"In Iraq: Forget Michael Goldfarb, Remember Inigo Montoya" (1/21/09)

How does this end?

A New York Times story from today is worth considering in the context of my post earlier about the dire climate facing Afghan police. The story, headlined "Petraeus Warns About Militants’ Threat to Pakistan," focuses on today's Senate hearing featuring the Defense Department's Michele Flournoy and Gen. David Petraeus, who oversees America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here are three paragraphs from the story that struck me:

"'How does this end?' asked Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, echoing comments that General Petraeus once made when he was the commander in Iraq.

"Ms. Flournoy responded that 'a key point of defining success is when both the Afghans and the Pakistanis have both the capability and the will to deal with the remaining threat themselves.'

"General Petraeus said that he would 'echo' Ms. Flournoy and that 'the task will be for them to shoulder the responsibilities of their own security.'”

Flournoy noted that the president has made "a very strong commitment" to restoring security. By the end of the year, 30,000 additional troops will join the existing 38,000 troops in Afghanistan.

GOP Sen. John McCain, meanwhile, wants a bigger, faster troop build-up.

"It’s a big country," McCain said, according to the Times' report on the hearing.

Yes, senator, it is a big country. And that would have been an outstanding fact to notice in the fall of 2001 when we were deciding whether trying to invade and re-make Afghanistan would be the most efficient, effective way to protect America from terrorism.

I apologize for arguing with a man who's not here to argue back. But I just get so tired of these belated realizations. Belated realizations coupled with apologies? That, I could stomach.

Kandahar Isn't Levittown (Lessons From Seven Months in Afghanistan)

One boon of calling this blog "AfPak Ignoramus" is that I'm never tempted to pretend I know more than I do. By habit, it's easiest for me to accept my own ignorance of people from other cultures, living in vastly different circumstances than my own. What's been slower to come is the realization that I suffer from basic ignorance about a key group of my fellow Americans: members of the U.S. military. However slow, the realization has come all the same.

So I've grown cautious. Knowing that I have exactly zero first-hand knowledge of what it's like to serve in the military (generally) and in Afghanistan (in particular), I now do my best to avoid baseless generalizations. Where I do try to characterize the actions of our troops, I aim to include links and citations. If you catch me getting sloppy on that score, please post a comment and insist that I live up to my own standards.

All this is preamble to explaining why I'm trying to make sure I hear actual voices of actual Americans serving in Afghanistan. It is why I came to be listening to a Defense Department podcast called "Bloggers Roundtable." This particular discussion featured Lt. Col. Pam McArthur, a command judge advocate for the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command South. Before I get to what Lt. Col. McArthur had to say, let me acknowledge that anything that gets released by any organization -- public, private, military, civilian, religious, secular, etc. -- may tend to distort reality in a way that makes the organization itself look its best. So, could Lt. Col. McArthur simply be reading talking points? Sure. But I think there's something more spontaneous and sincere going on here.

McArthur, for example, says "you know" a lot. So do I. I realized this the one time I appeared on radio for my old newspaper. Maybe there's some ultra-clever writer in the military who litters talking points with a scripted "you know" here and a strategic "um" there. But I sort of doubt it.

There's a transcript here and audio here. You can read/listen and decide whether McArthur sounds like someone delivering canned sound bites.

McArthur spoke to a number of issues during the roundtable. The one that stuck with me most, though, has to do with the realities faced by some of her pupils: the police officers who she teaches about the importance of following the rule of law and the Afghan constitution.

As McArthur put it, "the police are facing the same kinds of dangers that an Army faces."

"They are enormously brave men and they -- you know, they -- as I said, they are facing the threats that an army faces. They are not -- you know, it's not like they're walking around in, you know, downtown Long Island and Levittown and, you know, you're sort of generally safe. ... (The Afghan police are) very, very much in a combat situation and they're not -- there is not as much patrolling or general work of that nature going on. They are -- you know, they're driving down the road and getting blown up by IEDs."

A quick aside. No disrespect intended, I'm sure, to either Levittown, NY or to the officers who patrol its streets. Police work, obviously, is dangerous anywhere. Here is a link to a memorial page honoring fallen members of the Nassau County PD as well as crime stats for the precinct that includes Levittown.


Levittown aside, McArthur's perspective is helpful as we try to assess progress in Afghanistan from afar.

The Afghan police do make the news, after all. A recent Reuters story by a correspondent in Kabul characterized the country's police force like this:

"Before Afghan and U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Afghanistan had little concept of police and while progress has been made in developing the fledgling force, it is usually seen as corrupt and lagging behind the more professional army.

"In many isolated outposts, the police are the only face of the Afghan government and are vulnerable to insurgent attacks, but they are also renowned for milking the populace for bribes."

Indeed, during McArthur's roundtable, her interviewers repeatedly focused on what's being done to end the "long history of bribery and corruption" among police in Afghanistan.

McArthur acknowledged that "it's impossible to think that we could ever follow around every single ANP officer or, you know, employee and make sure that they didn't do some low level of corruption. I don't think that would be very realistic."

But her role is to educate. The right rules are on the books, she said:

"... you know, innocent till proven guilty. That's Article 25 of the Afghan constitution. ... (There is) a due-process provision under Article 27. Voluntary confessions under Article 30; right to a defense attorney, Article 31. Article 38, can't go in the house without a warrant."

Asked to rate the progress she and others are making in teaching the police about such issues, she said, "I'd have to say we're at the beginning. I couldn't rate its success ..."

Still, it's not a start from scratch, according to McArthur. She rejected the premise of a questioner who asserted that Afghans and Americans lack a common heritage and language for discussing matters of justice.

"Well, what I've found really enlightening since I came here was that their values are the same as ours. They have -- they place enormous value on fairness and on honesty and on telling the truth. ... (Those values are) not really being expressed, you know, very forcefully or very evidently to us, but they are there. And I have sat in court martials where, you know, where the fundamental fairness and an honesty and lack of corruption are things that people are enormously concerned with."

There are aspects of McArthur's first-hand account that simply reinforce my basic hopelessness about our mission in Afghanistan. The very fact of a country where the cops are routinely forced into full-fledged combat deepens my sense that the Bush/Cheney team -- or its would-be congressional critics -- should have anticipated this mess. Prudent leaders don't necessarily choose to conquer countries where cops are forced to cope with combat.

But this -- again -- is my Time-Machine Syndrome. I wish we could go back to 2001 and get this right. But we can't.

So it's good to hear from someone like McArthur. It's consoling to hear the voice of an American who believes in our Afghanistan mission enough to wake up each day and do some actual work toward improving the country. Most of all, it's good to hear from someone who forces us to notice the huge dangers Afghan police face. In our impatience for victory or exit from Afghanistan, it's worth remembering why the people of Kabul or Kandahar may have more trouble recruiting and retaining cops than, say, the folks in Levittown.

Andrew Sullivan Mulls the Ugly Math

In a Friday post called "The Unanswered Questions," Andrew Sullivan considers the president's new plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In doing so, Sullivan mulls the vast numbers of Afghan troops and police that still need to be trained. He then falls prey to a despair that's all too familiar for me. He writes:

"The more I read the more depressed I get. I simply do not believe that we will be able to rid the region of Islamist terrorists by military force, diplomatic genius or civilian outreach. And I suspect that our very intervention has spawned more of these terrorists than might have existed otherwise. The only reason we are there is because Osama bin Laden used the place as a base for the 19 unarmed men who perpetrated 9/11. The question we have to ask is: How is our current policy going to prevent another 19 unarmed men from wreaking havoc in the same way?

"I don't see it. And what are the unintended consequences of extending this war into Pakistan, and adding more and more resources to Afghanistan? God knows.

"I just try to imagine what the founders would say. With this level of debt, with another country, Iraq, still jammed with US troops, and still deeply unstable, with a global recession threatening to gut our capacity to finance even basic domestic needs, we are about to tackle a region of this complexity and danger. At some level, it is unhinged. It presupposes American responsibility for things we cannot understand, cannot control and cannot defeat. Its premise is imperial responsibility, not a reasonable assessment of national security. Does that make me sound like an isolationist? If isolationism means not trying to remake Afghanistan and Pakistan, then absolutely."

A couple of days earlier, Sullivan linked to a thoughtful, compassionate post about Afghanistan by Matt Steinglass. Among other things, Steinglass asked:

"... what are the moral dimensions of a possible retreat from Afghanistan? Is it possible to honor our promises to those who have chosen our side in Afghanistan if we decide that we no longer have a strategic interest in preventing a Taliban victory? Isn’t it important to keep such promises? ... So what do we offer to the girls whose schools will be closed, the police and army officers who will be executed, the NGO volunteers who will be whipped when the Taliban jeeps roll into Kabul? Nothing? “Sorry”?"

I, in turn, posted this comment:

"These are huge moral questions. Thank you for raising them. But what are we to do?

"What we’ve got here is a case, as they say, of Bush’s mouth writing checks that his ass couldn’t cash. What clear-headed assessment of Afghanistan’s history would have led Bush to imagine we could remake the country at all — let alone remake it into a place where we could promise girls the schooling they so deserve?

"If Bush promised each Kabul resident a ride on the Space Shuttle, I assume we’d want Obama to politely explain why America wasn’t going keep Bush’s promise.

"Prolonging a doomed war for the sake of showing that we tried our darnedest doesn’t help anyone — not us, not our troops, not even Afghan schoolgirls.

"Let me be clear. I want there to be a way to make good on these promises. Someone needs to show me how it can be done without bringing back a military draft to get us up to the troop levels we’d need for a responsible, robust counterinsurgency. And maybe that’s what it comes down to. If morality prevents us from walking away from a delusional promise, maybe a moral America needs to grow a military that’s gigantic enough to keep the promise.

"More of my thoughts on the Afghanistan conundrum here …

"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-quigg/why-we-all-ought-to-read_b_141555.html

"Thanks again for making us take a hard look at the morality of all this."

And yes, we really should be taking a hard look at this. This post was the first I'd read by Matt Steinglass. I look forward to reading more.

A lack of color

This blog is a bit drab. That's probably not going to change in the near future. While I'm a photographer, I've never been anywhere close to Afghanistan or Pakistan. So I have no photos to post here. What I will try to do over time is include links to photography and art made in the region. Photography, particularly photography of people, is a powerful reminder that the lives of actual human beings can be profoundly affected by any action the U.S. and the international community might take.

To start, here are links to some AfPak shots by photographer Thomas Nash, who I've known since I was a kid ...

Afghan girls, refugee camp, Peshawar, Pakistan, 1992.

Pulling your beard is a Pathan greeting. This man welcomed us as we stopped on the road at the top of a pass crossing into a valley north of Peshawar in Pakistan. 1992

Guards with AK-47 in front of Pathan family compound door, Khyber pass highway, Pakistan, 1992

Hashish dealer with his wares in front of store, Darra, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1992

A tribesman, his beard dyed red with henna, and his friend, admire an M16 rifle at a gun shop in Darra, Pakistan, near the Afghan border. 1992.

Pathan tribal elders, Khyber Agency, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1992

Lobby sign, main entrance, Intercontinental Hotel, Peshawar, Pakistan, 1992

Entry to Khyber Pass. North West Frontier Province, Pakistan, 1992


Gunshop signs, Darra bazaar, Pakistan, 1992

Reprinting my 11/5/08 HuffPost

I wrote this right after America elected Obama. It goes into more detail about my struggle to understand Afghanistan and the preliminary conclusions I'd reached about American policy there.

Why We All Ought To Read The Book President-Elect Obama Has Been Reading

posted 11/5/08


The second-best news I heard during these last few historic days didn't make tears stream like the moment Obama soared above 270, didn't cause me to go slack on the couch with some pride-relief hybrid like when the president-elect's victory speech reached out to "those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world," didn't cause me to hold my daughter extra tight like the scenes of brotherhood from Grant Park, didn't cause me to cuddle my son and whisper "I love you" more times than he knew how to handle like I did this morning as I surveyed the better future this American choice might mean for him and his world.

No, the second-best news I heard during these last few historic days merely made moot what seemed like an impossible, quixotic question: How will I -- a nobody typing on a laptop 2,765 miles (as the crow drives) from America's capital city -- get Barack Obama to read one particular book before he takes the oath of office? How, to be specific, will I get Barack Obama to read Ghost Wars, Steve Coll's Pulitzer-winning book subtitled "The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001"?

My wife delivered this second-best news. She'd just read a Nov. 2 New York Times piece about Obama and noticed a tidbit she figured might interest me.

"Hey, Barack's reading Ghost Wars," she said with the casualness you'd expect from someone who didn't quite realize she was delivering incredibly awesome news and crossing off the most unattainable item on my to-do list.

It's hard to sum up why getting Obama to read Ghost Wars felt so important to me.

Maybe the best way is to tell you about a blog post I've been trying to write since springtime. Back then, a dread had come over me -- a sense that American leaders, including the man I wanted so badly to be president, didn't realize how doomed our mission in Afghanistan was threatening to become. I'd been picking up disturbing signals here and there. They kept piling up. A photo tucked away on page 39 of a June 18, 2008 Government Accountability Office report seemed to sum up so much of what worried me about progress in the troubled country that had been so thoroughly overshadowed by our Iraq fiasco. The photo showed trucks that had been purchased for the Afghan National Police. The GAO report explained: "more than 1,500 trucks have been on hand and ready for issue since late 2007, but the Afghan Minister of Interior has delayed distribution of these vehicles until adequate accountability procedures and driver training are established in the target districts."

I tried to counter my pessimism by seeking out optimistic words. I found optimistic remarks delivered in May 2007 by Ronald Neumann, America's former ambassador to Afghanistan. Neumann's can-do spirit was admirable. Here he was talking about efforts to generate tax revenue so the Afghan government can function:

"But until you create an industrial sector, you haven't got anything to tax. And, you know, you're not going to go with an AK in one hand and a tin cup in the other and tax the farmer. So you're going to have to create something that's taxable, but to get there you have to create a regulatory structure, and we're doing that."

Did you catch that? We just have to complete two simple tasks so the Afghans can collect taxes and sustain their own government:

1) Create a regulatory structure.

2) Industrialize a war-torn agrarian society.

So Neumann's "optimistic" outlook only added to my pessimism.

By that time, I'd traded e-mails with an Army counterinsurgency expert who I respect and asked him to suggest a reading list for my study of Afghanistan. He recommended Charlie Wilson's War, Not a Good Day to Die, and a chapter in Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare.

But there was a fourth book that sat at the top of the expert's list: Ghost Wars, the book I don't need to get Barack Obama to read because he's already reading it.

Ghost Wars stopped me cold. The complexity that emerged from its pages is the reason I shelved my plans to blog about Afghanistan. As I later wrote in an e-mail to the man who'd suggested my reading list:

"I have to tell you that Afghanistan scares the crap out of me. In crucial ways, it seems like a tougher problem than Iraq. While it's plainly a country that you can find on a map, the place seems to lack any cohesiveness, any homegrown reason to even exist as a single country. I worry about how we can make things work in such a place. I find myself wishing we'd waited very, very patiently for bin Laden & Co. to slip up and taken them out without invading and taking on responsibility for the whole mess of a country.


"I hope you are right, that Iraq does hold lessons for Afghanistan. My fear, with troop levels now falling according to schedule in Iraq, is that Afghanistan may offer lessons for Iraq: namely, as the Taliban are showing, that you sometimes can't tell for years whether a routed enemy is actually beaten for good."

Basically, my only solutions to Afghanistan involve the use of a time machine. And that's no solution at all.

Thankfully, Obama and his advisers are sharper thinkers than I am. So they may find a way forward -- even a really good way forward. Knowing now that Obama has read the book that lays out the Afghanistan problem in all its messy detail gives me much more faith that our country and our allies stand some chance of cleaning up President Bush's lesser-known war fiasco.

We should all read Ghost Wars. Gov. Palin should read it. So should Rudy Giuliani. Anyone at all who has a history of shrieking "white flag of surrender!" should read it. As far as I'm concerned, we should hold proud victory parades for our returning troops if we manage to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan without suffering the same bled-dry fate as the Soviet Union once did.

Yes we can. I hope.