The Eleven Year War (Afghanistan and Back by Ted Rall)

I woke up today to another story about a suicide attack in Afghanistan. It seemed that for at least a few precious weeks we had had little news from that region, a cutoff in the steady stream of news about political reverses and Shia pilgrims under attack and suicide bombers. Coverage was dominated by a bombshell of another nature, the Petraeus mistress scandal, as well as speculation about the possible compromising of sensitive information and the peddling of influence on the part of a wealthy Florida socialite. It was news that was predicated on scandal-mongering, with the whole East Coast news media set to twittering.

But then we were reminded of how volatile this region is, and of how the whole crisis mentality fits conveniently into the scheme of international coverage of the area. The whole Hamas-Israel confrontation captured the headlines, and we were treated to reports of bombing campaigns in Gaza and terrorist attacks in Israeli cities. I have to admit that I have long grown weary of this situation, and the prospect of protracted conflicts with both sides dug in deeper than ever, and with our country having to take a mediating role. In a sense, we must also signal out our news coverage for falling into an eternal crisis mode in which the same images of bombs and bloodshed is eternally circulated, but in which little though is given to trying to explain the complex circumstances behind these conflicts. There are reasons, after all, and they don’t evolve into the traditional “East is East and West is West” mentality that seemed to somehow justify 19^th century western colonialism.

A few weeks ago I read Ted Rall’s “To Afghanistan and Back”. It is a chronicle of his journey to the country in 2001, told in the form of short prose narratives that are interspersed with graphical narratives that at times illustrate these episodes. The style is editorial, with people and places rendered in a simplistic style that seems a little crude at times. The figures are wooden and seem strangely static, conveying an old-fashioned sense that seems very unadorned, as if it were somehow more direct. It is at odds at times with the emotional intensity and the anxiety it wishes to portray, as bomb blasts echo in panels and as the journalist is forced to deal with a people who seem to obfuscate and hide their true selves.

In the opening moment of America’s intervention in Afghanistan, which was undertaken with the aim of toppling the Taliban regime and responding to the Sept. 11^th events, we see an editorial journalist and part-time radio host who has joined a cadre of other journalists who swarmed into the country to capture the fall of the regime. First of all, one wonders at the foolhardiness of these journalists. They seem to absurdly believe that they will be somehow shielded from any harm by their profession, as if this aura (and their camera and reporting gear) could somehow stop bullets and protect them from exploding land mines and shrapnel from aerial bombing campaigns. They seem to be disconnected from their reality, and it echoes the criticism that had been lodged against CNN and their enterprising journalists way back in the early 90s, when they embedded their journalist in Baghdad and reported breathlessly on the explosions in their midst, a mindset that fetished explosions and rattling effects, as if feeding a video-game mentality.

Ted Rall is an editorial cartoonist whose work has frequently struck me for its smirking tone.  (He himself utilizes the adjective “snarky” in this book.) I had first heard about him when he was a radio host on local AM powerhouse station KFI, the most popular outlet in Southern California for extremist right-wing radio. He himself, however, was no right-winger, and seemed if anything to offer a contrarian opinion that was grounded in comedy, similar to John Stewart, and it was refreshing. It made his program at least somewhat palatable as Saturday night fare, for those of us who no longer venture out on dates nor wish to recapitulate the other frenetic rituals of our earlier adolescence.

One of the features of his program was a segment that he called the “’Stan Report”. No, it wasn’t a report on people named Stanley, but instead his reflections on the countries in the region of East Asian that end with the suffix “stan”. It is, as I understand it, a linguistic term that derives from Persian, and it refers, of course, to “land”. We know of many of these countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazahkstan, etc. In the popular imagination, they all seem to merge together to give us the impression of unstable regions that are gripped by religious fundamentalism and a pervading medieval mentality.

That was certainly the impression that Ted Rall conveyed in his report, and one of the reasons why I grew tired of this segment. He may very well have journeyed to the area, but I questioned how much he could have gleaned from these journeys to be able to simplify and paint with such as broad stroke as he did. Was he not perhaps parodying the mindset of the right-wingers who held forth during the daylight hours on that station, the very same ones that he seemed to snipe at constantly at other moments? He seemed a little too earnest and dismissive in this segment, portraying a region that was somehow inoculated against change and modernity.

Well, after reading this narrative (which he terms a “graphic travelogue”), I think that he does carry a touch of what one could term an “Orientalist” perspective, to make reference to Edward Said’s classic volume on the ways in which western countries have elaborated an ideological scheme that served to demonize and distort our perception of the East. It does no credit to his journey that was supposedly motivated to offer a critique of the Bush doctrine of intervention and conquest. Was that the only motivation, or was it not more self-serving?

I return, over and over, to consider this question and to what might have motivated this group of journalists to insert themselves in this region without recognizing the very real dangers to which they were exposing themselves. They arrived in caravans traveling through difficult terrain, with heavy equipment and enterprising mentalities, hoping to catch crucial footage of historical events but also, one suspects, wishing to burnish their reputations and feed a seemingly infinite western appetite for gore and drama on a public that had been feeling anxiety about this region. They were looking for drama and heroism and other saleable commodities as they narrated the pitched battles between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban remnants, but it wasn’t that easy. They were, of course, woefully unprepared for what they encountered, and what is more shameful, oblivious to their surroundings.

They arrived with little knowledge of the country and even less of the language. How did they expect to carry through with their mission? I am struck over and over by how this collection of international journalists stuck to themselves, dependent upon each other for rumors and tips and forced to rely on translators they seemed to distrust and resent because of their predatory instincts. How accurate were these translators, and how could they be sure about the stories they were being fed? They were certainly greedy, demanding $150 per day in fees when, as Rall repeats over and over, the average month wage was $1.40. There was some serious price-gouging goingn on, but I can’t blame them.

Try to look at it from their point of view. Who are these western journalists who so callously descend on the region, accompanying the vanguard of an invasion force that indiscriminately bombs their towns and villages from above, supporting an opposition movement (the Northern Alliance) that presents itself as a viable and modern alternative to the Taliban regime but that reveals itself to be a paragon of corruption, venality and sheer stupidity? These western journalists are the vanguard of western soldiers and western policymakers who seem to be similarly clueless, and they must be viewed as similarly suspect by the Afghan population. If they were taken advantage of and if they were given boiled sewer water instead of clean water from a well, or charged $800 for a twenty mile taxi ride, was this not a way of merely reflecting the greed and the self-interest they themselves revealed? Does this make the Afghans more “medieval”, a term used by Rall when describing the scenes he encountered in the country, knowing full well that the very use of the term brings up associations in our minds that are unfailingly negative because they are based on a construct that wishes to impose western historical experience on a wholly different region?

I hate to say it, but I felt little sympathy for the hardship that was suffered by Rall and his fellow collection of motley journalists while carrying out this supposed mission. (Yes, there is a strong sense of suspicion as to their real intentions, at least as presented by Rall.) We are treated to descriptions of flea-infested rugs and rickety buildings, of venal Alliance commanders, of hypocritical and two-faced Taliban soldiers who shave off their beards and buy Tajik hats in order to switch sides when it seems as if they are about to be overwhelmed, and then take up arms again against the Northern Alliance solidiers they have joined, as has happened over and over ten years later, in the spate of attacks by Afghan soldiers against their NATO colleagues. Yes, there would seem to be a deep cultural disconnect taking place, but the dismissive attitude and the failure of Rall to attempt to address and explain it would seem to underscore the continued influence of a colonial mentality. Things don’t change, despite eleven years of war in this country.

Yes, the mission was ill-conceived, and yes, I agree with Rall, the region harbors potentially vast reserves of petrochemical and mineral resources that western countries would love to exploit if they could only install convenient and complaint puppet regimes. Yes, I understand that Afghanistan is a crucial piece in this scheme, and that if it could be somehow pacified, a pipeline could be constructed through the country and into Pakistan, providing a new source of oil as well as hopefully providing a way to stabilize unstable regimes and destabilize stable regimes, by which I am referring respectively to Pakistan and Iran. Of course, oil resources have a tendency of serving only limited sectors, mainly, local economic elites as well as transnational corporations, and rarely have they led to sustained national development. Witness the case with countries such as Azerbaijan, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria.  

So we have a mission in which Rall and his fellow journalist try to follow a shifting front, besieged as they are by predatory Afghanis who take to murdering them as related in the episode of the Swedish cameraman Ulf Stromberg, the only unfortunate westerner to open the door when soldiers knocked late at night at their compound. Yes, it is dangerous, but in the same way the situation is logical. To criticize bands of Afghanis for organizing these campaigns and for expressing their distrust of the westerners in their midst who descend and evaporate regularly like the winter snows is to fail to see that they have their own interests to address.

In the end, the portrayal of the Afghanis and of the difficulties encountered by Rall as he was engaged in this journalistic “stunt” (and we can’t label it as anything other than a “stunt”, for it was predicated on his own ignorance of the region and his failure to overcome his own prejudices and to question his own roll as he and his companions sought to score the latest “scoop”) tends to overshadow the critique of western interventionism. To boil it down, he is guilty of the same, part of the apparatus of western imperial dominance that is predicated on a certain predatory scheme that he excoriates when he sees it in operation among ordinary Afghans.  It lends itself to a corrosive discourse that discredits these people in a wholesale fashion, and the tedium he expresses sounds like the juvenile rant of a journalist who was unfamiliar with the ideals of his profession.

What is the purpose of allowing these journalists to descend en masse in these areas, as part of the vanguard of an invading western army?  Are they there only to lend a thin veneer of fairness and supposed transparency, to say that at least the West as an open society is prepared to accommodate a cadre of potential critics, even when these critics differ in no real way in their mindset from the elites who control the course of this foreign policy? Yes, I agree with Rall that the Northern Alliance is another fabricated opposition force, one that was a convenient front to carry forth this mission, making it seem as if opposition was internal, but are they as journalist in any way different?

I can’t see myself visiting any of the ‘Stans in the future, but if I do, I will have to be honest about my own preconceptions. At least Rall was honest about his, although I’m not sure if he understands the implications of this, and his snide criticisms of the region and its people seem to have ended up assuming a harder edge at the end of this travelogue.

The war in Afghanistan will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future, even though the United States is committed to withdrawing its forces in 2014. Perhaps it will be left for the surrounding countries to intervene and impose their own arrangement, as they had done before with Pakistan having imposed the Taliban after the period of Soviet intervention. This has been the longest war in American history, and also, the most pointless.



Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013

Review of "Which Way Home"

“Which Way Home” is a documentary directed and produced by Rebecca Cammisa that deals with the plight of migrant children as they make their journey to the United States. The phenomenon is by no means recent, and is as old as the epic of migration. It is colored by the pain of separation, and the deep feeling of abandonment that leads to guilt on the part of parents and deep feelings of inadequacy that can lead to bitterness on the part of the children. The director includes interviews with the children, but what makes it novel is the fact that this documentary is also structured as an adventure story.

In this film we follow the journey of two migrant children from Central America. They are Kevin and Fito, and they are from a small town in Honduras. They seem to be undertaking the journey in good spirits, and seem fully as boisterous and optimistic as any children their age would be, undaunted as they are by the risks they have assumed. There is no doubt that this is a perilous journey, one that involves passage on top of the notorious “Bestia”, the name that has been given to the freight trains in Mexico that travel the length of Mexico.

This “Bestia” has become part of the mythology of migration for many. These trains leave from the border region with Guatemala, and they are infused with a sense not only of hope but also dread. One imagines that trains were similarly viewed here in the United States in an earlier epoch of our history, when the movement west was one that represented, as the movement north to the United States does to these migrants, a hope for a new beginning.

However, along with the hope comes the prospect as well of danger and threats. It is a perilous journey in which many migrants struggle to climb aboard and hold on. The viewer has a visceral sense of these threats in the way in which these people scramble to hold on to the sides of moving trains, and climb aboard them and are forced to be on the watch for vegetation such as the branches of trees that threaten to knock them off. There are also, of course, the unexpected starts and stops of the trains that seem to snort and buckle the way a horse does, thus helping to explain the alternate name “Caballo” .

The human danger is just as prevalent, although one can earnestly believe that the presence of a camera crew worked to afford these children a protective shell. For other migrants, there is always the prospect of encounters with thieves and sexual predators, and indeed, many migrants lose everything long before they reach the border. It is a perilous journey, one that would seem terrifying to an adult but that somehow seems unreal to the children.

Kevin and Fito at times play up to the camera. It is unsettling to see them clinging to a side hold on the train as it passes over steep hillsides, and to see them nonchalantly approaching Mexican families to beg for food to eat. It is an adventure for them, and they open up to the camera crew, confessing quite candidly that their motivation resides not only in a wish for reunification with a missing parent, but also, from dysfunctional family dynamics. They both confess to having felt rejected by their parents, and in a way this journey is an escape that is part of a painful process of adolescent crisis.

The journey is long, and we are left to wonder how far they will reach. It seems even from the beginning that they are living on borrowed time, and this helps to create a sense of latent danger. How far will they get, and is there tragedy awaiting them?  Given the way in which they have built up the American Dream and their eager wish for accepting families and material comfort, is seems that their wishes inevitably will be dashed, for how can reality hope to measure up?

After a series of rendezvous, the camera crew loses track of the children, only to find them again at a later moment.  The worst has not happened. Kevin, the chubby and ebullient youngster who seemed to be the leader of this group that came to include as well two Mexican boys (Jairo and the “Dog”), manages to make it to the border and turns himself in. Fito somehow makes it back without reaching the border. The “Dog”, sadly, returns to Chiapas and picks up his prior lifestyle as a niño gamin, those that inhabit the streets and live by petty thievery and glue-sniffing.

The film, of course, touches upon the experience of other selected individuals. It is, of course, heart-breaking to see children who have been detained by immigration authorities, abandoned at times by their smugglers, and awaiting repatriation to families that, in a real sense, have no place for them. Migration has become a safety-valve not only for economic migrants but for those whose problems derive from psycho-social circumstances, and we can’t underestimate the degree to which spiritual poverty, for lack of a more adequate term, leads to migration.

Both the children when repatriated as well as their parents are enjoined by the authorities to repair their own family relationships. It is, of course, evident to all to see that these reunions mask deeper problems. These children have, in a sense, already been abandoned, and it is only a matter of time before they leave on the eternal quest to start their own families, ones that will offer them the emotional support that they receive , for example, from the film crews that followed and interviewed them, shielding them from the worse aspects of this journey to the north.

We have no firm statistics on the number of deaths, and one of the leaders of a refugee center in Mexico asserts that between 10 and 20 percent of migrants will perish on this journey north. He earnestly warms them that if this journey is a dangerous passage, then the North, “El norte”, is death itself. It is a dramatic warning, and none of the migrants is quite prepared to understand what it will mean to run the risk of being kidnapped by drug gangs, as happens frequently, and possibly massacred, or to run the risk of crossing a dangerous desert. What do they know of deserts, they who come from tropic homelands?

In the end, Kevin does make a second journey, and he does end up in Washington, wishing, as the film informs us, to be adopted by an American family. Where, indeed, is he to find his home? It isn’t in the countries he left behind.  And that is one of the psychological effects of migration, for the journey itself and the illusion of the “dream” unsettles them, perhaps permanently.  It is to be expected that it will serve as the groundwork for a powerful nostalgia that will affect them the way it affects all of us as we grow older, for we never stop believing in the power of illusions.



Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013

Election Overload

Finally, two days before Election Day, after months and months of news coverage, of political speeches, of news “bites” recycled over and over, of ambushes and sorties and accusations that verge on the ridiculous, as exemplified in particular by the PAC ads running in Ohio during the last week. We’ve had attack heaped on attack, with politicians earnestly exhorting the public to “read my plan” while offering precious few details a la Romney’s budget, and we’ve had endless political punditry that has left me more disillusioned precisely because it seems to concentrate, as always, on style rather than substance. It is hard not to compare this campaign to the recent hurricane Sandy that devastated the East Coast last week. Both have been incredibly destructive forces that have swept everything away in their sights, that have terrorized the population of that region and that will leave a legacy of finger-pointing as we reflect on the work that will be done to repair all the damage. And as with all natural disasters, we have the inevitability of the next one that is coming down the line.

I would like to believe that there used to be a time when campaign season was more joyous and innocent, when politicians weren’t beholding to fundraisers and political campaign contributions, when earnest people were willing to represent their communities with a spirit of moderation. Was it ever the case? When did we devolve into this madness we see every four years, a grinding process that tears away at us inside and that leaves us more dispirited than we ever were? Why do we lament over and over the way we have been consumed by partisanship, manipulated as we are by agents that claim to represent us but are instead representing their own interests? Is it only that these agents are freer now to reveal themselves and to shower their cash without restraint or oversight? Why has this election season alarmed me as never before?

It isn’t enough to the gridlock on Capital Hill. I can’t hear another ridiculous accusation by extremists firebrands such Michelle Bachmann or social conservatives such as the Missouri Senate candidate who earnestly proclaimed the idea of “legitimate rape” without wondering how they haven’t been hounded out of politics by reasonable people. The extremists are feeling freer than ever to proclaim their messages, doing so with a messianic zeal that seduces so many who are taken in by the proclamation of conviction rather than by the thoughtful consideration of the ideas. That is precisely what we are seeing as well with the political attack ads, and the way they formulate new and emotionally-appealing attacks that have no foundation in truth and that instead rely on distortion.

Nowadays, I have this strong sense that our political parties don’t represent my interests. They resort to the same formulas we’ve seen earlier, but delivered in wittier fashion and with a sense of urgency that seeks to bypass reason. For decades the Republicans have been relying on a standard attack on “Big Government”, while at the same time hypocritically increasing expenditures and yoking it to an invasive program of social conservatism that threatens to control how we conduct our lives at home. It is a deadly attack, and the Democrats never seem able to mount a convincing counterattack. They look muddled in response, reasonable, using charts and figures to counteract this attack when it is rhetoric and not charts that win the day. Neither party addresses the full panoply of concerns that I have, because they are limited to reprise this cycle of attack and counter-attack, in the mode of “Spy versus Spy” in the old Mad magazine serial.

Instead of a profuse Baroque symphony we have instead the same insistent notes jabbed over and over and over again. The claim is made that we are experiencing a crisis that threatens to overwhelm us unless we take dramatic action now. It all depends on scaring us, and of invoking what would seem to be our deepest fears. Who can live under the suffocating mantle of crisis? Is it not a mind scheme that is designed to alarm and provoke us into mindless action? Will we not always regret these actions taken in haste and without thoughtful consideration as we do the crash after a night of binge drinking? It is a form of intoxication that weaves the fumes of fear and propels us into the darkness with a lamp, and it is one that is used by both parties, although much more insistently and expertly by the Republicans. It has become, after all, their mainstay.

I refuse to be considered as just another mobile soldier to be rushed to the front. Everyone is appealing to me to save the day, to get out and make a difference, to fight for the future, and for any number of other clichés. We are in crisis, and we have to put up with what seems to be a never-ending barrage of ads and soundbites and rhetorical flourishes that suck the oxygen from our air and poison us against each other. I have political views and values, but I hate to be so blatantly manipulated.

My values are progressive, but I have a practical streak. I don’t appreciate this blind partisanship, and I don’t want conservative sectors to impose their rigid social values on me. It is hard enough to escape the confines of religious custom and that scheme of fundamentalism that purports to be based on true values that, in Mike Huckabee’s repressive phrase, stand “The test of fire”. I can’t believe in such a diety, for what is hell but another rhetorical excess? Are things so stark that we can only imagine this opposition between black and white, between pure good and pure evil? Why does this puritanical religious fundamentalism seem to pervade our politics more and more, yoked as it is with an anti-science bias as seen in the Republican agenda that wishes to inveigh against evolution and climate-change?

We knew it was going to be a bruising fight before the beginning of this campaign season. It seems as if the previous campaign season had not ended before we were gearing up for a new tsunami of attacks, and perhaps that is what it means to live in this current political climate. The election season is never over, and as with house races where representatives spend more time fundraising and working to hold on to their seats than they do crafting policies, we are constrained by our voracious election cycles.

We knew enough to expect tactics similar to the scurrilous “Swift-Boat” attack shamelessly pioneered by political operative Karl Rove eight years ago. We knew that PACs would have a more prominent role than ever, for they were unleashed by the “Citizen’s United” Supreme Court decision as a seeming reaffirmation of free speech protections. To have eliminated those restrictions to unregulated contributions by corporations was to create the conditions for the exhausting and hyperbolic campaign we have just witnessed, where by one report over six billion will have been spent.

So, in these last two days, after what seems like a decade of campaigning, with both sides still delivering nonstop attacks, I can’t help but miss what I would like to believe were the more placid campaigns of the past. I was a child during the Watergate years, and I don’t really have a sense of how gut-wrenching an experience that might have been to adults during that era, except by recalling the Iran-Contra hearings that took place during the last year of Reagan’s presidency. Was it similar in overall impact? Probably not. I have heard again and again in interviews with politicians from the 70s and 80s about how there used to be a different culture in Congress. They used to be able to set aside ideological baggage to adopt a more practical and reasoned approach. Perhaps it is just me expressing my cynicism by refusing to believe in this fallacy of a golden age although I very much want to believe in it. Perhaps twenty years down the line we will have House representatives sponsored by Exxon or Koch Industries or Walmart and we will look back on this season with wistfulness.

I fear a Romney win. I fear it, because I believe it would affirm the fundamentalism of the extremist conservative forces that are beholden to corporate interests, those who would like to appeal to the defense of meritocracy when all we have seen with them is that they are just as capable of ruinous policies and failure as another other group. They were behind the banking crash of 2008. They are behind the outsourcing of jobs, and environmental cataclysms, and yet, when those executives fail, they are prosecuted, they leave with golden parachutes that take the form of multi-million dollar payouts.

These extremist ideologists continually appeal to fear, and it is shameful to say it, have struck an echoing chord among white working classes who are willing to believe their message that they would fear the control of elites while hypocritically deflecting any attention to themselves. These forces have also highjacked the Democratic party apparatus as well, and that is what worries me, that I have no viable political options, and that I am left to vote for the lesser of two evils.

The election will soon be over, and we won’t have this barrage of coverage on the news channels anymore. It will blissfully come to an end, even if only for a nanosecond, a brief pause before we gear up for the next election cycle that looms on the horizon like a troubling storm. Although the overall problems and concerns will continue to demand solutions, at least we will be spared and left to try to survey and clean up the damage, and maybe, just maybe, to restore power and enjoy a little brief flash of light. I just want this cycle of endless campaigns to end.  We are not in a crisis, but we do have problems, and I at least wish to be demobilized from this need to partake in an endless political campaign season.



Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013