Islam

This exchange from a Senate hearing yesterday about how and why the Army dropped the ball on the Fort Hood shooter is worth reading:

Sen. Lieberman: . . . . General Keane, do you -- and obviously this is speculation but the military is most sensitive of any organization I know to any taint or allegation or impression of being discriminatory which is appropriate. Do you think that political correctness may have played some role in the fact that these dots were not connected?

Gen. Keane: Yes, absolutely and also I think a factor here is Hasan's position as an officer and also his position as a psychiatrist contributed to that because of the special category I think someone who's operating as a clinician every day treating patients is in in the military. It's an individual activity versus a group activity which provides considerably more supervision in squads, platoons, companies and the like inside our units.

So there's no doubt in my mind that that was operating here. But in fairness to many of the people who are associating with him, based on what preliminary research I have done and I think what the committee is doing, I think we're going to find very clearly that we do not have specific guidelines on dealing with Jihadist extremism in terms of the obligations of the members of the military to identify a reported and what actions to take and what constitutes Jihadist extremists itself.

So that you take some of this burden away from people by having those guidelines and when you have those guidelines in place you are clearly saying to the institution that this is important to us, we are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior and we want to identify with immediately to try to curb the behavior through counseling and rehabilitation and if necessary separate that individual from the service if it cannot be curbed.

Sen. McCain: I have talked to military officers who have stated that they at least up until now have had a significant reluctance to pursue what may be these indications because of this political correctness environment. Have you heard the same?

Gen. Keane: Well I know it exists, no doubt about it, and what I'm trying to say is is that the way to deal with that -- it shouldn't have to be an act of moral courage on behalf of a soldier to have to report behavior that we should not be tolerating inside our military organizations. It should be an obligation. The way to make that an obligation is provide very specific guidelines through the chain of command as to what their duties are in regards to this issue. That takes this issue -- begins to take this issue off the table because the institution is speaking clearly in terms of what its expectations are and what it will tolerate and what it will not tolerate.

Sen. McCain: And perhaps err on the side of caution instead of erring on the side of correctness.

I think General Keane is pointing to a good way to help soldiers, and help the Army, akin to what Stu Herrington was talking about the other day in this blog.   

RoE warning: Look, I know the three people quoted above are not Democratic Party favorites. Even so, I don't want to see a bunch of ad hominem attacks on Keane, McCain and Lieberman. If you want to do that, take it outside to another blog. This is a sensitive, difficult subject. It is easy to rant about this. But that is not what we need. I don't want name calling, I want to think about solutions here, as Keane does. ‘Nuff said?

Will Palmer/Flickr

The note below is from a friend, retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer who wrote one of the best memoirs of the Vietnam War, Silence was a Weapon -- and who also blew a much-needed whistle in Iraq in 2004 about the abuse of prisoners.

My favorite anecdote in his Vietnam memoir is about the restaurateurs of Saigon who specialized in Hanoi cuisine and who complained about all the Viet Cong commanders he was driving into the city for lunch. Herrington's feeling was that they were hungry and homesick, and that a little bit of pho would go a long way. He was right, despite the discomfort of the restaurant owners.

Anyway, here is his take on what the Army needs to do after the Fort Hood incident. I think he offers a lot of common sense, as well as dollop of respect for Muslim soldiers in a difficult situation. I think the top brass needs to think about this was a way to protect American soldiers from violent extremists in their ranks:

I remember when we invaded Panama, and I led a team to investigate (via captured archival review and interrogations of detainees) if some of our soldiers stationed in Panama had been "co-opted" (i.e. recruited) by Noriega's intelligence service to give secret information about the US contingent stationed there. We found 35 cases from our investigation, of whom all but one were Hispanic GIs, or GIs with Panamanian wives who were working as civilians for US forces.

When I revealed these somewhat damning results to the J-2 and recommended that ethnic Hispanics, heavily targeted as they were, should receive a special security briefing when they signed in for duty, apprising them that they were particularly vulnerable and targeted when stationed there, the idea did not go over well with Southcom staffers and commanders, and that's putting it mildly. "We cannot insult our fine Hispanic-American soldiers," was the outcry. Sounds like a similar situation now exists with Muslim soldiers. 

Fear of "insulting" them causes the Army to circle the wagons, in spite of the obvious appeals being made now by al Qaeda-associated Imam that no soldier in the U.S. Army who is Muslim can faithfully be a Muslim while serving in a force that kills fellow Muslims. This is a serious situation, and someone needs to wake up. There are ways to handle these things that are not necessarily insulting and degrading to Muslim soldiers. In fact, what is insulting and degrading to them is the notion that they are not sufficiently professional to understand their vulnerability and accept common-sense measures to heighten vigilance and weed out problem soldiers -- like Maj. Nidal."

I think there is a great deal of common sense in Stu's note. I think his last three sentences need to be put in front of the Army chief of staff, the secretary of the Army, and the secretary of Defense. 

Will Palmer/Flickr

Get this: Iran's Revolutionary Guards are angry at Pakistan for arresting and then quickly releasing a leader of the anti-Tehran Sunni rebels, Dawn of Pakistan reports. 

Some 42 people died last month in a bombing the rebel group claimed to have perpetrated. "How is it possible that this guy can move freely [unless he is] under the protection of the intelligence services?" righteously inquires the  most honorable Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the no. 2 guy in the Guards. (What's the no. 3 guy, Col. Pepperoni?)

It is a little odd to see both the United States and Iran cranky with Pakistan over related issues of harboring bad actors. Maybe Washington, Tehran and Delhi can form an anti-ISI alliance? I admit to just sitting back and enjoying this. OK, I feel a twinge of guilt. But just a twinge. 

upturnedface/Flickr

John McCreary of NightWatch fame answers my question of yesterday about what the Saudi bombing in Yemen (and the Israeli arms interception near Cyprus) might mean:

The significance is that Saudi Arabia is now engaged in counter-insurgency operations.  Tallying the score in the Middle East-south Asian region during the past five years, a Shiite government is in Baghdad, replacing a secular government, but violence is down for now. 

The Taliban in Afghanistan now operate in more than 220 of the 400 districts in Afghanistan, compared to fewer than 30 five years ago. A new Pakistani Taliban movement has sustained insurgency in the Pakistan border regions and spread terror east of the Indus River boundary and threatened to carry it to India.

Iran and North Korea have continued to proliferate weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Lebanon has no government. Most Central Asian states have returned to the Russian fold. Western China has become less stable and more unpredictable. Yemen is fighting a low level civil war that has now required Saudi Arabian air force assistance. Iran continues to send arms to its proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia. New Iranian made rockets now held by Hamas in Gaza can reach Tel Aviv, and maybe Dimona. Iran's nuclear program continues to expand.

The tally does not look like progress towards stability."

garlandcannon/Flickr

One of the most interesting sub-genres of journalism is the article reporters write as they leave a country or beat. Often, they vent feelings and views they've kept pent-up for year.

Here is a classic of the type. As she leaves Iraq, Alissa Rubin of the New York Times summarizes the harsh lessons she learned from years of living in Baghdad:

. . . Army checkpoints -- legal ones -- are the only ones that stop you, but huge posters of Imam Ali punctuate the streets, a signal that this is now Shiite-land. Imam Ali is revered as a founder of the Shiite branch of Islam, but a poster of him is also a silent rebuke to Sunnis, a way of marking territory, of reminding them that the Shiites run things now. It is a sign of victory as much as peace.

And victory in Iraq almost always begets revenge.

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality."

I think this is a good prism through which to view Iraq's upcoming national elections.

Photo: ALI YESSEF/AFP/Getty Images

Paula Broadwell, a reserve Army officer who is doing a PhD at Harvard, made the point that the military needs to think more about using female soldiers and Marines in counterinsurgency operations. If the point of COIN is to reach out to the population, then female soldiers are likely to be able to better deal with the half of the population that also is female, she noted. I think this is especially true in Muslim societies, and also in other tradition-oriented cultures. Broadwell noted that some 200,000 U.S. military women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

This is a glibness correction. While on my bicycle ride just now I thought about a posting by Seth Edenbaum that criticized my earlier comment. We basically agree about the importance of knowing one's enemy. But he is right that I painted with too broad a brush in my earlier post, partly because I was playing to the gallery -- and this issue is too important for that. I violated Krepinevich's rule advising the disaggregation of one's enemies. So, to be more precise: Our enemy is Islamic extremists who want to harm us, have the means to do so, and can't be dissuaded from acting on their views, and so have attacked our homeland, our diplomats, our soldiers and our journalists.

I appreciate the navigational guidance. Tone is indeed important. Have a good weekend, all.