Op Ed

On Thanksgiving Day 2001, my job was to take the turkeys out of the fire. I’d been out reporting most of the day, so when I returned to Jalalabad my contribution to dinner was to monitor four scrawny Afghan turkeys that were baking in Dutch ovens buried in hot coals behind the Spinghar Hotel. Once I was sure they were fully cooked, I sliced them up for a dining room full of war correspondents who were celebrating with an unhealthy amount of lousy Pakistani liquor.

As a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, I had spent more than a dozen Thanksgivings with fellow hacks in Third World countries, fashioning holiday meals from whatever we could find in local markets. But Thanksgiving in Afghanistan was different. Sure, there were plenty of familiar faces from past wars in the old hotel that we had made the media headquarters. There were also acouple of household names at the table: CNN’s Brent Sadler, Fox’s Geraldo Rivera. But this dinner of turkey, mutton, cauliflower and potatoes was more emotional than others.

Just a week before, Taliban fighters had ambushed us on the road to Kabul. The bearded gunmen stopped two of the cars in the convoy and executed four of our colleagues. It took several days to get the bodies to Pakistan. Their faces were still fresh in our minds. The night before the holiday, The Washington Post‘s Pam Constable had decided to organize a dinner to break the somber mood, even as American bombs rattled the windows. We tried to blunt our trauma by raising glasses to our fallen comrades and treating ourselves to an American Thanksgiving.

Eight Thanksgivings later, U.S. soldiers are still celebrating their survival in Afghanistan, even as they ship home the bodies of their dead. Taliban gunmen are still launching ambushes on the Kabul road as American bombs rain down. Some Texas troops will be sharing a Thanksgiving meal on the sprawling Bagram Air Base, eating turkey and fixings supplied by Houston-based KBR, which has made billions in profits from the war. More will be sitting behind sandbags in frigid fire bases, eating ravioli out of plastic bags and peering down mountainsides, watching for the enemy.

Back home, many Americans will be thinking long and hard about what our troops are doing in Afghanistan and what they can hope to accomplish. Most important, they’ll be asking whether the fight in Afghanistan is worth what it’s costing us in blood and treasure.

While President Obama will make the decision about a new strategy, individual Americans need to answer these questions for themselves. Texans in particular need to think about Afghanistan, because 15,000 Texans serve in the armed forces. Lately, one Texan per week has died in Afghanistan.

The first thing to understand about Afghanistan is that it’s not Iraq. Nor is it Vietnam. The nation has not had an effective central government since the late 1970s, and since then living conditions have regressed in almost every way. There is also a vast gulf between average Afghans and the men who carry Kalashnikovs in the streets. One wants nothing but peace; the other is a mercenary.

I spent two months living with Pashtun fighters during the Battle of Tora Bora in 2001. These mujahedeen had only weeks earlier ditched their Taliban turbans to join the CIA payroll and fight al Qaida. They had no interest in Western ideas of liberty, democracy or fighting terrorism; they only wanted to drive the foreign fighters out of their country. At that moment the enemy was al Qaida, which made them our allies of the hour. These fighters had been educated in conservative religious schools, if at all, and they fought for clan leaders who made sure they got paid. They prayed five times a day, even in the heat of battle. Their goal was to simply be left alone.

I have no doubt that most of the mujahedeen I shared tea with in 2001 are now fighting against U.S. troops. The heart of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s battle plan for Afghanistan is to get these men to switch sides again. That strategy eventually succeeded in Iraq, after years of strategic blunders, but will be harder in Afghanistan. In Iraq, American officers could negotiate with the nationalist insurgents because they were led by men from the middle and upper classes, many of them with Western educations and secular views. The flat terrain also favored American tactics, making the insurgents want to talk.

In Afghanistan, there is no middle class. Most Afghans spend their lives following an ancient interpretation of the Quran. The country’s mountainous geography favors guerrilla tactics, which places the Americans in a weak negotiating position. The Afghans have also proven difficult to buy off, since clan and tribal loyalty are paramount in Afghan society.

When I interviewed Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch in Iraq in 2008, he chalked up U.S. successes there to the fact that American commanders had finally figured the country out. By McChrystal’s assessment, the Pentagon is still nowhere near figuring out Afghanistan. One key question is whether we ever will.

The litany of seemingly insurmountable challenges has led many to call for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. After McChrystal’s report leaked in September, Vice President Joe Biden floated a containment strategy in which the Pentagon would pull out and build a virtual wall around Afghanistan. We’ve tried that before, and we’re still doing it with another country I’ve reported from: Somalia. U.S. troops provide equipment and training to every country that borders Somalia, and a naval task force sits off the coast. The Pentagon’s goal is to simply contain the radicals where they can do no harm.

I could try to quantify the misery in Somalia using government statistics, but there has been no real government to collect data since 1989. Outsiders guess that unemployment is at 80 percent, but no one knows for sure. Infant mortality is horrifyingly high, but since most Somalis never see a hospital in their short, brutish lives, who can calculate a number? I can tell you that no more than 10 percent of Somali children see a classroom. Women are oppressed publicly and abused daily. Young men are heavily armed and drugged, either on a narcotic called khat or on a radical form of Islam that would make al-Qaida’s Ayman al-Zawahiri blush.

Those who would withdraw American troops from Afghanistan are condemning the Afghan people to a Somali fate. The people of Somalia did not elect the brutal warlords who rule their divided country, and neither would Afghans elect the radicals who would take power if left unopposed. We would be writing off millions of people to generations of suffering, and the female half would again become chattel. The cost in lives and money to the United States would certainly drop in the short term. The long-term costs to humanity would skyrocket.

I was late to that Thanksgiving party in 2001 because I had been assigned to write a heart-warming story. The headline read, “Girls at School in Eastern Afghanistan for the First Time Since 1996.” I wrote, in part:

Hundreds of girls were at school for the first time in their lives. The teachers did their best to calm them, but learning with others—instead of alone or in small groups at home—proved to be a powerful distraction. Throughout Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, 3,500 girls have registered for classes and 320 female teachers have returned to work.

Politicians and generals may talk about fighting terrorism, but frontline troops talk about the new school or the better hospital they’ve helped build. I’ve been on patrol with hundreds of young soldiers, and the one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that they can’t believe how horrible the living conditions are in Afghanistan. And once they’ve been inside an Afghan family compound, they would often say: “I get it, I get why these guys become terrorists.” They learn firsthand that defeating terrorism is not about killing people, but about defeating injustice.

The vast majority of Afghan civilians, of course, don’t become terrorists. Most people I’ve met want a country more like India than Iran. They certainly don’t want the medieval-style Islamic regime the Taliban operated. They want little more than to work, prosper and provide a better life for their children.

The question—for all of us—is how many American lives and dollars we are willing to sacrifice to help them achieve those dreams and, by extension, to bolster our security.

More from Afghanistan »

Blood and Treasure by Laura Burke Texans killed in the “graveyard of empires” Texas veterans with PTSD

Gather ’round, and a true tale I’ll tell about how privatization does not go so well.

In the past decade or so, public officials have rushed to privatize government functions. Corporations, they cried, can do any public job better and cheaper. So on that theoretical assumption, everything from water systems to social services has been turned over to corporations for their fun and profit. In case after case, the profits came at the expense of the public. The corporations achieved their so-called “efficiencies” by replacing experienced government employees with low-wage workers and cutting service to the people.

For example, in 2005 the Republican governor and Texas Legislature drank deeply from the cup of privatization theory when Accenture Ltd. got a nice contract to handle food stamp applications. Accenture computers and consultants arrived, and 2,900 state workers exited.

After months of bumbling, Accenture botched the job so badly that the state’s sheepish officials had to fire the corporation and give the program back to the state. But—oh—one little problem. Those 2,900 fired workers were gone, having moved, taken other jobs, or just becoming fed up. Most weren’t coming back.

Now that job losses have caused food stamp applications to soar by 11 percent, Texas doesn’t have enough trained processors to handle the load. The law requires that these hard-hit people be certified within 30 days—but the backlog is so huge that certification is taking three months in Amarillo, four months in Houston, and five in Dallas.

Before privatization, the Texas food stamp program won national praise for its efficiency. Now it’s a mess—and hungry people are paying the price.

For more information on Jim Hightower’s work—and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown—visit www.jimhightower.com.

Just before taking office, Barack Obama called on the millions of people involved in his campaign to stay active: “I don’t want them to just sit around and wait for me to do something,” he said. “I want them to be pushing their agendas.”

Well, since he asked for it, let’s shove this agenda forward: Jobs. Middle-class jobs. Jobs with a future and a satisfying purpose. Lots and lots of those jobs.

Obama has talked often about jobs, but he’s put little presidential heft into creating them. Indeed, even as unemployment soars to 10 percent and the number of underemployed Americans almost doubles that percentage, the administration lacks the sense of urgency that ordinary families feel.

Debbie Kransky, 51, who lives in Milwaukee, has been out of work since February despite constantly being on the hunt. Her unemployment benefits have run out, and her life savings have been depleted. As she told The New York Times, “I’ve got October rent. After that, I don’t know. I’ve never lived month to month my entire life. I’m just so scared, I can’t even put it in words.”

There are millions of Debbies, yet Obama doesn’t seem to be in touch with the aching anxiety and growing anger of these people. They saw the unprecedented, multi-trillion-dollar federal bailout to save Wall Street banksters. Now they hear the recession is “over.” Yet there are six unemployed people for every job opening. Obama, however, recently brushed off this reality, saying: “As you know, jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last.”

Hello—jobs are not an “indicator,” they’re the sustainer of families, the lifeblood of our middle-class society. Franklin Roosevelt made jobs first, not last. And so should Obama. Soon. In fact, now would not be too soon.

For more information on Jim Hightower’s work—and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown—visit www.jimhightower.com.

Drew Ryun surveys the Dallas hotel conference room. He can feel the dissatisfaction—anger, even—radiating from the 40 or so newly minted conservative activists seated in front of him.

“You are all here because you are upset about something,” says Ryun, executive director of American Majority, whose mission is training a national network of activists committed to limited government. “You want to know what you can do to turn the tide in this country.”

There are a few murmurs and a boisterous, “Yes!”

“We all share common values as conservatives. We all want to hold our elected officials accountable,” he says, pacing the front of the room. “But here’s a test: Who here can name every member of your school board?”

Silence.

Ryun is practicing the ancient art of political organizing, a tradition once thought lost in the age of television campaigning. With the Christian Right and the Obama Left having reinvented personal politicking for the 21st century, the old wizardry is making a comeback. After the tea parties are over and the Fox News van has skipped town, American Majority is training activists to win elections at the grassroots.

At this Thursday-night meeting in late September, Ryun uses the audience’s ignorance as a teachable moment. He has demonstrated that angry chants and loud shouts do not an effective activist make. Like an Army drill sergeant, he’s tearing down these wannabes and building them up as political warriors with a full complement of weaponry.

“OK. So what are you so pissed about? The people that make decisions are the ones that actually get elected to office,” Ryun says. “If you don’t know who the people are that are making the decisions that most directly affect you, what are you so mad at?”

Ryun helped his twin brother Ned launch American Majority in January 2008. They are the sons of former Kansas Republican Congressman Jim Ryun, whom the National Review ranked as the most conservative member of Congress in 2006. Ned, president of American Majority, worked as a writer in President George W. Bush’s administration. Drew previously ran the grassroots operation of the Republican National Committee.

Nevertheless, the group claims to be nonpartisan—a requirement to keep its nonprofit status. The Ryuns say their efforts are ideological, not partisan; they consider most elected Republicans either insufficiently conservative or, worse, falsely conservative.

American Majority has a field office in Dallas. Since it opened in late May, the group has held 12 training sessions (half for activists, half for candidates), with six more on this year’s calendar. Ryan says American Majority’s goal for 2010 is a thousand new activists and 100 candidates running in Texas.

The training session makes it clear that the members of this audience are not the “crazy uncles” you see on TV. They’re the kind of folks who will work the call centers, walk blocks, and, potentially, translate the Tea Party movement into a political force.

WILLIAM WAYNE JUSTICE1920 – 2009

See also:

Justice for the Dispossessed: William Wayne Justice 1920-2009

One of his clerks remembers Judge Justice »

Dave Richards on Wayne Justice »

It is again time for those of us in the middle of the mystery of life to confront the mystery of death.  As with every funeral, there is a sense of loss.  But never before have I felt not just a sense of loss, but such a sense of loneliness.  He was the ever-burning fire at the base of our camp.  It was to his flame that we were all drawn for warmth.  It was to his light that we looked for inspiration.  Now, the fire has gone out.  We are left in the cold, in the dark, and all alone.

Those who knew him best will miss him most.  But, our country will miss him most of all, especially now.  No one else cared as much, no one else did as much, no one else mattered as much as William Wayne Justice.   We are left with no one like him.  I fear we will not soon see anyone who even puts us in mind of him.  Wayne strapped to his slender back all that was best in our system of laws and in ourselves, and pushed upwards, through sunshine and shadow, towards a higher and finer concept of justice, justice that had for too long eluded our society.   Shakespeare anticipated Wayne when he wrote, what “can [I] say more/ Than this rich praise – that you alone [were] you.”

Wayne knew in every cell and membrane that, to show compassion for an individual or a people, without concern for the legal structures that make them an object of sympathy, is just watery sentimentality.  It is not a responsible understanding of the law.  He knew also that those who prefer injustice to disorder generally produce more of both. And, he likewise knew that those who are bold enough to advance before the age must learn to expect censure.  In enforcing constitutional mandates, he learned that there would be a horrific price to pay.  But, he always reached for the check, and he paid it to the very last penny.

All of us have often heard of the crucibles in which Wayne was torched and burned, how the ingot was stamped with the hallmark, and the ashes blown away.  But, with some crucibles and some hallmarks, we must always tell the story.   Because we send him to the immortality of history, we tell the story.  Because we must remind ourselves of, and remain scared of,  what humanity can do to itself, we tell the story.

Wayne took the bench in 1968, two months after Dr. King’s murder.  Fourteen years had passed since Brown v. Board of Education.  Nonetheless, African-Americans were still being denied a desk in the school room, a place at the lunch counter, a moment in the voting booth, a seat at the front of the bus, a job at the factory, and a home in the neighborhood.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.  Many people contributed to the long, vexed, and continuing struggle to change all that.  But, within Texas, no individual, and no group of individuals, did remotely as much as Wayne.  He stands alone among all the others.  Whoever is in second place is not even close.

The case of United States v. Texas, for example, resulted in Wayne’s imposing a desegregation order on all public schools at all levels throughout the State of Texas.  This was an order on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of black children in Texas who, although not even grown up, were already being ground down.  Wayne’s ruling was upheld by the Fifth Circuit, but the State sought a stay from Circuit Justice Hugo Black.  Justice Black wrote: “The District Court’s opinion and order are comprehensive and well reasoned.  In my judgment the facts found by the District Court, which do not appear materially disputed by the applicants, fully justify the order.”

Wayne’s contribution to the rights of the incarcerated was similarly profound.  In the wake of Iraq and Abu Gharib we have all been made sickeningly familiar with prisoner abuse and even torture.  I quote from a national magazine: “The footage is not easy to watch.  In one clip, a prisoner screams as an attack dog mauls his leg; in another, a prisoner with a broken ankle gets zapped in the buttocks with a stun gun because he’s not crawling along the floor quickly enough.  These aren’t the infamous videos from . . . Abu Ghraib.  They were taken in 1996″ at a detention facility outside of Houston.

The case of Ruiz v. Estelle became Wayne’s most famous and his most long-running.  It began in 1972 with a handwritten fifteen-page petition from an inmate in a Texas prison within Wayne’s district.  The prisoner, David Ruiz, alleged that he was being confined under unconstitutional conditions and specified incidents of harassment by prison officials, inadequate medical care, and unlawful solitary confinement.  Eventually, Mr. Ruiz became the lead plaintiff in a class action involving all the prisoners in the Texas system.  Wayne presided over the case for thirty years and, despite enormous governmental obstinacy, forced thoroughgoing reform all over the state.

In a totally different arena, Wayne vindicated the rights of children of illegal immigrants to attend public schools.  The local school district had reasoned that, because their parents were here unlawfully and were paying no tax, the children should be required to pay tuition – a requirement that effectively and forever shut the schoolhouse doors to them.  Wayne quickly outlawed this practice.  His decision was upheld unanimously by the Fifth Circuit, and by the Supreme Court on a five to four vote.

Think back on these decisions for a moment.  Wayne held that African-Americans should enjoy the same rights as whites, that those whom we had imprisoned should be treated humanely, that children are entitled to public education irrespective of the financial or citizenship status of their parents.  What, in the name of all that we hold good and true is controversial about any of those holdings?  How could any system of justice have reached different conclusions?

But, this is now, and that was then.  The vitriol directed at Wayne and his family was brutal, copious, and unrelenting.  If Wayne had not been so robust, so high-hearted, and so unafraid, our state’s history would have been vastly different and vastly poorer.  One-sixth of the 65,000 residents of Tyler, where Wayne sat, signed a petition calling for his impeachment.  Hate mail and obscene phone calls poured in at both home and office.  A fleet of school buses was bombed.  Wayne received death threats and two different plans to kill him were documented.  The minister of the First Baptist Church, which was located across the street from the federal courthouse, called Wayne a socialist intent on tearing down the fabric of local society.  A neighbor who was an influential member of the Episcopal Church made it clear, when Wayne sought to attend services there, that he was not welcome.  Repair men would not come to his home.  When Wayne walked into a restaurant, others would often walk out.

Wayne endured all this with stoicism, but was deeply anguished over what it meant for his beloved wife Sue.  At least within the federal courthouse, Wayne was surrounded by sympathetic colleagues.  As Sue went about her daily life, however, she had no comparable source of solace.  Wayne well realized that, as life kept calling with its insistent and often hateful voice, it was so often Sue who had to answer.

Wayne and Sue persevered.  They stood with those who had nothing, absolutely nothing, and were not even allowed to enjoy in peace the nothing that they had.  They stood with those for whom life consisted of darkness being added to darkness in a night sky that was already devoid of stars.  They stood with those of broken, broken lives, lives that – if they were to be mended at all — would be mended only imperfectly.

What Wayne and Sue did, and all that they had to bear, “will continue to be commemorated as long as fortitude under fire continues to be admired.” And, as we ask blessings on the life that has ended, and upon the lives that go on, we cannot but be reminded of the smallness of our own vision in the face of these deepest truths.

For other judges, Wayne’s career is both an aspiration and a silent rebuke – we follow so very far behind him.  Fortunately for all of us, a well-lived life is eternal.  Wayne’s example will always be with us.

For now, at this quiet hour and in this sacred place we say, as Thucydides said two-and-a-half millennia ago:  We offer his body to our common earth.  We offer to his memory praise that will never end.*

*My primary source for the Judge’s career was Dr. Frank Kemerer’s William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography. Other sources and attributions can be provided upon request.