Category Archives: Defense Department

How national security gave birth to bioethics

By Jonathan D Moreno, University of Pennsylvania

Starting near the end of World War II and continuing until the 1970s, the US government sponsored radiation experiments on human subjects. Some of these experiments were conducted to understand the effects of radiation on atomic bomb workers. Others were to learn about the benefits of radiation for cancer patients. Many of the experiments were conducted in secret or not well understood by the public.

Twenty years ago, a committee appointed by President Bill Clinton reported on decades of radiation experiments conducted under the auspices of the federal government.

I was a senior staff member of that committee. Even though I had been teaching bioethics for 15 years, I was stunned to discover that my understanding of my field was drastically incomplete. I failed to appreciate that national security was the reason for many experiments in the history of medicine. After that experience, I published my book Undue Risk about human experiments and national security.

Unethical incidents often gave rise to ethical standards we now take for granted. But even when ethical standards were in place, there were times when they were grievously violated.

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5 reasons the U.S. cannot defeat ISIS

Aaron David Miller writes: On Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama will sit down with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to talk about the strategy to fight the Islamic State. The president will lay out what he wants Iraq to do, including making good on promises to empower Sunni militias and tribes. Indeed, there are many things the United States can do to counter the Islamic State: It can increase the number of special forces deployed in the region; assign U.S. troops as spotters and coordinators with forward-deployed Iraqi units; supply weapons directly to vetted Sunni militias; and increase airstrikes.

But what it cannot do is defeat the Islamic State and eliminate it from Iraq and Syria. Even if we finesse the problem and use Obama’s clever turn of phrase, to “ultimately defeat” ISIS, as our goal, we had better get used to a very long war. Even with such a war, victory as conventionally defined may still be elusive. Here is why. [Continue reading…]

Michael Knights writes: When U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter opined that Iraqis “showed no will to fight” in Ramadi, he demonstrated a complete lack of empathy for the situation of the Iraqi combat troops on the front lines against the Islamic State.

America’s Iraqi allies are exhausted, and many units are barely hanging on. They’ve been demonstrating plenty their “will to fight” in the 12 months since Mosul fell, in the 16 months since Fallujah and Ramadi were overrun, and in the decade since Iraqi forces came to outnumber U.S. forces as the main security force in Iraq.

No U.S. service member serving in Iraq ever had to stay in the combat zone for as long as the Iraqi troops have. Many of these Iraqis have no safe place to go on leave, allowing no respite for years on end. No U.S. unit in recent history has ever had to suffer the chronic lack of supply and near-complete lack of good officers that Iraqi soldiers live with every day.

If the United States can totally misunderstand the conditions its allies are experiencing, it’s fair to ask what else it is getting wrong about how Iraqis are going to behave in the future. [Continue reading…]

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A year after ISIS assault, Iraq still on the brink

AFP reports: A year after the Islamic State group launched a brutally effective offensive, Iraq is struggling to survive as a unified nation, gripped by seemingly endless violence, sectarianism and humanitarian tragedy.

IS began the offensive on June 9, 2014, and overran a third of the country, declaring it and areas in neighbouring Syria a “caliphate” and carrying out atrocities from beheadings and mass executions to enslavement and rape.

The jihadists have been driven out of some areas, but still hold much of western Iraq and remain able to defeat Baghdad’s forces and gain new territory despite a year of heavy fighting and some 4,000 strikes carried out in a 10-month US-led air campaign. [Continue reading…]

Nancy A. Youssef reports: It sounded so authoritative, when a top Obama administration official claimed this week that the U.S. killed roughly 10,000 enemy fighters in its fight with the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Until that figure was contradicted by a second official. And then undercut by a third.

Not only could Obama administration officials not agree on the final death toll, they could not say how they determined such a figure with no ground forces in Iraq and Syria to assess airstrike damage. Nor could those officials articulate how well such a statistic measures progress against the terror army.

By the end of the week, many administration officials were admitting a defeat of sorts. They conceded that it was foolish to talk openly about body counts in the first place, when dead fighters are such an irrelevant measure of the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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The secret history of SEAL Team 6: Quiet killings and blurred lines

The New York Times reports: They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.

Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.

Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine.

That role reflects America’s new way of war, in which conflict is distinguished not by battlefield wins and losses, but by the relentless killing of suspected militants. [Continue reading…]

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Using violence and persuasion, ISIS makes political gains

The New York Times reports: Days after seizing the Syrian desert city of Palmyra, Islamic State militants blew up the notorious Tadmur Prison there, long used by the Syrian government to detain and torture political prisoners.

The demolition was part of the extremist group’s strategy to position itself as the champion of Sunni Muslims who feel besieged by the Shiite-backed governments in Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has managed to advance in the face of American-led airstrikes by employing a mix of persuasion and violence. That has allowed it to present itself as the sole guardian of Sunni interests in a vast territory cutting across Iraq and Syria.

Ideologically unified, the Islamic State is emerging as a social and political movement in many Sunni areas, filling a void in the absence of solid national identity and security. At the same time, it responds brutally to any other Sunni group, militant or civilian, that poses a challenge to its supremacy.

That dual strategy, purporting to represent Sunni interests and attacking any group that vies to play the same role, has allowed it to grow in the face of withering airstrikes. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon offered ‘FOIA terrorist’ Jason Leopold a stack of documents to just shut up and go away forever

TechDirt: Jason Leopold has so thoroughly aggravated naturally-secretive government agencies that he has earned the nickname “FOIA terrorist.” He routinely files two dozen FOIA requests a week, along with MDRs (Mandatory Declassification Reviews), which force the government to more closely examine documents it has previously withheld in full.

In the course of these activities, Leopold has also filed numerous FOIA lawsuits against government agencies for withholding documents, not performing thorough searches or exceeding the statutory time limits for responses.

Several government agencies hate him. One government agency hates him so much it offered him a one-time deal bordering on illegality.

In his testimony in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Leopold gave up both the agency and its questionable offer.

Leopold: The Office of Net Assessment (ONA) is the Pentagon’s in-house think tank. They spend millions and millions of dollars putting together reports — reports that they contract out about perhaps some futuristic warfare, or what the situation in the Middle East is going to look like with regards to oil. I asked for those reports. I filed a FOIA request; they refused to comply with my FOIA request. They said it was too broad. I narrowed it, they still said it was too broad. I sued them. Recently they said that ‘We’ll give you some documents as long as you promise to never file a FOIA request again and don’t have anyone else file a FOIA request on your behalf.’

Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.): How is that legal?

Leopold: I don’t know but they put this in writing and I’m really looking forward to the day when I write this story up.

This is what one agency was prepared to do just to keep Leopold out of its file cabinets.

But it’s not just overt actions like these. It’s the little things agencies do to frustrate FOIA requesters, especially journalists like Leopold who are looking for timely information rather than just information. [Continue reading…]

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Nick Turse: My very own Veteran’s Day

It’s been an incredibly quiet show. In recent years, the U.S. military has moved onto the African continent in a big way — and essentially, with the exception of Nick Turse (and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post), just about no one has noticed. In a sense, it’s a reporter’s dream story. Something major is happening right before our eyes that could change our world in complex ways and no one’s even paying attention. Of course, in the West, developments in Africa have been “seen” that way for centuries: that is, little if at all. Think of it as the invisible continent. There can be no place that has, generally speaking, been less in American, or even in Western, consciousness until recently. This is, of course, changing fast in Europe as a wave of desperate immigrants from fragmenting Africa, dying in startling numbers in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean in every rickety kind of craft, has made a distinct impression.

The African continent has, in recent years, been aboil, a phenomenon to which the American military has only been adding as it pursues its unsettling “war on terror” in its usual disruptive ways — and Turse has been Johnny-on-the-spot. His reporting for TomDispatch and his new book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, have done much to give a higher profile to just what U.S. Africa Command has been doing across that continent. In his most recent report for TomDispatch from civil-war-torn South Sudan, he focused in for the first time on the phenomenon of child soldiers and how the Obama administration, which has denounced their use in countries that are not its allies, repeatedly looked the other way while a South Sudanese military it had built used them. It wasn’t a pretty tale. Today, he turns from U.S. and South Sudanese policy matters to the saddest story of all — those child warriors themselves and what makes them tick, drawing on his interviews with South Sudan’s youngest soldiers. Tom Engelhardt

The child veterans of South Sudan want to know
Will Americans support them?
By Nick Turse

PIBOR, South Sudan — “I’ve never been a soldier,” I say to the wide-eyed, lanky-limbed veteran sitting across from me. “Tell me about military life. What’s it like?” He looks up as if the answer can be found in the blazing blue sky above, shoots me a sheepish grin, and then fixes his gaze on his feet. I let the silence wash over us and wait. He looks embarrassed. Perhaps it’s for me.

Interviews sometimes devolve into such awkward, hushed moments. I’ve talked to hundreds of veterans over the years. Many have been reluctant to discuss their tours of duty for one reason or another. It’s typical. But this wasn’t the typical veteran — at least not for me.

Osman put in three years of military service, some of it during wartime. He saw battle and knows the dull drudgery of a soldier’s life. He had left the army just a month before I met him.

Osman is 15 years old.

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Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate is grappling with its identity

Charles Lister writes: In a three-hour lightening assault launched on the evening of Thursday 28 May, a coalition of Syrian opposition fighters successfully captured the last remaining major regime-held town in the governorate of Idlib. In taking control of Ariha, the largely Islamist Jaish al-Fateh coalition and its allied Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions have successfully imposed a near-total province-wide strategic defeat upon the Bashar al-Assad regime.

With Idlib therefore effectively out of regime control — with the exception of the now isolated Abu Duhour Airbase and several small pockets of villages — opposition attention can now shift south to Hama, west to the regime stronghold of Latakia, and east to Syria’s largest city of Aleppo. All seem likely candidates.

Parts of northern Latakia are now dangerously exposed and one of the leading Islamist commanders active there has told this author to expect “a lot of surprises” in the coming weeks. Other insurgent commanders say a large multi-group operations room is in the midst of being formed in Aleppo amid escalating fighting south of the city. “We’re feeling more confident than ever and sooner or later, the regime will experience the consequences of that — Idlib was just the first stage of a more comprehensive plan,” claimed one prominent Islamist commander now in Idlib. However, a renewed Islamic State (IS) offensive north of Aleppo may prove a dangerous distraction to the implementation of the next stages of that more ‘comprehensive plan.’

A majority of the media coverage of Jaish al-Fateh’s advances across Idlib has focused on the role of al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra over and above the part played by Syrian opposition factions. Admittedly, Jabhat al-Nusra and its close ally Jund al-Aqsa have indeed played a key role in frontline operations in Ariha and previous battles in Idlib city, Jisr al-Shughour, Al-Mastouma and many other Idlib fronts. However, according to interviews with multiple commanders involved in Jaish al-Fateh operations, it has in fact been more expressly Syrian factions that have lent the most combined manpower and led much of the decision making within the operations room. Faylaq al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham — two groups increasingly close at both leadership and ground level — have been particularly central. Moreover, none of the major victories in Idlib since early-April would have been possible without the crucial rearguard actions of U.S.– and Western-backed FSA units and their externally-supplied artillery shells, mortars and American-manufactured BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile systems.

Thus the reality on the ground is more complex than YouTube videos and media headlines would suggest. As this author revealed in early-May, the depth of coordination between Western-backed FSA factions, Islamists, Jabhat al-Nusra and other jihadists has increased markedly in Idlib since April, both due to a natural need for cooperation on the ground, but also thanks to a tacit order to do so from the U.S.- and Saudi-led coordination room in southern Turkey. Having spoken extensively with leading commanders from across the Syrian spectrum in recent weeks, it is clear this cooperation has at least partly been motivated by a desire to ensure victories in Idlib do not become strategic gains for al Qaeda. After all, it has been starkly clear since the summer of 2014 that Idlib in particular represents Jabhat al-Nusra’s most valuable powerbase. [Continue reading…]

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While nobody was looking, ISIS launched a new, deadly offensive

The Washington Post reports: Syrian rebels appealed for U.S. airstrikes to counter a new offensive by the Islamic State in the northern province of Aleppo that could reshape the battlefield in Syria.

The surprise assault, launched over the weekend, opened a new front in the multi-pronged war being waged by the extremist group across Iraq and Syria, and it underscored the Islamic State’s capacity to catch its enemies off guard.

The push — which came on the heels of the miltants’ capture of the Syrian city of Palmyra and the western Iraqi city of Ramadi late last month — took them within reach of the strategically vital town of Azaz on the Turkish border.

The offensive reinforces the impression that the Islamic State is regaining momentum despite more than eight months of U.S. led-airstrikes. [Continue reading…]

Shiraz Maher writes: It is almost impossible to see how the Islamic State can be undermined. So far, the West has shown itself to have little meaningful strategy and the coalition bombing campaign has been weak and ineffective.

Meanwhile, for all the talk of counternarratives and disruptive measures, thousands of young people from across the world continue to make the journey to Syria in support of jihadist causes. Of all the options currently being explored by Western governments, none are attractive. Jihadists will not abide diplomatic initiatives and there is no public or political support for a full military campaign.

The intractability of the Islamic State is borne of much more than just the Syrian uprising. At its core is the unraveling of the Sunni poor across the Levant, while Sunni elites are holding on to the power structures that have worked for them thus far. They are the greatest losers of the last decade and are unsure of their place in an increasingly Balkanized and atomized Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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Washington insists Syrian rebels receiving U.S. support must not use weapons against Assad regime

Michael Weiss reports: A centerpiece of the U.S. war plan against ISIS is in danger of collapsing. A key rebel commander and his men are ready to ready to pull out in frustration of the U.S. program to train a rebel army to beat back the terror group in Syria, The Daily Beast has learned.

The news comes as ISIS is marching on the suburbs of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. Rebels currently fighting the jihadists there told The Daily Beast that the U.S.-led coalition isn’t even bothering to respond to their calls for airstrikes to stop the jihadist army.

Mustapha Sejari, one of the rebels already approved for the U.S. training program, told The Daily Beast that he and his 1,000 men are on the verge of withdrawing from the program. The issue: the American government’s demand that the rebels can’t use any of their newfound battlefield prowess or U.S.-provided weaponry against the army of Bashar al-Assad or any of its manifold proxies and allies, which include Iranian-built militias such as Lebanese Hezbollah. They must only fight ISIS, Washington insists.

“We submitted the names of 1,000 fighters for the program, but then we got this request to promise not to use any of our training against Assad,” Sejari, a founding member of the Revolutionary Command Council, said. “It was a Department of Defense liaison officer who relayed this condition to us orally, saying we’d have to sign a form. He told us, ‘We got this money from Congress for a program to fight ISIS only.’ This reason was not convincing for me. So we said no.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s ISIS strategy: Something in preference to nothing

The Daily Beast reports: The self-proclaimed Islamic State has claimed a major provincial capital in Iraq and taken over another strategically key city in Syria. In response, the Obama administration plans to do — well, not much of anything new.

Four defense officials told The Daily Beast that there’s still strong resistance within the Obama administration to making any serious changes to the current strategy for fighting ISIS — despite mounting skepticism from some in the Pentagon about the current U.S. approach to the war.

Although the Obama administration’s public messaging is that it still wants to “degrade and ultimately defeat” ISIS, in reality, many in the Pentagon view the real objective as just running out the clock.

“I think this is driven by a sense that this not our fight and so we are just going to try to contain it and have influence where we can,” one official who works closely on the military strategy explained to The Daily Beast. “This is a long fight, and it will be up to the next administration to tackle.”

Rather than aiming for a decisive victory, the U.S. approach has devolved into simply maintaining a low boil in perpetuity.

They said they realize that the political strategy supersedes the military one; there is no public appetite for ground troops in Iraq; there is frustration about corruption within the Iraqi government; and there is a lack of a clear alternative approach.

“It’s a political response,” one official explained. “They are doing ‘something’ to inoculate themselves from substantial criticism.”

Some are more blunt, saying no one wants to invest too much time or resources in crafting an alternative. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon slams ‘unhelpful’ Shi’ite codename for Ramadi offensive

Reuters: The Pentagon on Tuesday said it was “unhelpful” for Iraq’s Shi’ite militia to have announced an openly sectarian code name for the operation to retake the Sunni city of Ramadi and added that, in the U.S. view, the full-on offensive had yet to begin.

A spokesman for the Shi’ite militias, known as Hashid Shaabi, said the code name for the new operation would be “Labaik ya Hussein”, a slogan in honor of a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed killed in the 7th Century battle that led to the schism between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims.

The United States has been vocally advocating for Iraq to tread carefully in employing Shi’ite militias to help Iraqi forces retake the city, which fell to the Islamic State a week ago in Baghdad’s biggest military setback in nearly a year.

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Only Iran is confronting ISIS, says commander of Quds Force

Reuters reports: The general in charge of Iran’s paramilitary activities in the Middle East said the United States and other powers were failing to confront Islamic State, and only Iran was committed to the task, a news agency on Monday reported.

Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force responsible for protecting the Islamic Republic’s interests abroad, has become a familiar face on the battlefields of Iraq, where he often outranks local commanders.

“Today, in the fight against this dangerous phenomenon, nobody is present except Iran,” the Tasnim news agency quoted Soleimani as saying on Sunday in reference to Islamic State.

Iran should help countries suffering at the hands of Islamic State, said Soleimani, whose force is part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Mehr news agency reported.

The Sunni militant group has taken key cities in Iraq and Syria in the past week, routing regular forces in both countries with apparent ease.

“Obama has not done a damn thing so far to confront Daesh: doesn’t that show that there is no will in America to confront it?” Mehr quoted Soleimani as saying, using a derogatory Arabic term for Islamic State.

“How is it that America claims to be protecting the Iraqi government, when a few kilometres away in Ramadi killings and war crimes are taking place and they are doing nothing?” [Continue reading…]

Christian Science Monitor adds: The comments have created a “Twilight Zone”-esque conversation in which former US military officers – whose troops were killed during the height of the Iraq War by the roadside bombs that Quds force advisers helped Iraqi insurgents make – say that Soleimani may have a point.

“Quite frankly, Soleimani is correct,” says retired Col. Peter Mansoor, who served as the executive officer for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq.

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Barack Obama still misunderestimates ISIS

J.M. Berger writes: The Obama administration’s misguided rhetoric on ISIL finally sped over the edge of a cliff over the last week. Officials stand now like Wile E. Coyote, still taking steps over thin air, bemused, in the moment before gravity takes hold.

With the fall of Ramadi, and continuing through the fall of Palmyra, officials up to and including President Barack Obama have sought to recast the Islamic State’s victories as “tactical” setbacks. Variations on this line were trotted out by the Pentagon and other officials first, and reiterated by the President in an interview published Thursday, in response to a question about the loss of Ramadi: “No, I don’t think we’re losing. There’s no doubt there was a tactical setback, although Ramadi had been vulnerable for a very long time, primarily because these are not Iraqi security forces that we have trained or reinforced.”

For those who do not speak Wonkese, making reference to an enemy’s “tactical” success is code for saying that the enemy is not “strategic.”

To be strategic, according to the dictionary definition, is to identify long-term goals and take action to accomplish them. In the Washington vernacular, the act of Being Strategic implies a near mystical quality of superior thinking possessed by some, and clearly lacking amongst the vulgarians of the world — heedless brutes such as ISIL. Tactics are short-term ploys, easy to dismiss. Strategy is for winners.

Perversely, the United States is itself sorely lacking in strategy, whether in its pedestrian or mythical definitions, with regard to the problem of ISIL. We have deployed a fairly limited collection of tactics, with an increasingly baseless confidence that these will “buy time” for improbable political resolutions in Iraq and Syria. Buying time is inherently tactical, or in this case, magical.

In contrast to the Mideast hopes and dreams we have tossed in a box labeled “strategy,” ISIL does in fact have a strategy, which it is pursuing aggressively. ISIL’s long-term goal is a transnational caliphate, and its strategy to achieve that has been clearly laid out if you take the time to understand it: [Continue reading…]

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Dahr Jamail: The Navy’s great Alaskan ‘war’

It isn’t the best of times for the American Arctic and let me explain why.

The world is in the midst of an oil glut.  In the last year, oil prices bottomed out before rising modestly.  A NASA study just offered the news that a massive ice shelf in Antarctica, half the size of Rhode Island, will disintegrate by 2020, and not so long ago Science magazine reported that the melting of that region’s ice sheets is proceeding far faster than expected.  Sayonara, Miami Beach!  All of this, of course, is happening thanks to the burning of fossil fuels.  In March, the Obama administration responded to such a world by preparing the way for a rather familiar future.  It lifted a ban on drilling for oil and gas off the U.S. southern Atlantic coast, opening those waters and their untapped four billion barrels of oil and 37 trillion cubic feet of gas to future drilling.  Then, less than two weeks ago, the Interior Department green-lighted Shell Oil, a company with a memorably bleak record of exploration and disaster in the Arctic, to launch this country into a drill-baby-drill future in northern waters. 

If Shell gets all its other permits in place, it will begin drilling this summer in the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast.  This will happen under what might be some of the worst weather conditions on the planet in an area “prone to hurricane-force storms, 20-foot swells, pervasive sea ice, [and] frigid temperatures.”  We’re talking, of course, about another four billion barrels of potentially exploitable oil just in that region, which is also a sanctuary for whales, polar bears, and other species that have no vote in this matter.  Subhankar Banerjee put the environmental problem in a nutshell (or perhaps an ice cube) at this site back in March in a piece aptly titled “Arctic Nightmares.” Of the dangers of letting Shell loose in those waters, he wrote, “Just think of the way the blowout of one drilling platform, BP’s Deepwater Horizon, devastated the Gulf of Mexico.  Now, imagine the same thing happening without any clean-up help in sight.”  Keep in mind that this sort of far north drilling can only go on because the past drilling and burning of fossil fuels has helped melt Arctic sea ice and open up its potentially vast energy reserves to exploitation.  It’s a little like watching the proverbial snake eat its tail.

So, thanks to our environmental president, things look bad off Alaska. And as TomDispatch regular Dahr Jamail reports, in June they’re about to get significantly worse.  The U.S. Navy is arriving in the Gulf of Alaska big time — and we’re not talking about the cavalry riding to the rescue here.  In waters that are starting to seem like Grand Central Station, that service is planning to launch massive war games with a new set of potentially deleterious effects on those seas and what lives in them.  But let Jamail explain.  Note that this is a joint project of TomDispatch and Truthout, the invaluable website where he now works.  Tom Engelhardt    

Destroying what remains
How the U.S. Navy plans to war game the Arctic
By Dahr Jamail

[This essay is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.] 

I lived in Anchorage for 10 years and spent much of that time climbing in and on the spine of the state, the Alaska Range. Three times I stood atop the mountain the Athabaskans call Denali, “the great one.” During that decade, I mountaineered for more than half a year on that magnificent state’s highest peaks.  It was there that I took in my own insignificance while living amid rock and ice, sleeping atop glaciers that creaked and moaned as they slowly ground their way toward lower elevations.

Alaska contains the largest coastal mountain range in the world and the highest peak in North America. It has more coastline than the entire contiguous 48 states combined and is big enough to hold the state of Texas two and a half times over. It has the largest population of bald eagles in the country. It has 430 kinds of birds along with the brown bear, the largest carnivorous land mammal in the world, and other species ranging from the pygmy shrew that weighs less than a penny to gray whales that come in at 45 tons. Species that are classified as “endangered” in other places are often found in abundance in Alaska.

Now, a dozen years after I left my home state and landed in Baghdad to begin life as a journalist and nine years after definitively abandoning Alaska, I find myself back. I wish it was to climb another mountain, but this time, unfortunately, it’s because I seem increasingly incapable of escaping the long and destructive reach of the U.S. military.

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Anyone telling you ISIS is in decline isn’t paying attention

Hassan Hassan writes: Once again, in less than a year, Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions en masse and fled in the face of advancing Islamic State forces. The fall of the city of Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar province, leaves no doubt about the jihadi group’s capabilities: Despite U.S. attempts to paint it as a gravely weakened organization, the Islamic State remains a powerful force that is on the offensive in several key fronts across Syria and Iraq.

Ramadi is far from the only front on which the Islamic State is advancing. The group last week launched an offensive, supported by multiple suicide operations, in the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor against President Bashar al-Assad regime’s holdouts in the military air base. In the central city of Palmyra, it attacked a regime base near the ancient Roman ruins. It also recently clashed with Syrian rebels and the regime in the eastern countryside of Aleppo, the provinces of Homs and Hama, and the southern city of Quneitra, near the border with Israel.

Nor are the Islamic State’s gains in Iraq confined to Ramadi. The group has advanced deep into the Baiji oil refinery, the largest in the country. And it has since pushed on from Ramadi, attacking the nearby town of Khalidiya; if the group is successful, that might provide it with the territorial depth to advance on Baghdad.

The Islamic State’s recent advance did not take the world by surprise, as it did when the group captured Mosul and other areas across Iraq last year. This time, the United States said it conducted seven airstrikes in Ramadi, in an effort to prevent its fall, in the 24 hours before the city was lost. Local officials in Ramadi, meanwhile, had repeatedly warned that the city would be overrun if they did not receive urgent reinforcements. But the international and Iraqi support that arrived was simply insufficient to hold the city.

Therefore, the prevalent narrative that the Islamic State is destined to decline appears to be false. Rather than suffering from resource and manpower shortages, the group is only increasing its grip on the local populations in its strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa, Syria; it is also attracting a considerable number of recruits, especially among teenagers. [Continue reading…]

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Fall of Ramadi reflects failure of Iraq’s strategy against ISIS, analysts say

The Washington Post reports: As Islamic State militants repeatedly attacked ­Ramadi this year, police solicited cash from local families and businessmen to buy weapons, one officer recalled. The Iraqi government didn’t pay the police for months, he said.

“We begged and begged for more support from the government, but nothing,” said Col. Eissa al-Alwani, a senior police officer in the city.

The fall of Ramadi amounts to more than the loss of a major city in Iraq’s largest province, analysts say. It could undermine Sunni support for Iraq’s broader effort to drive back the Islamic State, vastly complicating the war effort.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Tuesday reiterated a government pledge to train and arm Sunni fighters to rout the extremists from the predominantly Sunni province. The government had announced a military campaign that envisioned taking back Anbar province in the coming months and then moving on for a climactic battle with the extremists in Mosul, Iraq’s ­second-largest city.

But the plan to form an effective Sunni fighting force was slow to take shape, hobbled by government concerns that some of the Sunnis might be close to the Islamic State, analysts say. [Continue reading…]

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The $25 million building in Afghanistan nobody needed

Megan McCloskey and Vince Dixon report: This is a story about how the U.S. military built a lavish headquarters in Afghanistan that wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted and wasn’t ever used—at a cost to American taxpayers of at least $25 million.

From start to finish, this 64,000-square-foot mistake could easily have been avoided. Not one, not two, but three generals tried to kill it. And they were overruled, not because they were wrong, but seemingly because no one wanted to cancel a project Congress had already given them money to build.

In the process, the story of “64K” reveals a larger truth: Once wartime spending gets rolling there’s almost no stopping it. In Afghanistan, the reconstruction effort alone has cost $109 billion, with questionable results.

The 64K project was meant for troops due to flood the country during the temporary surge in 2010. But even under the most optimistic estimates, the project wouldn’t be completed until six months after those troops would start going home.

Along the way, the state-of-the-art building, plopped in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, nearly doubled in cost and became a running joke among Marines. The Pentagon could have halted construction at many points—64K made it through five military reviews over two years—but didn’t, saying it wanted the building just in case U.S. troops ended up staying. (They didn’t.) [Continue reading…]

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