Vanguard Blog

My next Vanguard special due out Dec 2, is called Remote Control Warfare. Without giving too much away the premise is simple. As warfare evolves its becoming increasingly sophisticated, and now technology is allowing us to conduct over the horizon warfare in a way we never could before. One of the technologies we look at is the Predator drone. The Predator is becoming an increasingly famous player on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But one of the interesting things I found when I was researching this story, with producer Lauren Cerre, is that the Predator is actually being employed in over a dozen countries right now. And sure enough it related to two of my old stories, Pirates and Mogadishu. They are using the predator to patrol over 2.1 million square miles of ocean in the Gulf of Aden which has become a hotbed of maritime piracy.

What Lauren and I found on our journey around the country looking at the changing face of warfare, was that war is rapidly is starting to more and more resemble a video game. In one scene we even go to a military recruiting center that uses video games to solicit tech savvy gamers into the Army to fight future wars. Since the Predator is kind of the mother of all remote control technologies, and they are actually employing it against pirates right now, I couldn’t help but think that the gaming industry cant be far behind. There is actually a blurring of the line between actual war, and video games that depict it. Although I’m not a gamer at all (as is very obvious in the story as I crash about everything they have me play), I am pretty sure that a counter-piracy video game would be pretty cool, and realistic too. So, pirates, video, games, remote control warfare; that’s got to be a winning combination. Thank you EA, you know where to send the commission check to.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… – Mitch Koss
- You Have a College Degree: So What? – Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan’s falling population – Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? – Mitch Koss
- My Second Tour of Sri Lanka – Mariana van Zeller
- Chinese Mobsters and Megacities – Joanne Shen

Yesterday my colleague Darren wrote about how the world is becoming increasingly dangerous for journalists. While the recent high profile events that Darren mentioned (Roxana Saberi, Laura Ling) have put a spotlight on the perils of journalism, there is an interesting corollary trend that has largely escaped mainstream attention. Slowly but steadily the world is becoming a more dangerous place for humanitarian organizations.

Non-profits, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), aid agencies all used to be afforded a larger degree of protection in the countries and conflicts in which they operated. It’s difficult to define when the trend started occurring, but there has been a rapid escalation in the last two decades of violence against aid organizations. Perhaps the most notable example is the withdrawal of Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF, or known commonly as Doctors Without Borders in the US) from Afghanistan in 2004. Doctors Without Borders had been providing medical services in Afghanistan since 1980. They fearlessly worked throughout the bloody confrontation with the Soviets, the brutal civil war that followed, and the repressive regime of the Taliban in the 1990s. But, after 24 years of operating in one of the most difficult places on earth, coupled with an incident in which five of their staff members were killed, MSF decided that it was too dangerous to operate in the country. This left a major void and a population without access to basic medical treatment at a time it was desperately needed.

Similarly, last year in Somalia, MSF was forced to halt all operations and withdraw 87 staff members after three of its people were killed in a roadside bomb. This was on the heels of an incident in which two staff members were kidnapped. I was in Somalia in 2006 and could see the rampant escalation of violence against what used to be perceived as neutral actors. When I was in Mogadishu, the UN had pulled out all international staff, using only local Somalis as proxies to conduct their activities.

These are but a few examples. The general trend line is that more and more aid organizations are being targeted in conflict zones. The humanitarian space is rapidly shrinking. Even in places where NGOs can still operate, they have to devote a larger and larger portion of their resources to security, thereby diminishing the care they are able to give to the local population, which in turn makes them perceived less as allies and more as foreigners, which makes the aid organizations more vulnerable. It’s a vicious cycle.

Its reasonable to ask why the humanitarian space is rapidly disintegrating. There is a combination of factors. One component is that in both Iraq and Afghanistan the insurgency style conflict has blurred the lines between combatant and non-combatant. This has had spill-over effect to the NGO community. The UN peacekeeping branding has lost some of its perception as a strict peacekeeping force as well. Blue Helmets with .50 cals don’t exactly scream peace, and it is likely that the NGO community as a whole has been impacted by the changing perception of the UN. Finally there is a more worrisome reason that has been whispered about in the aid community. It has been suggested that the military itself is blurring the line between military action and humanitarian action. In an effort to win hearts and minds, the military is engaging in many of the same types of missions that have traditionally been the domain of humanitarian organizations. Detractors say that when the missions are the same, it makes it less important for combatants to distinguish between the motivations of different organizations. For example when I was in Afghanistan in 2005, I was embedded with the US military when they went on a mission called a MedCap. The purpose was to provide medical care in rural Afghanistan. Some in the humanitarian world claim this is exactly the kind of thing that pollutes the line between aid and military action, and puts providers at risk.

The military disagrees with this analysis and believes it is critical to their efforts to engender good will among the civilian populace. Its difficult to know the answer, but it is troubling that an organization like MSF which survived the Russians, a Civil War, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, couldn’t survive the American occupation.

What is clear though is that what (and who) were once considered safe in some of the most difficult areas in the world are no longer so. Aid workers joke with the gallows style humor that the famous red cross plus sign, used to act a bullet proof vest. A vehicle emblazoned with it on the side could drive through the middle of a fire fight and the shooting would stop. Now its considered a bulls-eye.

Whatever the reasons, the shrinking humanitarian space is a reality with fairly severe consequences. In many places organizations like MSF are the only people operating there. Without them, the populations, become less healthy, more impoverished, and increasingly isolated from the outside world; exactly the root conditions that make them ripe to become conflict zones in the first place.

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- The world: A dangerous place for reporters – Darren Foster
- Sometimes that which seemed impossible actually comes to pass – Mitch Koss
- Doctors Wanted: no experience necessary! – Cerissa Tanner
- All you ever needed to know about Vanguard, and then some. – Mariana van Zeller
- Kentucky Targets “The OxyContin Express” – Mariana van Zeller

I wasn’t going to write about Afghanistan this week. It’s all over the news, it’s certainly the topic du jour, and I was feeling a little Afghan-saturated.

But then I woke up this morning to a headline that announced that with the death of 11 more soldiers (including three DEA agents) that this was the deadliest month yet for American forces in the country. It also struck me personally because I lost 11 of my good friends from the service on June 28th, 2005, in a helicopter crash. When I was in Afghanistan, I became pretty good friends with some other DEA agents working counter-narcotics in the country. And, finally, hitting unbelievably close to home, my good friend LT Dan Cnossen stepped on a land mine in early September within 36 hours of getting on the ground. He lost both legs above the knee.

So this morning’s news, coupled with thinking constantly about Dan, reminded me about how volatile Afghanistan really is, and the imperative to figure out a cogent strategy in regards to a rapidly deteriorating situation.

I can’t help but feeling that we are at an inflection point in the war in Afghanistan. The public dissatisfaction is becoming more and more tangible, and there are more opponents on both sides of the political spectrum questioning our goals and methods. The American public has a long historical track record of being quite averse to American casualties, and you cant help but think that as Obama is considering McChrystal’s request for more troops, that this month’s death toll is going to influence that decision.

People have been asking me constantly about my thoughts on Afghanistan. Should we be there? Should we send more troops? Is it winnable?

I don’t claim to have the policy solution in Afghanistan, but I do tell one story that maybe in an anecdotal way can help us think about Afghanistan with regards to the long view of history.

In 2007, I was writing my masters thesis on economic alternatives to poppy production in the rural areas of Afghanistan. I had to go to Bagram Air base about three hours outside Kabul in order to conduct some interviews.

As you drive into the main gate of Bagram air base, you see a line of hundreds of big semi-trucks waiting to get through security to get on base.  The trucks are filled with construction materials — concrete, wood, steel, etc…  Then you drive around Bagram and you see those materials being put to work.  There is massive construction erecting hangars, buildings, even gyms for recreation.  But if you look closely you notice that we are building a lot of those structures on the rubble of the Taliban buildings from when they were in control of Bagram prior to the US invasion.  Interesting, we destroyed them, and are now rebuilding the same buildings.

But perhaps more interesting is that if you look closer, you see the Taliban buildings are built on top of the Russian buildings from when the Russians invaded Afghanistan.  The Russians built on top of the old British buildings, and so forth and so on.  And what you begin to realize is that Bagram has been a base of some foreign power since Alexander the Great.  And if you do what I’m calling — for lack of a better term — a sedimentary analysis of Bagram, you begin to see like a geologist examining layers of rock formations, layers of political empires that have come and gone in Afghanistan.  Finally, as you are looking at these layers of different powers who have failed to tame, conquer, pacify, socialize, democratize (insert your own ideology here), you begin to seriously question the feasibility of US goals in the country.

Then as you leave and see the hundreds of millions of dollars of construction being done at Bagram, and around the rest of the country, you cant help but wonder: Are we just the next layer of rubble?

There was an article in the New York Times this past week about war correspondents in Afghanistan.  Within the article, Richard Engel from NBC said, “It’s like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009.”  The point being that the journalists who cover conflict zones basically moved from Iraq to Kabul starting in 2007.  The greater implication of the headline is that the war in Afghanistan is now the war that matters, and that Afghanistan, which looked like the fairer cousin back in 2006, is really more the ugly stepmother.  The truth is that Afghanistan was always only rosy in comparison to the “Fiasco” (adopted from title of Tomas Ricks’ book on the subject) that was Iraq.  In 2006 most of the serious media was paying attention to the violence in Iraq, and ignoring the growing chorus of discontent coming from the other theater.

In 2006, I was in Afghanistan with Mitch Koss.  Mitch and I had been having lengthy discussions on how we both thought Afghanistan was on the precipice.  Mitch — who had been to Afghanistan in the early early days with Lisa Ling — knew how difficult it was to make forward progress there.  I was also an Afghan veteran and was writing my masters thesis at the time on the escalation of the poppy problem in the country.  We both were keenly aware that Afghanistan was a success only in comparison to Iraq.

What we found on that journey were precursors of all the issues that are manifesting in Afghanistan today.  The security situation was really beginning to plummet.  We missed by just a few minutes a friendly fire incident between the US Army and the Afghan police.   We observed growing dissatisfaction among the populace about the lack of progress in development and the economy.  We saw the impotent reach of the government outside of a small radius beyond Kabul.  Shortly after we left, our hotel was attacked by RPGs and machine guns. Perhaps most interestingly considering today’s headlines, we heard over and over again from Afghanis who were unhappy with Hamid Karzai. At the time, the media and the administration were heralding Karzai as the savior of Afghanistan, able to hold all these coalitions and factions together.  But on the streets, in the meat markets and the tea shops, we heard differently.  One of the final moments in our piece “Fear of Spring” ends with a random voice in the crowd yelling “Fuck Karzai.”  Well, now its 2009 and the world is finally starting to hear the voices in the crowd in Afghanistan.

You might think the Vanguard team is so serious, and we are. We take our work very seriously, and we cover some really serious subjects. But you can’t cover too much death, drugs, conflict, and destruction without a lot of levity to go around. So we are constantly joking around and giving each other a hard time.

I would like to say that overall the Vanguard team has a pretty good sense of humor. Case in point: An incident chronicled in this op-ed I wrote recently for the Huffington post.

I don’t want to give the impression that Vanguard is in the habit of stealing and tagging, more that we like to leave our mark from time to time.

I’m off to Mariana’s house to watch the new episode.  Yup, we are actually all friends in this department; it’s a pretty rare phenomena. The LA Times had an article this morning that talked about how we all get together and go to Laura’s house to play Rock Band.  That’s embarrassing, a ‘lil nerdy, and totally true.  I bet Hannity and O’Reilly don’t get together and workout with the Wii.  (I’m actually not entirely sure they work out at all, but that’s beside the point.)

The point is that Vanguard is a unique place to be, because it’s a tight-knit team.  We think this helps our journalism, but at the very least we know we have a lot of fun doing our job.

–Kaj