This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com
In the method, there is madness; in the comedy, nightmare; in the tragedy, farce.
And despite everything, there's still good news when it comes to what Americans can accomplish in the face of the impossible! No, not a debt-ceiling deal in Washington. So much better than that.
According to Thom Shanker of the New York Times, the U.S. military has gathered biometric data -- "digital scans of eyes, photographs of the face, and fingerprints" -- on 2.2 million Iraqis and 1.5 million Afghans, with an emphasis on men of an age to become insurgents, and has saved all of it in the Automated Biometric Information System, a vast computerized database. Imagine: we're talking about one of every 14 Iraqis and one of every 20 Afghans. Who says America's a can't-do nation?
The Pentagon is pouring an estimated $3.5 billion into its biometric programs (2007 through 2015). And though it's been a couple of rough weeks when it comes to money in Washington, at least no one can claim that taxpayer dollars have been ill-spent on this project. Give the Pentagon just another five to 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the biometric endeavor of a lifetime should be complete. Then Washington will be able to identify any Iraqi or Afghan on the planet by eye-scan alone.
Be proud, America!
And consider that feat a bright spot of American accomplishment (and not the only one either) in a couple of weeks of can't-do news from the Greater Middle East. After all, despite those biometric scans, an assassin managed to gun down Our Man in Kandahar (OMK), Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's half-brother, in his own residence. He was the warlord the U.S. military buddied up with as U.S. troops were surging south in 2009 and who helped bring American-style "progress" to the Taliban heartland.
Of course, before he was OMK and our great ally in southern Afghanistan, he was OEK (Our Enemy in Kandahar), the down-and-dirty, election-fixing, drug-running evil dude whom one American military official more or less threatened to take out. ("The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone" was the way that Major General Michael Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in the country, put it at the time.) And before he was OEK, he was CMK (the CIA's Man in Kandahar), right up there on the Agency's payroll; and even before that, speaking of Chicago, he was a restaurateur in that city who... but I'm losing track of my point, as Americans have a knack for doing in Afghanistan.
Anyway, as I think I was saying, OMK-OEK-CMK was assassinated by Sardar Mohammad, a man he trusted and saw six days a week, a local "police commander" who, according to the Washington Post's Joshua Partlow, "spent years as an ally of the United States in the war against the Taliban." He was also reputedly a "trusted CIA contact" who had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces. He had, so associates believe, either been turned by the Taliban in the last few months or was a long-time sleeper agent.
And then when security couldn't have been tighter, at a service in a Kandahar mosque where hundreds (including top government officials from the region) had gathered to pay their respects to the dead capo, a suicide bomber wearing a turban-bomb somehow slipped inside and blew himself up, killing among others the chief of the Kandahar Province religious council.
In other words, even though the U.S. military tried to flood the zone in southern Afghanistan, its claims of progress and improved security are already giving way to a nowhere-to-hide Taliban world. These events could certainly be considered the insurgency's symbolic goodbye to General David Petraeus, the U.S. surge commander there, who was just handing over command and readying himself to return to Washington to become CIA director. In a further sign of deteriorating security, an advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai was assassinated (along with a member of parliament) in heavily guarded Kabul when a squad of Taliban gunmen stormed his walled compound.
To look on the bright side, though, that turban bomb may prove useful indeed to the Homeland Security lobby and the Transportation Security Administration back in the U.S. After all, it's one more thing to strip off in airports along with the usual assortment of wallets, belts, baseball caps, and footwear; and it's a surefire Homeland Security Department fear-stoker, hence fundraiser, to add to suppository bombs and possibly mythical but well-publicized surgically implanted bombs. (And bad news for any Sikhs with air travel in mind.)
Franchising a No-Friends Policy
Biometrics aside, there were some other startling numbers out of the Greater Middle East recently. As it happened, some non-military types were also looking into eyes, not for retinal patterns, but patterns of thought. Pollsters from IBOPE Zogby International checked out 4,000 sets of eyes in six Middle Eastern countries -- Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco -- at least five of which qualify as U.S. allies, and in none of which has the U.S. bombed, invaded, or carried out a night raid in recent memory.
And still, favorable opinion about the United States had plunged dismally since the early, heady days of the Obama presidency. In many cases, the numbers are now below those registered in the last year of the Bush era (and you can imagine what they were). Only 5% of post-Arab-Spring Egyptians, for instance, claimed to have a "favorable view" of the United States, and across the six countries, only 10% of respondents "described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama."
This spring, Pew pollsters found similarly plunging favorability ratings in the Greater Middle East. More recently, they asked Pakistanis about the CIA drone strikes in that country's tribal borderlands and came up with a polling near-impossibility: 97% of Pakistanis looked upon them negatively!
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
