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Breathing Room: Giving and Giving Up

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

We could all use a little breathing room, some space in which to back up, slow down, and look around.

While many of us aren’t particularly religious, this breathing room has been inspired by religion. This past Wednesday was the first day of the Christian Lenten season. Some Christian sects observe Lent with additional prayers and/or with forgoing pleasurable goods and services. Some Christian sects instruct adherents to give up red meat and to fast on certain days during Lent, ex. Catholics avoid meat on Fridays.

This year the Islamic faith community observes Ramadan from March 1 through March 29, overlapping with Lent for several weeks in recognition of the revelation of Islamic scriptures. Observant Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, offer more prayers, and engage in more charitable acts.

I’m not particularly religious, but I observe Lent having been raised in the Catholic faith. This frustrated my kids when they were little. “If you’re not a regular Catholic any longer, why do we have to give up stuff?” they’d ask.

I explained for multiple reasons:

— This is what our maternal forebears did going back hundreds of years, as far back as the 16th century. Perhaps even further, to when they lived in what was known as Poitou. This puts you in touch with history and tradition of some of your people.

— This is one of the few times privileged people are conscious of the act of going without; it’s still privilege to choose to do so, but in doing so we should be aware of those who are forced to go without. Our Catholic forebears were exhorted by their faith to “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15) We go without as others do during Lent to learn empathy with those who have no choice but to live without.

— Living with a parent who has diabetes and heart disease, going without is a protective act. We have a personal reason to give up red meat and other rich foods while learning how to eat healthier; in doing so we learn skills for a healthier future. This isn’t giving up but a form of giving to each other.

— And now it’s become a matter of health for the planet. Giving up red meat and other forms of discretionary consumption reduces our carbon footprint. This is what we should learn to do during each Lenten season in order to extend this as a lifetime habit.

This year my Lenten observation includes giving up retail consumption. I will not buy goods or services which are not essential, and when I must buy the essential it will not be from businesses embracing fascist ideology.

Support the current administration by eliminating pursuit of social justice through diverse hiring and contracting, inclusive and equitable operations? I will not buy from them, and I will learn how to replace them.

There are economic protests underway, some advocating the boycott of companies that have rejected DEI to submit to the current regime’s bigotry. The NAACP published an advisory list of companies that have eliminated DEI programs and others that have continued to embrace them.

The People’s Union USA organized a February 28th “economic blackout” aimed at certain large retailers; participating consumers’ purchasing abstention may not have made a dent. But the boycott didn’t end there; they are continuing their boycott of multiple large corporations for at least two months, including Amazon and its subsidiaries from March 7-14. They ask that participants make no Amazon purchases, no Whole Foods, no Prime orders during that period.

Some faith groups have also begun a consumer fast from purchasing. Target Corporation in particular has been the subject of abstention beginning February 1 in Target’s home state of Minnesota because of its reversal on DEI.

“Black people, on average, spend $12 million a day at Target,” [New Birth Missionary Baptist Church’s senior pastor Jamal-Harrison] Bryant said. “The fact of the matter is that Target made a pledge to our community after the killing of George Floyd of $2 billion into Black business and when the administration changed, they disavowed as if it never happened. The pledge was never made under DEI or affirmative action. It was out of decency and to humanity. To walk away from it is insult to injury.”

It’s important to remember that choosing to abstain from purchasing is an exercise in privilege which many more Americans can’t share after losing their jobs because of the Trump-Musk administration’s sloppy execution of Project 2025/Agenda 47. Recently unemployed may need to curtail spending due to loss of income and uncertainty about future employment prospects. This is not a little thing for some families when it comes to choosing where to shop; Target may have been convenient for diaper purchases on the way to/from work, for example. Entirely different calculus may be needed for those essential purchases.

Being empathetic and anti-fascist may not be easy for those of us with the privilege to choose where to shop. Looking for something as basic as a hair brush or grooming products may require entirely new approaches to shopping, and learning more about local businesses. Perhaps it’s a good thing to embrace this stretch out of the groove of habit; it could mean the difference between a small local business succeeding or failing. It could mean escaping enshittification foisted on us by Big Box retail.

What are you doing this spring to reject and repel fascism? This is an open thread.

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Increased Rate of Green on Blue Deaths Not Due to Increased Afghan Force Size

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Now that Ramadan is over, General John Allen and the rest of NATO will have to come up with additional explanations for why the rate of green on blue deaths is accelerating so rapidly. Besides the recent discussion of Taliban infiltration and Taliban coercion, another explanation that seems to be hinted at fairly often is that the attacks are going up because we are training more and more Afghan forces.

This explanation is offered outright by Peter Bergen in this CNN story:

Another likely cause of the increase in the number of green-on-blue incidents is straightforward: In the past two years the size of the Afghan army and police force has almost doubled from around 200,000 to around 350,000.

This explanation also was hinted at by Afghanistan’s Army Chief of Staff, General Mohammad Karimi:

Karimi said Afghanistan would also reinforce a vetting procedure that had never been properly employed, allowing cursory or no background checks for new recruits.

A number of the attacks this year were carried out by individuals who faced little scrutiny in getting access to joint U.S. and Afghan bases. This month, an unvetted 15-year-old “tea boy” who had been living on a police base in Helmand province killed three U.S. Marines while they exercised.

“We had a policy for recruiting from Day One, but it hasn’t been implemented. We needed too many people,” Karimi said. “When you need 12,000 people each month — it’s a number so high that we couldn’t implement the policy,”

In order to test this hypothesis, I collected the number of green on blue killings over the years from this database developed by Long War Journal. The data had to be updated yesterday to reflect another three deaths. For Afghan force size, I relied on this database from Brookings (pdf). In order to have annual rates for comparison, this year’s 45 deaths over eight months was adjusted to an annual rate of 67 projected over 12 months.

The number of deaths per year was then adjusted to reflect the annual number of green on blue deaths per 100,000 Afghan security force members. In table form:

Year                           Green on Blue Deaths per 100,000 Afghan forces

2008                                               1.4
2009                                               5.1
2010                                               7.9
2011                                               9.6
2012                                             19.5

These results are even more striking in graphical form:

NATO force size also has changed over the years as well. I was unable to find a reference with a table of total NATO force size over the years, so I had to rely on this New York Times reference for US deployment levels through late 2009, this article for 2010 and 2011, and finally this reference for current levels. Taking the numbers above and then adjusting the death rates per 100,000 US troops deployed gives numbers of 0.4, 3.5, 7.9, 9.1 and 16.4 for 2008 through 2012, respectively, giving essentially the same trend as seen when not adjusted for US troop strength.

Note that although the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and “training” of Afghan forces began as early as 2003, no green on blue deaths are reported before 2008.

NATO will have to find another explanation besides the rapid expansion of Afghan forces to account for why green on blue deaths have increased so dramatically.

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Allen Makes Worst Excuse Yet for Green on Blue Attacks: Ramadan Fasting

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Robert Burns of AP has a new story out today on the issue of green on blue killings. It appears that the increasing frequency of these attacks has driven General John Allen, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, to grasping for even the lamest excuse for why these attacks have spiked of late:

The rising number of attacks on U.S. troops by Afghan police and soldiers may be due in part to the stress on Afghan forces from fasting during the just-concluded Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Thursday.

/snip/

He cited Ramadan and the requirement for Muslims to not eat or drink during daylight hours as another factor.

“It’s a very tough time for these (Afghan) forces,” he said, particularly since they were fasting during the heat of the summer and the peak of the fighting season and have been facing combat strains for many years.

“We believe that the combination of many of these particular factors may have come together during the last several weeks to generate the larger numbers” of attacks, he said. Already this month there have been at least 10 “insider” attacks by Afghans, killing 10 Americans. The latest was Sunday when an Afghan police officer opened fire inside a police station in the southern district of Spin Boldak, killing a 55-year-old U.S. Army soldier.

Allen seems to want us to ignore that Ramadan ended with the Eid al-Fitr feast on Saturday night and the attacker on Sunday would have been able to eat on a normal schedule. Maybe the stress of fasting lingers after daytime eating has returned. In his coverage of Allen’s press conference, Spencer Ackerman noted that Ramadan moves around on the Western calendar:

One possible contributing factor: the holy month of Ramazan, which most of the Muslim world calls Ramadan. Although Ramazan is an annual event, it doesn’t occur at the same time annually on the western calendar, and this year it fell during the summer fighting season. The “daily pressures” of war and the “sacrifices associated with fasting,” especially with a larger and newer force of Afghan recruits, may have contributed to some Afghan forces snapping.

Last year, Ramadan also was in August, so it’s hard to see how it had a huge effect this year and not last year.

But the ongoing push by the military to ignore the retroactively classified report explaining that extreme cultural insensitivity on the part of American soldiers plays a major role in Afghans turning their weapons on them continues to have a horrible fallout as more and more Afghans attack American and other NATO troops. With the looming deadline of withdrawal of NATO forces by the end of 2014 and NATO trainers knowing that this can only occur if Afghan forces are seen as capable of taking over security responsibility, it is easy to see how there might a bit more pressure exerted in the training process and how this pressure could cross cultural boundaries, prompting attacks.

Although Ackerman portrayed Allen in the press conference as “not…telling the public — or the Pentagon, or the Karzai government, or the Obama administration — what it might want to hear”, I see no evidence of Ackerman (or Burns, for that matter) following up on an interesting discrepancy in the description of the role of the Taliban in green on blue attacks.

On August 18, CNN quoted NATO spokesman Gunter Katz on green on blue attacks: Read more →

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