Obama at Bagram: binaries, bookends and bye-byes

I cannot yet find a transcript of Obama's sober, straightforward, well-constructed speech from the Bagram base in Afghanistan (some excerpts here).  But a few notes:

Eyes on the prize: Obama made it very clear what the war was about: making sure that al Qaeda could "never again use this country to launch attacks against us."  With the goal thus narrowly defined, he could credibly claim victory-in-progress.  In fact he closely echoed a major speech he delivered in March 2008 laying out his foreign policy strategy, which centered on shifting focus from Iraq to Afghanistan. Then he said:

This is the area where the 9/11 attacks were planned. This is where Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants still hide. This is where extremism poses its greatest threat.

Binaries, bookends and bye byes: Because the speech was about closure it was full of binary pairings: two wars wound down in (he would have us believe) similar fashion; ten years of combat to be followed by ten years of support/partnership; standing them up/us down. The opening words were the keynote: now the war ends and a new chapter begins. And the close was a bookend: “This time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end.”

Also in this binary vein, and in characteristic fashion, Obama positioned his policy as a golden mean between two wrong courses advocated by his critics: leaving now, and remaining without setting a timeline.  The timeline he cast as the essential signal to Afghans that they have to take responsibility for their own security. And that message in turn was counterbalanced by another: that the just-signed agreement was the basis for an "enduring partnership"-- "as you stand up you will not stand alone."

So lovely a narrative: As always in such speeches, a war effort and alliance in fact fraught with conflict and failure sounded like a beautiful, steady progression from one phase of partnership to another with a lot of claims that rest on very questionable bases (to put it politely): the Taliban momentum broken, a steady transition to Afghans taking the lead in combat, firm commitments from the Afghans to combat corruption and ensure the rights of all.

The bottom line: But from at least the spring of 2008, Obama (with help from Gates) has been consistent about defining success down in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  If neither place becomes a safe haven, and neither place implodes into full-scale civil war, that is enough. Obama stated in no uncertain terms: the U.S. sought no permanent bases in Iraq. If that sounds like a no-brainer today, recall McCain's talk of a 50-60 year troop presence in Iraq if not Afghanistan.  Again, then, this takes us back to Obama's alpha and omega in this long war effort: no bases from which al Qaeda can attack the United States.  That's been his message and stated goal all along, and that's a message to which I think Americans are well attuned at this point.

Lincoln again: When speaking of war, Obama cannot forebear echoing Lincoln. Tonight again, near the close he channeled the Second Inaugural, exhorting the nation to finish the work at hand and build a lasting peace.

Update: More on Obama at Bagram and the continuities with Obama '08 here.

Torturers can't be arbiters

Once again, U.S. torture undermines U.S. moral authority. From today's Green Brief:

Picture of the day (Front Page of Keyhan Daily): http://tinyurl.com/lnfkzk
(The large red circle says: “Evidence of Mousavi’s Betrayal of Iran Exposed!” while the small red circle says: “Evidence of Inhuman Torture of Detainees by Americans in Bagram Prison [Afghanistan]).

Link above unfortunately is dead. UPDATE: Sully has the screenshot.

Training in torture

Atul Gawande's long look at solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, Hellhole, asks, "is solitary confinement torture?" and provides overwhelming empirical evidence that the answer is yes. Solitary confinement brings on psychosis and hallucination; it makes the mind effectively disintegrate; it causes lasting psychological damage.

In addition to documenting this torture's effects, Gawande also chronicles its explosion in the U.S. prison system since the early eighties, the same period in which the prison population as a whole has exploded:

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all.

Reading this made me think that like most disasters, the Bush Administration's embrace of more physically abusive forms of torture in its treatment of hundreds if not thousands of detainees from Bagram to Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib had no single simple cause -- say, a rogue Vice President and Secretary of State -- but came at the end of a chain of systemic failures. In some sense that needs to be explored further, we have trained ourselves to accept brutal treatment of those we deem to have forfeited their rights. A politics and society that embraces ever more punitive measures against prisoners and illegal immigrants is part and parcel with one that removes regulatory restraint from elites, from Wall Street to the executive branch, that gleefuly redistributes wealth upwards, and that plots to privatize and eviscerate our common measures for sharing risk.

We have changed course. How successful, lasting and thoroughgoing will Obama's counterrevolution be? For better and worse, we're living in interesting times..