Thursday, October 22, 2009

California’s Fine Tuned Job Killing Machine

by Andy Caldwell

California, on the brink of bankruptcy, has amassed debt in excess of $200 billion. No other State faces a problem of this magnitude. I remind you that California’s Legislature began racking up tens of billions of dollars in debt before the current national recession began, with the tacit support of voters who approved tens of billions in bond measures. Gray Davis was recalled, principally because of debt burden, but nothing was gained in the process. The deficit has since soared.

Taxes in the State of California seriously hinder our economy, but another reason the California economy continues to spiral out of control has to do with the regulatory climate in the State. The regulatory climate also serves to explain why the State of California will be the last in the nation to recover, if we recover.

All of the sectors of our economy, including manufacturing, industry, energy, housing, transportation, farming, ranching, fishing, timber and mining have been hemorrhaging jobs as they have suffered the death of a thousand cuts due to regulations imposed upon us by our own government. Less business activity, either due to taxes or regulations, means fewer jobs and that means less revenues to the State. It is a viscous cycle.

A combination of State and Federal Rules, has created a cumulative impact unique to our State. The combination of regulators and regulations including the California Air Resources Board, the State Water Quality Control Board, the State Coastal Commission, the CA. Department of Fish and Game, the California Environmental Quality Act, the Global Warming Reduction Act (AB32), the Diesel Engine Rule and the Endangered Species Act have served to relegate our economy, which was once one of the largest economies in the world, to Third World status. Our debt burden and the regulatory climate are preventing economic recovery.

A report issued recently by Cal State Economists indicates that regulations are costing the California Economy some $500 billion per year! The report indicates that the State of California in essence eliminates 3 million jobs per year by hamstringing the economy with regulations. If the 3 million jobs were allowed to be created they would generate nearly $20 billion in additional tax revenue to the State!

Our elected representatives are hoping in time that the California economy will recover by some unforeseen miracle or that things will get so bad that voters will approve new taxes in order to alleviate our collective misery. I am of the opinion that the economy is not going to recover on its own because of the aforementioned impediments and burdens placed upon the economy by our government. Furthermore, if enough voters can be duped into approving new taxes, things are only going to get worse. No economy has ever taxed itself into prosperity. It is mathematically and economically impossible to do so.

When taxes and regulations threaten the very existence of a business, then the owners are either forced out of business or they get their business out of the State they are in.

Sacramento, get a clue!


Andy Caldwell is the Executive Director of COLAB, the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, and a 41 year resident of the Central Coast. For more information, visit the COLAB website.

Make a Difference, Know the Facts

by Heather Moreno

Beyond voting for republicans and against tax-raising ballot measures, I paid little attention to politics prior to 2005 and not until 2007 did I get involved in any meaningful way. I naively trusted republicans to be (and act as) conservatives, and while I disagreed with democrats politically I was ignorant of the liberal agenda at the root of their policies. Unfortunately it’s because of people like me that we’re in the position we’re in today.

The traditional response is conservatives are busy building businesses, raising families, attending church, volunteering—being productive members of society—and don’t have time to get politically involved, much less keep up with the laws, taxes, and regulations being voted on by their local, state, and national politicians. Consequently our government reflects the apathy of our society which brings about a disdain for politics. But this only exacerbates the problems and provides an excuse for staying detached.

Faced with the current political crises we wonder how much influence one person can have. In 2007 I became involved with a group that in two weeks collected enough petition signatures to overturn an ordinance passed by a liberal city council majority. This core group of less than a dozen people accomplished something that affected thousands of people. Yet I’m mindful that had we not put forward this effort, the vote of three council members would have restricted the personal property rights of homeowners and small businesses throughout our city.

While not everyone will become as involved as that (although I highly recommend it) we have a responsibility to each other, and to the children who will inherit our country, to become more engaged. Minimally, we need to know the voting records of the politicians for whom we vote. (Note that one of the three council members mentioned above was a registered republican—an “R” by the name does not guarantee conservative values.) Gratefully we live in an age where that information is accessible instantly on the internet. Organizations that form for the purpose of educating members and supporting conservative candidates (e.g. Republican Women Federated clubs, Lincoln Club) also provide resources for analyzing ballot initiatives and researching voting records. The consequences of not becoming informed are already prevalent in the mortgaging of our children’s futures and loss of personal freedoms. A Republic is a fragile thing: unless we tend to the roots that keep it strong we will one day see it fall.


Heather Moreno, a former CPA with KPMG, owns the fitness coaching firm PeopleFit USA. A respected voice in the fitness and wellness industry, Heather presents to various organizations, such as World at Work, St. Joseph Hospital, and the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors. Her article “To Your Health” was published in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of Accountancy and her first book, Achieving Physical Wealth, was released in 2005.

Heather Moreno is past president (2007-2008) of the Atascadero Republican Women Federated and currently serves on the planning commission for the city of Atascadero. For more information on Heather visit her website.

AB 962: One of More Than a Thousand Tiny Cuts

by Charlie Whitney

Touted by its author, Kevin de Leon (D. Assembly District 45), as “…the Protection Act of 2009” which “seeks to safeguard California’s communities by combating the easy accessibility to handgun ammunition that fuels gun violence and criminal activity,” Assembly Bill 962 will be state law as of July 1, 2010. It will become one of more than 200,000 existing federal, state and local firearms related laws, the vast majority of which have been enacted as purported public safety measures, but have been largely ineffective in curtailing crime because of a flawed tendency to focus on the perceived instruments of criminal activity rather than the perpetrators actually responsible for committing crimes.

For the past half century, the Democrat Party has chosen to champion the cause of gun control and in an unrelenting quest to circumvent the Second Amendment, Democrats routinely sponsor cumbersome, complicated and overly restrictive firearms regulation, always in the name of public safety, with little or no regard for the more than 99.9 percent of those Americans who rightfully possess firearms and ammunition and do so without violating the law and who should, therefore, have ready access to both.

AB 962 creates numerous obstacles and imposes unreasonable requirements with respect to the purchase of handgun ammunition. Assemblyman de Leon and cosponsor Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal (D, Assembly District 54) claim that such measures are necessary to protect the public. In reality, only law abiding firearms owners will be affected by this legislation. Criminals will simply ignore the law and procure ammunition from other individuals who have purchased it legally, acquire it out of state, or they will steal it. Criminals don’t obey the law. Everyone knows that including the afore mentioned sponsors. Existing laws already prohibit criminals and gang members from possessing firearms and ammunition. The fact of the matter is that Assembly Members de Leon and Lowenthal are little more than gun control fanatics and in what amounts to a case of classic deceit, they are responsible for producing legislation that intentionally infringes on the rights of law abiding Americans under the guise of public safety.
Second Amendment scholars on both sides of the issue have long agreed that restricting access to ammunition is one of the most effective means of rendering useless the right to possess firearms as defined under the Constitution of the United States. Key words from statements made by the architect of AB 962; “…combating…accessibility to…ammunition…” attest to the true intent of the legislation.

So, why did a so called Republican Governor sign this bill? There are only two logical explanations. Either the Governor doesn’t fully understand or appreciate the importance of the Second Amendment (most likely because he spent his formative years in European countries where firearms ownership is highly restricted) or he is merely just another Kennedy with a funny last name.

Recent decisions in the U. S. Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the most liberal in the nation) have upheld the right of an individual to keep and bear arms. In that regard, common sense and logic dictate that firearms and ammunition go hand in hand as one is essentially useless without the other. Therefore, Constitutional protections should apply not only to the rightful purchase and possession of firearms but also to the products that enable their use.


Charlie Whitney has been in the cattle ranching business for 35 years in rural San Luis Obispo County. He is currently the chairman of the Santa Margarita Area Advisory Committee and serves on several boards and committees in the community.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Smart Growth on the Central Coast: Anatomy of a Coercive Utopia

by Alex Alexiev

As California stumbles through an unprecedented economic crisis caused by years of profligate spending, burdensome regulations and assaults on the free market economy by the leftist political establishment that dominates the state, one of the policies that has contributed significantly to the economic implosion of the formerly Golden State continues its work undermining its economic foundations unabated. Known as “smart growth” to its proponents, it aims to radically restructure traditional American land use policies in the name of a collectivist utopia under environmental disguise. Though it is often implemented stealthily and is therefore poorly understood by the citizenry, it has already become the guiding principle in land use policies up and down the state with devastating consequences for traditional property rights, housing markets and, ultimately, the economic well-being of the people (Footnote 1). And because these policies are invariably imposed through the coercive powers of the government, they directly impact the constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms of Americans.

The remainder of this article will try to document the disingenuous and deceptive propaganda and methods used by ‘smart growth’ advocates to push their agenda in the Central Coast county of San Luis Obispo, a sparsely populated county that has none of the problems that ‘smart growth’ is ostensibly designed to address.

So what exactly is ‘smart growth’? Essentially, it is a planning vision or an urban utopia, promising us a better, environmentally sound way to live by reorienting current housing development patterns to high-density, mixed-use and mass transit-based urban communities. According to its supporters, it will, when implemented, stop urban sprawl, alleviate traffic congestion and pollution, reduce crime, create jobs and make cities more livable by making it possible for people to live in close proximity to their jobs and amenities, and, last but most, alleviate global warming. Utopian or not, there is nothing wrong with this vision if its proponents were simply trying to persuade people to embrace it and make it a reality voluntarily.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with it that make it a pie-in-the-sky fantasy if left to the people’s choice. First, the vast majority of American cities were built for the automobile and the kind of 19th century high-density, walkable city smart growth seems to conjure up is simply impossible to recreate short of bulldozing our urban communities and starting over again. Secondly, the vast majority of Americans, as countless surveys and the market have shown, prefer to live in single family homes with a yard if given a choice.

Faced with this reality, the smart growth utopians choose to force their vision on their fellow citizens through the coercive powers of government. Specifically, the method followed in most cases involves the drawing of an arbitrary “urban growth” boundary around cities and forcing all future growth inside it, while denying building permits to property owners outside of it. The result is that property values outside this arbitrary boundary plummet, even as prices inside the boundary often skyrocket (Footnote 2). The end effect of this government assault on property rights is tantamount to government-sponsored destruction of private property values and ought to be unconstitutional under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Despite its openly coercive nature, ‘smart growth’ has become the received wisdom of the politically dominant Left and allied environmental lobbies throughout California and is increasingly the rule rather than the exception in land use policies. It has already wreaked havoc with the housing market of the state and will surely destroy American property rights if not stopped.

In practical terms, the imposition of this coercive utopia on the often unsuspecting citizenship in San Luis Obispo county and elsewhere follows a well-established pattern. The first order of business is packing county and city planning departments and commissions with leftist environmental zealots, which is not altogether difficult since most of these planners are the product of urban planning schools and faculties, which, with very few exceptions, are a domain of anti-market central planning ideologies. The result is that most of these people have little or no experience in the private sector and view themselves called upon to implement their collectivist schemes with little concern about their economic impact. And because these unelected central planners acquire tremendous de facto power through their monopoly on building permit issuance they often come to dominate land use policies and regulations to a greater extent than elected officials. In San Luis Obispo, a county of only 265,000 residents, for instance, an army of well over a hundred full-time planners and planning commissioners both design and implement land use policies with little more than rubber-stamp supervision by county supervisors who often appear poorly informed of the issues involved (Footnote 3).

The planners’ objectives are greatly facilitated by the steady drumbeat of pro-smart growth propaganda and disinformation disseminated by well-organized radical environmental groups, their allies in government and the uncritical and politically correct mainstream media. What is involved is a massive scare-mongering effort designed to convince the public that only smart growth policies can prevent imminent environmental doom. Thus, the public is told that traditional market-driven land use policies will soon result in out-of-control urban sprawl, gobble up most open space, endanger agriculture, make it impossible for local governments to provide even basic services, lead to traffic gridlock, pollution and crime and generally destroy the county’s quality of life (Footnote 4).

The actual reality in SLO county cannot be further from this deceptive picture. The county is already heavily urbanized with 81.2% of the population living in cities or urban clusters and only 18% in the rural areas (Footnote 5). Despite this high level of urbanization, only 3% of the land is in urban developments with the rest remaining open space (51% pasture, 27% farmland, 18% timberland, brush etc.) (Footnote 6). Most of the open space (at least 80% in some estimates) is already locked in state and federal parkland, Williamson Act acreage, easements like Hearst Ranch, etc., and is unlikely to be developed with or without smart growth.

Further, far from being consumed by urban sprawl, the county is extremely sparsely populated at 75 persons per square mile (compared to 10,000 in Los Angeles) or three times less the California average (217) and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Far from the “untrammeled growth” claimed by smart growth propagandists, SLOC is growing at less than 1% per year currently and may now be losing population under the impact of the housing crisis (Footnote 7). Nor is there much traffic congestion or pollution in a county with virtually no heavy industry and an average commuting time of 21 min., a third less than the average for California (Footnote 8). Finally, there is no shortage of high-density housing in the county for those who want it with 18.6% of all housing units in multi-unit structures already by 2000 (Footnote 9).

While ‘smart growth’ planners in the county are keen on disseminating deliberately deceptive information of the kind documented above, there are much less keen on revealing to the public the coercive nature of their schemes or of the methods they intend to use to impose them. Nonetheless, the central planners’ publications designed to prove the superior virtues of ‘smart growth’ occasionally and perhaps inadvertently reveal what’s in store for the public. For instance, in an effort to help the incorporation of the ‘smart growth’ principles into the SLO county general plan and thus make the law of the county in March of 2009, SLOC’s planning department published a document designed to show the superiority of smart growth (which the county has recently started calling ‘strategic growth’) to conventional development (Footnote 10). While, like most similar partisan documents, this study engages liberally in the already mentioned deceptive tactics, it also provides rare glimpses of what the central planners really have in mind (Footnote 11).

We find out, for example, that while conventional, market-driven and therefore voluntary housing patterns in the county call for roughly 90% detached housing on large lots and 10% multi-family units, ‘smart growth’ zoning intends to replace that with 40% multi-family housing, 32% detached housing on tiny (less than 6000 square foot) lots and only 28% single-family housing on lots over 6000 sq. foot (Footnote 12).

While this kind of radical zoning change would be difficult or impossible to introduce quickly in cities with established zoning laws, the unincorporated areas of the county are clearly envisaged as the guinea pigs of smart growth experimentation. The document specifically mentions three such SLOC communities (Nipomo, Shandon and Los Osos) as designed by the central planners to absorb 30%, 20% and 18% respectively of the projected growth (Footnote 13). In practice, this would mean nearly doubling the population of Nipomo and increasing that of Shandon eightfold! It is worth mentioning here that these two communities do not have adequate water supplies even for their present much smaller populations, while Los Osos currently lacks a functioning sewage system. It is a testimony to the arrogance of the smart growth planners that none of these communities seem to have been consulted by them as to their own future.

In yet another demonstration of the arrogance of power demonstrated by these coercive utopians, in foisting their disastrous smart growth agendas on the public, the planners have refused to provide an environmental impact report of their likely negative implications for the environment as required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). This brazen disregard of existing law has finally galvanized grassroots resistance to the smart growth steamroller and a lawsuit against the county for failing to comply with CEQA has been filed by a group opposing its radical agenda. It is to be hoped that the growing exposure of the dishonest smart growth shenanigans of these zealots will convince the citizens of San Luis Obispo county and California beyond, that what is at stake is nothing less than their fundamental rights and freedoms as Americans.


Alex Alexiev, a veteran national security analyst, is currently a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He served nearly 20 years as a senior analyst with the national security division of the Rand Corporation. Alexiev directed numerous research projects for the Department of Defense and other agencies. He is the author of several books and myriad articles on national security issues. His present research focuses on issues related to Islamic extremism and terrorism. He is a resident of San Luis Obispo county and a member of the board of directors of the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business of San Luis Obispo (COLABSLO).


Footnotes:

1 – In just one example of how ‘smart growth’ affected the housing bubble that was a decisive contributor to the current economic crisis, empirical evidence has shown that the greatest price increases followed by the steepest collapse occurred exactly in cities and regions that imposed smart growth land use restrictions like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego etc. In fact, there was little appreciation and therefore not much of a housing crisis in areas that pursued conventional land use policies. For example, in the 25 large US cities (over one million population) with conventional land use policies, properties experienced price increases averaging 11.5% ($148,000 to $161,400) between 2000 and 2007, while the 25 cities with smart growth policies averaged 97.5% increase ($189,200 to $363,200) in the same period. See this link. As even the left-wing New York Times columnist and economist, Paul Krugman, was forced to admit, the housing price bubble was limited to “urban areas with restrictive land use regulations.” Link.

2 – This, for instance, is what happened in one of the largest experiments with ‘smart growth’ in the U.S. to date in Portland, Oregon. For a detailed analysis and critique of the Portland smart growth experience see Randal O’Toole, “Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn’t Work,” Policy Analysis #596, July, 2007, Cato Institute, available here.

3 – A good example of this is a key vote by the SLO County Board of Supervisors in the Spring of 2005 which approved the smart growth principles for land use policy. A review of the videotape of the meeting reveals that while the two environmental activists on the board called numerous government witnesses extolling the virtues of smart growth, the three “conservative” members constituting the board majority at the time, appeared uninformed if not clueless about the issue and ended up voting unanimously for smart growth.

4 – For a typical example of such propaganda by two prominent smart growth supporters see John Shoals and Bruce Gibson, “Viewpoint: Smart is the Way to Go for SLO,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, May 6, 2008.

5 – Link.

6 – California Department of Conservation link.

7 – Between April 1, 2000 and July 1, 2008 the county population increased by only 7.5% or less than 1% per year. Link.

8 – Quick Facts, op. cit.

9 – Ibid.

10 – See “Growth Assessment: Comparing Conventional and Strategic Growth,” Department of Planning and Building, County of San Luis Obispo. Available electronically here.

11 – To mention just one glaring and deliberate disinformation, the planners’ projection for population increase by 2030 in the unincorporated areas of the county, which are the first and prime target of smart growth implementation, is twice the size of the official California (Dept. of Finance) projection (39,738 vs.19,751) and physically impossible based on current trends according to the US Census Bureau.

12 – Growth Assessment, op. cit. p.4.

13 – Ibid.

Afghanistan: Why are we there? Can we win? What if we lose?

by Lt. Col. Al Fonzi

Why are we there?
Sunday afternoons in our home can be lazy affairs, especially in the late Fall when my wife and I are often engrossed in a book, occasionally an old movie, or like today, a long drive on remote country roads in the county. While approaching Pozo, a small ranch community considered part of “North County” but southwest of Santa Margarita, my wife asked me why we were in Afghanistan and what would happen if we just left? The answer took up most of the drive home to Atascadero, about 45 miles worth of winding country roads.
We are a military family, having spent most our married life living the life of gypsies, with only the last third of our marriage being in one place. Even so, until 2006, I was still in uniform, as was our oldest son Joshua, a medical corpsman assigned to the 1st Marine Division. My life has been lived almost entirely upon or near military bases, growing up mostly in the mid-west in a military town, with the roar of jet engines from B-52 bombers and a nuclear armed and always on alert base of the Strategic Air Command nearby.

It was only natural that I would serve in the military, as did my father, all of our family friends and male relatives up to my generation. My father and all of my uncles served in WWII in various theaters of operation, all in combat. When my turn came in late 1968, my first year of college, I didn’t fight the draft notice and enlisted. I served two tours of duty in Vietnam, having volunteered for duty there as did every single member of my unit. So much for the myth of most of us being forced to serve. I was selected against my will by means of subterfuge by the military to serve in intelligence.

Being an enlisted man is nothing like “James Bond”. It consists mostly of tedium, long hours and occasionally, a healthy dose of fear. It’s a strange feeling to realize that somebody out there really doesn’t like you and really intends to kill you. At any rate, I was assigned to a signals intelligence unit; we intercepted all kinds of North Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian communications, radar signals, etc. and helped setup enemy anti-aircraft units for ambush by “Wild Wiesel” units suppressing enemy fire as our fighter-bombers went in for a kill. We were an airborne unit and I flew over half a hundred missions over North Vietnam and Laos, mostly Laos as it was a little safer there for our unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. My second tour of duty was spent down south supporting the Naval Advisory Group and their work in the Mekong Delta against enemy infiltration. No glory, just mud and long hours, a near miss during the Easter Offensive in 1972 when we thought we might have to fight our way out of Vietnam against the South Vietnamese as well as the North, but that is another story.

The point of all this, is that my career spanned from the Spring of 1969 to January 2006, from an absolutely junior enlisted man to my final rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. I served in SE Asia, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Okinawa, to Korea, Europe, Bosnia and finally in Iraq, in virtually every kind of ground and reconnaissance unit. In Bosnia, I was the Chief of HUMINT (human intelligence, aka spies,) and Counterintelligence for the National Intelligence Cell run by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). I was fortunate to be able to move about the entire country, based out of Sarajevo, (the French sector of control) and interacted daily with the locals. Most troops remained on their bases except for forays out in multi-vehicle armored convoys or combat patrols to keep the peace. Their interaction with the populace was nil. My work in Iraq involved working first with the 1st Armored Division, the with the 1st Cavalry Division Government Support Team, finally as the G2 for the Chief of Civil Military Operations which gave me additional mobility, but also the drawback of becoming a higher profile target. More on that later. An incident in May, 2004 brought me into close contact with the CIA station Chief in Baghdad and working on his behest, whether I liked it or not. The worst part of my tour had two components; my son Joshua was in Iraq at the time with the 1st Marine Division, or 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment based in Ramadi. In early April his company was hit hard and overrun, taking nearly 50% casualties in one night (12 KIA and 22 wounded). I spent about five hours on a helipad with him at the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad a few days later as he attempted to hitch a ride back to Combat Outpost in Ramadi. He had brought the 22 wounded in with a medical evacuation chopper. We watched a lot of casualties come in that night, many from his unit, including two fellow corpsman and friends of his who were wounded after the initial fight. That was the only time I was able to see my son while we were both in Iraq. The second bad event was the IED that exploded next to my door a few months later while on a patrol in the vicinity of a place called Latifia, part of the so-called “triangle of death” SW of Baghdad. After that event, I had some internal hemorrhaging in my brain which led to a semi-conscious state and loss of memory for about 15 hours. After that the docs said my war was over and sent me back to Fort Bragg for the next three months for medical tests and eventually retirement against my will the following year. I’m telling you all of this not because I am or have done anything special; I’m not and haven’t. Only my duty as I see it based on a long family tradition, that at least on my wife’s side, goes back to the French and Indian War. What I don’t understand about my country today, is the indifference to the pain and suffering I have seen in the world and the naïve belief that ignoring it will somehow protect us from what lays beyond the oceans.
Afghanistan is about a remote a place on the earth as one can find. Most people do have trouble locating it on a map. As children, most adults may have some idea of the region based upon old movies, like “King of the Khyber Rifles” or “Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” adventure tales for young boys mostly based upon the tales of Rudyard Kipling and the British Colonial experience in the region, albeit romanticized in the extreme. It is a harsh region, with illiteracy approaching 90% in most regions. For the last 30 plus years it has been the center of modern superpower conflict, a repeat of the similar conflicts that occurred in the 19th century, but far more deadly for the Afghan people.
The modern story begins, not surprisingly, with our very own worst 20th century president, Jimmy Carter. No man has ever demonstrated the degree of naivete as he, and held so much power to do so much long term damage. Carter’s presidency was marked by a desire to change the world as he wanted to see it, not as it really was. His human rights campaign in Iran set the stage for the return of a vicious tyrant and theological fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeni, who set about to return Iran as close to the 7th century as he could get it in the few years he remained alive. Tens of thousands were executed by his regime, and nearly a million died in the Iran-Iraq war, started by Iraq but prolonged needlessly and waged most savagely by Khomeni, including walking 12 year old boys through Iraqi mine fields to clear the way for Iranian human wave assaults on Iraqi positions. He also initiated the suicide bomber as a significant military tactic, first in the Iran-Iraq war and later in Lebanon, with his support of Hizbollah, a Shia Islam terrorist group sponsored, equipped and trained by Iranian agents. It was a Hizbollah suicide bomber that destroyed the US Marine barracks in Lebanon on October 23, 1983, killing 241 Marines, most of whom were still in their beds at that early morning hour. It was that attack that precipitated the US withdrawal from Lebanon after our attempt to provide peacekeepers ended in disaster. In the six months prior to that attack, Hizbollah attacked the US Embassy twice, each time inflicting major damage, even killing our entire intelligence staff, including our senior CIA representatives, and the French garrison, killing between 40 and 60 people in each attack. The Iranians are extremely dangerous as both a terrorist threat in the region and as a potential military threat to our allies and interests in the region.
As Khomeni’s regime took hold, the Russians, then known as the Soviet Union, took great note. The USSR shared a border with Iran and having a revolutionary Islamic regime on its border with the southern Soviet Republics with their predominant Muslim populations was a prescription for permanent unrest. So, they did the logical thing from a Russian point of view. First, they precipitated a Marxist coup in Afghanistan and attempted to impose a Marxist, godless regime on a people with no history of a central government, a deep seated mistrust and hatred of foreigners and a deep reverence for Islam. When their Marxist puppet government was staggering under tribal assaults, the Russians invaded Afghanistan to preserve the Marxist regime. For the first five years the Soviets held the upper hand, inflicting severe casualties on the largely non-unified and disorganized tribes who only received marginal assistance from foreign powers. Around 1985, a US congressman, named Charlie Wilson, decided to do more, a lot more, and virtually doubled the covert military assistance budget to the CIA in Afghanistan overnight. This was a watershed in US involvement in the Afghan conflict, taking place simultaneously at the same time that President Reagan was staring down the Soviets in Europe, missile for missile, challenging them to “tear down ..the Berlin Wall,” starting SDI missile defense, and generally giving the Soviets a very bad time all over the world. By 1989, for a lot of reasons and only marginally because of our support to the Afghans, the Soviet Union collapsed. In the five years of our assistance to the Afghan tribal resistance, the Soviets lost hundreds of combat helicopters, dozens of fixed wing fighter bombers and thousands of troops. As far as the Afghan tribes were concerned, they did it all and defeated an “infidel superpower.” Actually, our intermediary was the Pakastani intelligence service, called the “ISI.” The ISI equipped and trained, with our help, about 80,000 Afghan tribesmen of whom over 40,000 were from other Muslim countries. Some of these guys would later show up in places like Chechnya in the Soviet Caucasus, Bosnia and later Iraq. In 1990, the world was celebrating the “end of history” and talking about a peace dividend. Saddam Hussein of Iraq had different ideas. He was miffed with Kuwait over slant drilling by the Kuwaitis and not paying for the oil they “stole from Iraq.” So he ordered his four million man army to invade Kuwait, quite successfully and virtually overnight. After watching Iraq loot Kuwait, the western world was alarmed at having Saddam, no humanitarian, sitting on the jugular of the western world’s oil supply and ordered him to leave, via notice from the United Nations. Stupidly, he refused. The US led coalition defeated his army, almost in detail, six months later in 100 hours of conflict proceeded by five weeks of intense aerial bombardment.

Unfortunately, we didn’t finish the job, allowing his Republican Guard divisions to largely escape intact which kept his regime of terror alive another dozen years. A sidebar to all of this was the effect on Osama Bin Laden. Recently returned to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan and the fight against the Soviets, treated as irrelevant, ignored by all, he offered his services and those of his followers to liberate Kuwait. The King of Saudi Arabia preferred the US offer and Bin Laden was incensed at both the Saudi dynasty and the US, whom he considered infidels trespassing on holy ground; the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, home of their Prophet Mohammed and Islam, were located within Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden moved off to Sudan until he was expelled about five years later and sojourned to Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. During the 1990’s, Bin Laden and his followers plotted, trained, recruited and raised money from their base in Sudan until US intelligence made it too hot for him to stay. Saddam continued to stick his thumb in the eye of each successive US administration and the UN, playing a spectacular and ultimately fatal bluff with the world in keeping people believing he still had weapons of mass destruction or was on the verge of reconstituting both his military and WMD weapons programs.

In Afghanistan, after the Russians departed in 1989, the US congress (Democrats in charge again) lost interest in Afghanistan, turning down any real effort at building a civil society. The result was the rise of warlords in a country awash with weapons and drug money from opium crops, chaos, hardship and terror for the population. The Taliban, which translated means “religious students” were an outgrowth of the Madrassa school system funded by Saudi Arabia. Another legacy of Jimmy Carter was his self-righteousness and insistence on de-funding foreign regimes that didn’t closely resemble Jeffersonian Democracies. (He also didn’t like intelligence agents and fired 3000 of the most experienced agents of the CIA in 1978-80, deciding to allow satellites to collect what we needed. As a result, we were virtually blind on the ground in much of the Middle East for the next 20 plus years.) Carter’s State Department was especially incensed with the Pakastani government’s lack of adherence to democratic principles and their excessive corruption, even by Middle Eastern standards. As a result, they defunded most of Pakistan’s aid package, leaving a vacuum happily filled by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis funded over 30,000 religious Madrassas, which taught an extreme form of Wahabbist Islam of the type practiced in Saudi Arabia, contrary to the previous Pakistani nearly secular form of Islam practiced at its founding.

A generation later we have most of the young male population thoroughly indoctrinated in probably the most extreme and least tolerant Islamic sect. By 1994, the Taliban began to make a move that eventually brought most of the country of Afghanistan under their control, the local population grateful to almost anyone who could bring some type of stability to their lives. The warlords had practiced rape and murder and pillaged with abandon for five years; the people had had enough and rallied to the Taliban cause. For a time, even the opium trade was suppressed as the Taliban were as merciless with drug dealers as they were with women accused of adultery after being raped. About this time, Bin Laden was deported from Sudan with his followers after US pressure on Sudan was exerted, whereupon he was welcomed by the Taliban back to Afghanistan. Bin Laden set up his base organization, known as Al Queda to most of us and launched numerous attacks against the US, including the attack on the USS Cole and the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed nearly a thousand people.
We all know that Bin Laden’s group planned and launched their 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon from Afghanistan in 2001. Not many know that they tried an even larger attack against us in 1995. Known as the Bojinka Plot, Bin Laden attempted to bring down 12 airliners over the Pacific and fly suicide bombers into the TransAmerica Building in San Francisco, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the WTC in New York, the White House, the US Capitol Building and the CIA or the Pentagon. The plot was overly ambitious and accidentally discovered by the Philippine police when the plotters accidentally set their apartment on fire and a laptop computer with all the details was confiscated. If the laptop had been discovered in an American city, the laptop might never had been searched under US privacy laws that existed under President Clinton, another holdover from the early 1970s and the Church Committee that eviscerated the CIA under President Carter. As we know, the scaled down 9-11 plan approved by Bin Laden around 2000 and executed a year later on September 11, 2001, worked nearly perfectly and well beyond Bin Laden’s expectations.

Afghan culture puts extreme emphasis upon hospitality. Our demand for the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden or face dire consequences was met with disdain, as their culture requires. In their world, it would be better to turn over their virgin daughters to an outlaw motorcycle gang than violate their hospitality customs, which require a host to defend a guest to the death, lest the family be forever dishonored. (Oddly, this custom saved the life of a Navy Seal, the lone survivor of a deadly ambush years later in Afghanistan, as a village gave him sanctuary against a rival tribe hunting him and eventually escorted him back to US forces.) President Bush’s demands for the extradition of Bin Laden were rebuffed and led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike our Russian predecessors, we did not fight on Afghan terms with a conscript Army that was road bound and held to rigid command and control procedures. Using Special Forces and a pick-up alliance of rival tribes and deadly air power to back it up, we crushed the Taliban and drove them into the Northwest Frontier provinces of Pakistan where they remained for the better part of the next several years. Once again, however, we lost interest in Afghanistan, refusing to put adequate resources on the ground to build up an alternative society to Taliban tyranny. (In the Third World, corruption is endemic, to a degree most Americans could not fathom. Afghanistan is no exception and is probably worse given its long history of decentralized authority and very weak or non-existent central government. Corruption at every level is and has been rampant and is the single greatest impediment to establishing any type of stable society in that country. Once again, the corruption feeds the insurgency and recruits for the Taliban and to some extent, for Al Qaeda which is able to enforce some justice for the disenfranchised tribesmen and their families against rapacious warlords and government officials.)
In 2002, a tactical victory secured in Afghanistan, the Bush administration began to take a hard look at Iraq and Saddam’s disinformation campaign on WMD. Interviews with the FBI after his capture revealed that Saddam had waged a ten plus year campaign to keep his enemies believing that he still maintained a substantial stockpile of WMDs and was rebuilding his nuclear, biological and chemical weapon programs. Even his closest generals didn’t know what he had or didn’t have, nor did western intelligence agencies. Ironically, the only western official to loudly complain that Iraq’s WMD program was neutered was a UN inspector by the name of Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps Reserve Major, who stated that Iraq’s WMDs had been 99% destroyed. At a hearing before the US Senate in early 2003. Ritter was ridiculed by a US senator (Senator Joe Biden I believe) who stated that such an assessment was “above his (Ritter’s) paygrade.”

In March, 2003, the US invaded Iraq and began to search for Saddam’s hidden stockpiles of WMD. A year later we concluded we had been “had,” but by then the damage had been done and a serious loss of credibility incurred for US Intelligence Agencies, and most importantly, for the United States of America before the world. Worse to come, the insurgency gained significant ground after the military’s program for incorporating the Iraqi Army into any countrywide security program was scuttled by Ambassador Bremmer, who fired the entire Iraqi Army and anyone who had ever been a member of the Baathist Party. (Saddam’s political party, very similar to the NAZI Party in Germany, upon which it was actually modeled.) The problem was, anyone who held any kind of job beyond that of goat herder in Iraq had to be a member of the Baathist Party to hold a job. There was nobody left to run any part of the government or any government service, including water, sewer and trash pick-up. That left the US military and a handful of State Department employees to operate a country of 22 million people in an area bigger than California. At the time we had about 160,000 troops in the country, which declined for the rest of 2003. The insurgency along with resentment of US forces grew, especially as Al Queda made its presence felt, establishing strong relationships with disaffected members of the Iraqi Army, and allied with Sunni Muslim clerics against the majority Shia Muslims, now in power courtesy of the US Armed Forces.

Can we win?

By 2007, the American public was disillusioned with the war in Iraq. Calls for withdrawal were loud and constant; the situation was retrieved only by the vision of a few US military leaders and the political demise of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had resisted any attempt at imposing a counterinsurgency strategy involving an infusion of more troops into Iraq. The surge worked, as many soldiers knew it would, if allowed to work as planned.

Counterinsurgency strategies are troops on the ground intensive. An example I gave to my wife today on our drive to Pozo, was to illustrate the distance between Pozo and the nearest Sheriff’s substation in Templeton. The latter is about an hour’s drive from Pozo, maybe a little less. Imagine being besieged by 50 heavily armed men who surround your home, proceed to butcher your family due to your political outspokenness or refusal to pay their extortion “tax” for protection. What would your neighbors do when confronted by the impotence of the government in its ability to protect you, or even failure to respond at all upon your plea for assistance? Would they resist or comply? Without troops in your community to protect you and your local police, (police in Iraq frequently only had a few handguns and less than a few dozen rounds of ammunition, against 40 to 50 heavily armed insurgents complete with machine-guns, rocket propelled grenades, etc) you would likely do whatever you had to do to survive, or leave, as many refugees do all over the world.

Right now, in Afghanistan, we are short troops on the ground; when I was in Iraq in 2004, we were short 17 companies of Infantry in the capitol zone, which meant that half of the proposed security missions could not be conducted on any given day. The bad guys were winning, and continued to do so for about the next three years in most of the country. The surge changed the equation in our favor and gave the Iraqis a chance to fight back once they knew were committed enough to win. In Afghanistan, the ground commander had an approved (by President Obama) counterinsurgency strategy, which is troop intensive. We have to provide security to the people on the ground or they will transfer their allegiance to the Taliban and Al Queda in order to survive. Most are too poor and too uneducated to leave and have no other options.

Now that strategy is in jeopardy as the political left is pressuring the President to abandon Afghanistan, or go “lite” and muddle through until a respectable time has passed for us to give up and just leave. Such a strategy is a prescription for certain defeat and a return of the Taliban with basing rights for Al Queda. The so-called “counter-terrorism strategy,” using remotely piloted drones, like the Predator drone, to fire missiles at targets of opportunity will not work without good intelligence on the ground. Without troops on the ground to provide security for the population, you will not receive reliable, accurate or timely intelligence. In essence, you will be shooting at shadows in the dark. Some may argue that we did this (troop increases) before in Vietnam and draw false analogies on the gradual buildup and subsequent loss there, all for naught. During the first four years of that conflict, our strategy was flawed, but so was that of the enemy, who suffered enormous casualties in a gambit that failed in the Tet Offensive of 1968. After the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong were shattered (over 40,000 dead).

But, we had lost our will to fight and began to withdraw. Under General Creighton Abrams in 1968-72, (Abrams replaced General Westmoreland who commanded US Forces in Vietnam until 1968) we developed a Vietnamization strategy that armed and trained 300,000 Civilian Defense Corps civilians to protect their villages from the enemy with the help of the South Vietnamese Army. When the North Vietnamese launched a conventional invasion in 1972, the South Vietnamese stood and fought to defend their homes and families, and along with our air support, defeated the “Easter Offensive” of the North. Air power alone would not have stopped the North Vietnamese, it took the determined resistance of the South to save the day. By 1975, the US Congress had decimated US logistic support to the South Vietnamese; 2/3 of their aircraft were grounded for lack of fuel and spare parts; artillery units had less than 60 rounds to fire per week, and the Army was starved of every type of ammunition and support. When the North Vietnamese launched their final invasion in April 1975, after two years of massive rearmament by the Soviet Union and Chinese in violation of the 1973 peace accords, the South Vietnamese were defeated by a conventional invasion, even though some South Vietnamese units fought to the death in place. Millions were slaughtered by the communists over the next five years, about a million fled to America as refugees; some live in Atascadero after surviving Cambodian Khmer Rouge (communist) death camps. We abandoned over 400 South Vietnamese intelligence operatives who were executed by the North Vietnamese when their conquest was complete. Yet we have won in other places.

In the Philippines in the 1950’s, an Air Force intelligence officer named Colonel Edward Lansdale along with a single heroic Philippine patriot, Ramon Magasaysay, who became the Defense Minsister and eventually President, defeated the communist Huk insurgency without American forces in any significant numbers. He fought corruption and won by instilling a democracy that is still hobbled but effective. Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam with far less success, especially after President Kennedy gave quiet acquiescence to a coup that toppled the Diem regime but resulted in Diem’s murder in November, 1963. Lansdale had neither prior knowledge or involvement in the coup and had been frustrated by his inability to persuade President Diem and his family to institute reforms throughout the country. The point is, counterinsurgencies have been won in the past, as the British did in Malaya in the 1950s, adapting their strategy to the situation and being persistent and determined to win. We also fought successful counterinsurgencies in the Philippines in 1904 and should not forget the 30 plus years of counterinsurgency fought by the US Army against the Plains Indians in the American West in the latter half of the 19th century. The key ingredient is willpower for a long hard slog, which is often costly in blood and treasure, but usually better than the alternatives.

How do we define victory, many will ask? I define victory in both a military and social sense. We will have “won” when we have killed or captured most of the senior leadership, particularly the key leaders, of both Al Queda and the Taliban. We will have won in a social sense when an Afghan girl can go to school like her brothers without fear of a Taliban fanatic throwing acid in her face. We will have won when an Afghan woman can testify in a courtroom and her testimony is given equal weight with her male attackers. Finally, we will have won when we leave behind some kind of semblance of a government and a society that at least attempts to provide some type justice and respect for human rights and doesn’t support terrorism or tolerate them on its soil. It may not look or be like a Jeffersonian Democracy, but it will be theirs and hopefully, decide to join the community of nations in at least a 20th century sense.

What if we lose?

What will happen if we abandon Afghanistan? Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, is a nuclear armed state. It is unstable at best, fighting a powerful insurgency against an ideologically motivated and determined foe. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are well armed and well equipped with significant support in the ISI and the Army, the only unified force in the country. Pakistan hates India, also nuclear armed, which equally hates Pakistan. One report received in the 90’s revealed Pakistani plans to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack upon India and is believed to be keeping that option on the table.
After the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, Pakistan loosely controlled an army of about 40,000 combat experienced guerrilla fighters and terrorists. They have not hesitated to form terrorist groups to attack India, like the devastating attack on Mumbai (Bombay) India last year or the attack on the Indian Parliament several years earlier. They have fought a full-scale war at least once and engaged in prolonged border clashes including the use of heavy artillery on numerous occasions. Allowing Afghanistan to become a terrorist refuge again will destabilize Pakistan even further, perhaps even allowing the Taliban or Al Queda sympathetic leaders to take control of the government. The threat of nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups is not out of the question and Pakistan has been implicated in spreading nuclear weapons technology, especially “know how” throughout the region, including to Iran. With Iran arming with nuclear weapons in the West, you would have a belt of radical Islamist regimes from South Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan opposite the jugular vein of the oil resources of the western world. This would encourage Gulf States, such as Saudi Arabia and other confrontation states (Jordan and Egypt) to seek nuclear weapons for their own defense.

An American retreat in Afghanistan will completely compromise US credibility and its willingness to protect its friends with a nuclear shield. Undoubtedly, Israel will seek every military advantage and may initiate preemptive strikes against any neighbor or near state that poses an actual or perceived threat to its existence. Should hostilities actually occur, the situation will be absolutely unpredictable and uncontrollable in outcomes. Hostilities between Pakistan and India may very well embroil China, which has both interests and close ties to Islamic states and has a historical rivalry with India. Once that happens, China, allied with Iran and ostensibly Pakistan, against India and probably Israel, would likely rise to support their protégés against any US attempt to intervene. The devastation of a nuclear conflict would be catastrophic for the region, with the deaths of 100, 200 or 500 million people in a regional nuclear war.

Even without a nuclear hostilities, the ability of such a hostile alliance, nuclear armed, to intimidate the world with terrorist attacks, combined with bullying of European and regional powers, would neuter American power in the region, probably forever. Even the notional threat of conflict in the region normally sends crude oil prices spiking; an outbreak of actual conflict (conventional or nuclear) would send oil prices spiraling to over $200 or more a barrel overnight. This will translate to between $5 and $10 for a gallon gas, some even think $20 a gallon gas is possible, assuming you can even get it. Food shortages will ensue, first in third world regions where everything is scarce, but the Middle and Working classes of America will be hit especially hard by high prices, out of control inflation, fuel shortages and even shortages of food and many essentials.

The shock to our economy will be comparable or worse to that of the 9-11 attacks with high and prolonged unemployment levels, probably on the order of the 25 – 30 % levels experienced in the Great Depression will occur. It could be considerably higher. Environmental damage will be catastrophic on a planetary scale; some scientists have postulated the dust clouds hurled into the stratosphere will induce worldwide cooling of temperatures for up to two years, which might resemble the “The year without a summer” in 1816 when a massive volcanic eruption in SE Asia caused it to snow in New England in July. Temperatures were lowered nationwide, causing worldwide crop failures and food shortages. The economic consequences are incomprehensible and left to the imagination; none of the outcomes are favorable for peace, economic prosperity or even the survival of the western world, at least as we know it.

The United States has a moral obligation to keep its commitments. We have an obligation to keep faith with the soldiers we have deployed and their families, who trusted our leaders to support them and to treasure their lives, not spend them wastefully or foolishly on quixotic foreign adventures. The campaign in Afghanistan began not as a “war of choice” as the current president described the war in Iraq, but a “war of necessity.” It occurred after a catastrophic attack upon our nations’ leading city and the symbols of American power. Most importantly, the Afghan war began as a war in response to 3,000 Americans whose lives were violently taken from them and their families on September 11, 2001. For their sake alone, we must continue this fight until the end, lest we forget… lest we forget their loss and the sacrifices so many have made on their behalf.


Al Fonzi is a Middle East and counter-terrorism specialist. He is a retired U.S Army officer with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and over 35 years of military service. His duties included service with the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), participation in three wars or periods of national crisis. He holds a masters degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California.