It was the fall of 2016 and I was thirty-six. I had been a mid-level staffer at The Carter Center in Atlanta for about a year and a half. My job, although it took me a while to figure this out, was to try to continue President and Mrs. Carter’s legacy of peacemaking in South Sudan and Sudan.

I was not sure I was up to the task.

I had just returned from a trip to Khartoum. There, a friendly American diplomat had asked me to dinner at his residence. I expected the usual exchange between Sudan watchers, comparing notes on the shifting currents and personalities in the country. Then – and it all remains a bit hazy in my mind, as is much of what followed – the diplomat explained that the United States and Sudan were discussing the potential partial lifting of American sanctions in exchange for concrete actions by the Sudanese. In 2016, Sudan and the Sudanese people faced severe American sanctions on par with those imposed on North Korea.

The U.S. government, however, had a problem. Since his indictment in 2009 by the International Criminal Court, the U.S. had a policy of no direct dialogue with Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan. As the sanctions discussions advanced, the U.S. needed assurances that al-Bashir himself agreed to the actions needed to reach agreement.

That is where President Carter came in. Carter had known al-Bashir for more than 30 years and had met with him to negotiate peace agreements, including a 1995 ceasefire in Sudan’s Civil War, known as the “Guinea Worm Ceasefire” because it was linked to an eradication campaign against that disease. The diplomat asked if Carter would act as an intermediary with al-Bashir. As the Obama era wound down and Trump awaited, time was short.

It was with that request in mind that I, with my boss Jordan Ryan, drove the two hours from Atlanta to Plains. Only later did I reflect on driving up to the modest house, the Secret Service agents letting us through the gates, and President Carter meeting us at the door. We sat on his couch. He asked me to go to the kitchen to help him prepare and bring the tea. Rosalynn was unwell, he said, and would not be joining.

I had never been so close to President Carter. His hands, his voice, even his smell reminded of me of my grandfathers – one genteel from Portsmouth, Virginia the other tough from Tucson, Arizona – fused into a single man. Somewhere inside myself I heard, “Just talk to him like you would talk to Bill,” the name I called my maternal grandfather.

Jordan and I updated Carter on the situation in Sudan and the U.S. openness to lifting some sanctions. He said he had worked with the U.S. before to convince al-Bashir to take actions in return for sanctions relief. Al-Bashir had delivered on his end of those bargains. The U.S., he felt, had not done so. Carter knew well al-Bashir’s crimes, but he had, Carter said, “always kept his word to me.”

Then he turned to me and – I will never forget this – said “John, what do you think?” I had expected him to ask Jordan’s views, not mine. Then like a revelation it came to me – “this man has been President of the United States. He knows the real deal, knows the person who has been on the ground.” I am not able to remember what exactly I said in response but it was in sum: “It’s worth a try and there are a lot of factors in our favor this time.”

President Carter did not seem to me to be enthusiastic – but he agreed. He agreed to my recommendation!

The next steps followed one after the other in a blur: we arranged calls between President Carter and then-Secretary of State John Kerry and with the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, Donald Booth; I talked back-and-forth with the National Security Council; Carter sent a letter to al-Bashir with the terms of the proposed deal; I talked to al-Bashir’s advisors; and we arranged a fast-track visit by one of them to Plains, where he met with Carter, Jordan, and myself. One day during this time, I saw President Carter at The Carter Center in Atlanta and he said, smiling, “I’m finally seeing you not at my home.”

Somewhere along the way I met al-Bashir. Through the fog of action and memory, I do not remember exactly when. What I do recall is that what struck me was that al-Bashir, the dictator and war criminal, had clearly just spilled tea on his shirt.

In early 2017, President Obama eased sanctions on Sudan. This step was good for the Sudanese people, even if many layers of sanctions remained. The easing demonstrated that Sudan and the United States could establish a good relationship. It contributed in a small way to the cracks that led in 2018 to the fall of the al-Bashir regime. The immense credit for that, of course, goes to the brave Sudanese who made it happen.

As President Carter enters hospice care and as I reflect on his life – his dignity and grit, his boldness and kindness, his humanity and statesmanship – I confess most of all I think of an immeasurable, personal gift: he believed in me, and we did something good together.

And so I end this homage here, with a pledge: My dear President Carter – please accept my heartfelt gratitude and know that I will honor your legacy and your spirit by fighting on for human decency, for right, and for peace.

( Waging Nonviolence ) – Peace is made by people; but their work can be greatly improved by organizations. Take, for example, the progressive, non-governmental organization Nonviolent Peaceforce, which is so well represented by former protection officer Hunter Dalli and his dramatic “No” to the endemic violence in his country of South Sudan.

In this special feature for our documentary film, “The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature,” Hunter talks about discovering, as all field workers do, that while his intervention is critical it is far from sufficient without the people directly involved themselves taking on the dramatic conversion.  It is ultimately, as Hunter says, “hands-on.”  With determination and courage, he shares with us an indelible lesson about nonviolence.

Hunter: I grew up during the war. I stayed my entire life during the war. I remember asking my dad when I was 11 years old, I asked him, “Is this how we’re going to live for the rest of our lives?” And he did not answer me because he didn’t know. And he can’t tell. Because like he was not going to say, “No, no, we’re not going to be like this the rest of our life,” because it was bombing every day. There’s a ground attack all the time. And he had been through this almost his entire life. So, he cannot tell me that this is not how we’re going to be.

But then when I grow up, I take this — these are of like, “No. We can’t continue doing this. Like we have to do something else.” Like because it’s too much. It has been going on forever. I work for Nonviolent Peaceforce about three and a half years, between 2011 and 2014 in South Sudan. I worked in different states. I worked on different projects, different conflict situations. You have to reach the people who are directly involved in this conflict. You have to reach the most affected people. Affected people because if you don’t reach them, for example, if you say, “Okay, I will go to the government. And government from this side and government from that side to solve this conflict,” this conflict will not be solved. Because these people on the grassroot level, they’re the most who are directly affected, they are the one whose relatives were killed. So, they will still go and, you know, kill people from the other side.

But we reached both the government level and the grassroot. So, we talked to them. We give them the tools to solve their own conflict. And that would be – the tools would be going and talking to these people. It is scary. It’s hard. You cannot do it because if you cross there, they will kill you. Well, the people from the other side, we also know them. We also go and talk to them. Then we – if people are too scared – we can accompany them. We can go with them as protection to the other side.

Because we are there, present there, and those people knew us, then they will be like, “Okay. This is something that maybe we should do.” Like okay, nobody should bring guns and nobody should do anything because these are Nonviolent Peaceforce people that are coming here. Then they would eventually end up talking to one another.

After some of the work that we did with Nonviolent Peaceforce, people came to respect me. Today, I would say I have a voice in my community.

Via Waging Nonviolence

ROME (IPS) – Urgent action is needed to save the lives of people facing famine in North Eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, the UN leading food and agriculture agency’s chief on April 28 warned. “If nothing is done, some 20 million people could starve to death in the next six months.”

“Famine does not just kill people, it contributes to social instability and also perpetuates a cycle of poverty and aid dependency that endures for decades,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva added.

At a media briefing ahead of the conclusive session of the this UN specialised agency’s executive arm—the FAO Council, he launched a new appeal for voluntary contributions, that are “of vital importance to FAO, now more than ever.”

“I will be always committed to finding more savings and promoting more efficiency, as I have done over the last five years. But I have already cut to the bone. There is no more fat left.”

On this, Graziano da Silva emphasised the need to work with everyone on the basis of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development –“Leaving No One Behind”, in order to save all the affected people.

He also announced that agreement will be signed among FAO and the other two Rome-based UN agencies: the International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) on how to tackle the current famine in those 4 countries– Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.

The FAO Council, which has met in FAO-headquarters in Rome on 24 – 28 April, convenes between sessions of the main Conference to provide advice and oversight related to programmatic and budgetary matters.

The Council’s 49 elected members have been briefed on the extent of the hunger crises, and the steps required to preventing catastrophe.

Making Funds Go Further

The organisation’s executive body has also approved FAO‘s Programme of Work and Budget 2018-2019, which prioritises areas where FAO can deliver the greatest impact to member countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable agriculture production, water scarcity management, and building the resilience of poor family farmers.

Ahead of the FAO Council’s meeting, Graziano da Silva had on 25 April stated in Geneva that a combination of food assistance and food production assistance is the only way to avoid famine in conflict-ridden Yemen where two-thirds of the population –17 million people– are suffering from severe food insecurity.

“As the conflict continues, food security and nutrition will also continue to deteriorate,” he stressed in his address to a United Nations High-Level Pledging conference for Yemen organised in Geneva and co-hosted by the governments of Switzerland and Sweden.

“To put these figures into perspective, we are talking about the double of Switzerland’s population being unable to meet their basic daily food needs.”

He stressed how livelihoods support, especially for agriculture and fishing, must be an integral part of the international community’s response to the crisis in Yemen.

Over 17 Million Yemenis, Acutely Food Insecure

More than 17 million people around Yemen’s rugged landscape are acutely food insecure, and the figure is likely to increase as the on-going conflict continues to erode the ability to grow, import, distribute and pay for food, Graziano da Silva wrote on IPS.

“More than 7 million people are on the verge of famine, while the rest are marginally meeting the minimum day-to-day nutritional needs thanks to external humanitarian and livelihoods support. Large-scale famine is a real risk that will cast an awful shadow for generations to come.”
According to Graziano da Silva, only a political solution can end the suffering in Yemen, as there can be no food security without peace. And the longer the delay to draft an adequately funded recovery plan, the more expensive the burden will be in terms of resources and human livelihood.

In 2016, agriculture production in Yemen and the area under cultivation shrank by 38 per cent due to the lack of inputs and investments. Livestock production fell by 35 per cent.

“Agricultural assistance in a humanitarian crisis can no longer be an afterthought,” the FAO Director-General said. “We need to seize every opportunity to support communities in Yemen to continue producing food, even under difficult circumstances.”

In Geneva, Graziano da Silva met Yemen’s Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid Bin Daghr, for talks on FAO’s support to the country to deliver emergency livelihood assistance and kick-start food production, especially when resources pledged to tackle the crisis are concretely made available.

The Geneva pledging conference on April 25 mobilised half of the 2,1 billion dollars urgently required to rescue the starving Yemeni population.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

UN News Centre from 3 months ago: “UN relief official: International efforts underway to aid the 7 million vulnerable in the Sahel”

The report “can only jeopardize the pursuit of peace and stability,” South Sudan representatives said.

A new report claiming that South Sudan’s leaders have exploited the country’s ongoing civil violence has been criticized by the country’s government. It comes as the world’s youngest nations stands on the brink of a renewed civil war.

The 66 page report, “War Crimes Shouldn’t Pay” was published Saturday by Sentry, a U.S.-based watchdog co-founded by Hollywood actor George Clooney and details how leaders plundered the country and stripped the country of money.

The South Sudan government challenged the report, casting doubt on whether the sources used by the report were legitimate. Spokesperson for President Salva Kiir, Ateny Wek Ateny, said that the report “can only jeopardize the pursuit of peace and stability in my country where the distrust and lack of authority are key factors of violence.”

“We will make sure that each of those allegations are challenged with a counter forensic and legal analysis of the shortcomings of this report,” Ateny said.

A local South Sudan newspaper said it was shut down by the government after it ran the report on its front page.

Sentry made special mention of President Kiir and his family as well as former Vice President Riek Machar and other close government associates who partook in corrupt practices such as fraud, insider trading, and suspect transactions.

The money that the South Sudan elites were able to obtain was then hidden in various international ventures including resource companies, banks, real estate and luxury cars, according to Sentry.

“South Sudan’s military and political elites are widely reported to have constructed a kleptocratic regime that has captured and controlled nearly all profit-generating sectors of the economy,” the report read. “Direct perpetrators of violence, and those acting on their behalf, have benefited from the plunder of South Sudan’s public wealth.”

South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation, having just gained independence from Sudan in 2011. A civil war then erupted in 2013 after Kiir sacked Machar as his vice president for allegedly plotting against him. Instances of violence have recently been rising, and many believe the country is on the edge of returning to civil war.

Tens of thousands have people are estimated to have been killed in the ongoing violence which is largely bases along ethnic associations.

People fleeing the violence has reached one million according to the most recent estimates by the United Nations Refugee Agency. International organizations are also concerned about massive number of child soldiers that have been recruited in the country.

The U.S. has welcomed the Sentry report saying that it supported the South Sudanese people.

“The Department of State is pursuing measures it can take to deter corruption by South Sudanese officials,” the department said in a press statement Wednesday.

Via TeleSur

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related video added by Juan Cole:

AP: “Clooney Unveils Report on South Sudan Corruption”

[This story was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Additional funding was provided through the generosity of Adelaide Gomer.]

Juba, South Sudan — The soft glow of the dancing white lights is a dead giveaway.  It’s Christmas in July at the U.S. Embassy compound.  Behind high walls topped with fierce-looking metal impediments meant to discourage climbers, there’s a party under way.

Close your eyes and you could be at a stateside summer barbeque or an office holiday party.  Even with them open, the local realities of dirt roads and dirty water, civil war, mass graves, and nightly shoot-to-kill curfews seem foreign. These walls, it turns out, are even higher than they look.

Out by the swimming pool and the well-stocked bar, every table is packed with people.  Slightly bleary-eyed men and sun-kissed women wear Santa hats and decorations in their hair.  One festive fellow is dressed as Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation complete with a white sweater, black dickey, and bright white loafers.  Another is straddling an inflatable killer whale that he’s borrowed from the collection of playthings around the pool and is using as improvised chair while he stuffs his face from an all-American smorgasbord.  We’re all eating well tonight.  Mac and cheese, barbequed ribs, beef tenderloin, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and for desert, peach cobbler.  The drinks are flowing, too: wine and whisky and fine Tusker beer.

Yuletide songs drift out into the sultry night in this, the capital of the world’s newest nation.  “Simply having a wonderful Christmastime,” croons Paul McCartney. 

Just 15 minutes away, near the airport in an area known as Tongping, things aren’t quite so wonderful.  There’s no fried chicken, no ribs, no peach cobbler.  At Juba’s United Nations camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), they’re eating sorghum and a crude porridge made from a powdered blend of corn and soy beans provided by the United Nations’ World Food Program.  Children at the camp call it “the yellow food.”  “It’s no good,” one of them tells me, with a quick head shake for emphasis.

I mention to a few of the embassy revelers that I’m heading several hundred miles north to Malakal.  A couple of them assure me that, according to colleagues, it’s “not that bad.”  But while we’re chowing down, an emaciated young girl in Malakal clings to life.  This one-year-old arrived at the hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) at the U.N. camp there several days earlier, severely malnourished and weighing just 11 pounds.  It’s uncertain if she’ll survive.  One in 10 children who arrive at the hospital in her condition don’t.    

A Man-Made Famine

As John Kerry, then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it in 2012, the United States “helped midwife the birth” of South Sudan.  The choice of words may have been cringe-worthy, but hardly divorced from reality.  For more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in Washington and beyond championed rebel forces here.  As the new nation broke away from Sudan, after decades of bloody civil war, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in aid, including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security assistance, and sent military instructors to train the country’s armed forces and advisers to mentor government officials. 

It would be Washington’s major nation-building effort in Africa, a new country destined to join Iraq and Afghanistan as a regional bulwark of democracy and a shining example of American know-how.  On South Sudan’s independence day, July 9, 2011, President Obama hailed the moment as a “time of hope” and pledged U.S. partnership to the new land, emphasizing security and development.  There’s precious little evidence of either of these at the U.N. camps and even less in vast areas of the countryside now teetering on the edge of a catastrophic famine.

Since a civil war broke out in December 2013, at least 10,000 South Sudanese have been killed, untold numbers of women and girls have been victims of sexual violence, and atrocities have been committed by all parties to the conflict.  As a result, in the eyes of the United Nations, in a world of roiling strife — civil wars, mass killings, hunger, and conflicts from Iraq to Gaza, Ukraine to Libya — South Sudan is, along with the Central African Republic and Syria, one of just three “L3 emergencies,” the world’s most severe, large-scale humanitarian crises.  The country has also just displaced Somalia — for six years running the archetypal failed state — atop the Fund for Peace’s 178-nation list of the world’s most fragile nations. 

Today, close to 100,000 people are huddled on United Nations military bases around the country, just a fraction of the almost 1.5 million who have been put to flight and are waiting out the war as internal exiles or as refugees in the bordering nations of Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan.  Such massive levels of displacement guarantee another nightmare to come.  Since so many subsistence farmers weren’t around to plant their crops, despite fertile ground and sufficient rain, seeds never met soil and food never had a chance to grow. 

“At this point in time, because it’s the rainy season, there’s nothing we can do in terms of agriculture,” says Caroline Saint-Mleux, the regional emergency coordinator for East and Central Africa at CARE International.  Above us, the sky is darkening as we sit in plastic chairs in the muddy “humanitarian hub,” a grimy ghetto of white tents, nondescript trailers, and makeshift headquarters of aid agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross and MSF, on the outer edge of the U.N. base at Malakal.  Her organization did distribute a limited number of seeds to farmers still on their land earlier in the year, but can do no more.  The planting season is long past.  “It would be a waste of energy at this point,” she says, resignation in her voice.

Famine “is a very realistic possibility,” Deborah Schein tells me.  She’s the coordinator for the United Nations in Upper Nile State, where Malakal is located.  Right now, experts are crunching the numbers and debating whether to formally declare a famine. Whether it’s this fall or early next year, aid workers say, it’s definitely coming and the sooner it comes, the more lives can be saved. Recently, U.N. Security Council President Eugène-Richard Gasana called attention to “the catastrophic food insecurity situation.”  Already, 3.9 million people — about one in three South Sudanese — face dangerous levels of food insecurity. However, unlike in Ethiopia in the 1980s, where drought led to crop failures that killed one million people, Vanessa Parra, Oxfam America’s press liaison in South Sudan, says this country is facing an “entirely man-made famine.”

Click here to see a larger version

Women walk through the muddy U.N. Mission in South Sudan camp in Malakal. (Nick Turse)

Nyajuma’s Story

If it were dry, it would take only five minutes to walk from Deborah Schein’s office at the U.N. base in Malakal to the Médecins Sans Frontières field hospital in the adjoining IDP camp where 17,000 South Sudanese are now taking refuge.  But the rains have turned this ground into fetid mud and an easy walk into a slip-sliding slog.   

At the end of a gray, mucky expanse that nearly sucks the boots off your feet, an MSF flag flies outside a barn-sized white tent.  Before you enter, you need to visit a foot-washing station, then have your feet or boots disinfected.  Even then, it’s impossible to keep the grime out.  “As you can imagine, this is not the best environment for a hospital,” says Teresa Sancristoval, the energetic chief of MSF’s emergency operations in Malakal.

Step inside that tent and you’re immediately in a ward that’s electric with activity.  It’s hard to believe that this 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week hospital is manned by only three expat doctors and three expat nurses, plus a medical team leader.  Still, add in various support personnel, local staff, and the many patients and suddenly this giant tent begins to shrink, putting space at a premium. 

“The great majority of the hospital is pediatrics,” says Sancristoval, a compact dynamo from Madrid with the bearing of a field general and intense eyes that go wide when making a point.  Not that she even needs to point that out.  In this first ward, the 15 metal-frame beds — blue paint peeling, thin mattresses, four makeshift bamboo posts topped with mosquito nets — are packed tight, all but two filled with mother and child or children.  Some days, there’s not a bed to spare, leaving patients ill with infection and wracked by disease to sleep on whatever space can be found on the floor. 

On a bed adjacent to the main thoroughfare sits a tiny girl in a yellow top and pink skirt, her head bandaged and covered in a clingy mesh net.  Nyajuma has been in this hospital for two weeks.  She was lying here inside this tent, wasted and withered, the night we were having our Christmas feast at the embassy about 400 miles south in Juba.   

Nyajuma weighed only 11 pounds on arrival.  According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average one-year-old girl in the U.S. weighs more than double that.  She was quickly started on the first of two powdered therapeutic foods to combat her severe malnutrition, followed by a regimen of Plumpy’nut, a high-protein, high-calorie peanut paste, four times a day along with two servings of milk.

It would have been bad enough if her only problem were severe malnutrition, but that condition also exacerbated the skin infection beneath the bandages on her head.  In addition, she suffers from kala azar, a deadly disease caused by a parasite spread by sandflies that results in prolonged fever and weakness.  On top of that, she is being treated for two other potentially lethal maladies, cholera and tuberculosis.  Her mother, resting beside her, looks exhausted, world-beaten.  Pregnant on arrival, she gave birth five days later.  She lies next to Nyajuma, listless, but carefully covers her face with her arm as if to shield herself from the harsh world beyond this bed. 

During her first week at the hospital, nurse Monica Alvarez tells me, Nyajuma didn’t crack a smile.  “But now, voilà,” she says lifting the child, sparking a broad grin that reflects the sea change in her condition.  Nyajuma is enduring the rigors of kala azar and tuberculosis treatments with great aplomb.  “She’s eating well and she’s smiling all the time,” says Alvarez, who’s quick with a smile herself.  But Nyajuma is still in the early stages of treatment.  Once stable, severely malnourished children can be transferred to ambulatory care.  But it takes roughly six weeks for them to make a full recovery and be discharged.  And in today’s South Sudan, they are the lucky ones.

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One-year-old Nyajuma sits on a bed next to her mother at the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital at the U.N. Mission in South Sudan camp in Malakal.

Of those who make it to the hospital in such a condition, 10% don’t survive, Javier Roldan, MSF’s medical team leader, tells me.  “We have people who come in in later stages or have a co-infection because malnutrition has compromised their immune system, which makes treatment much more complicated.”  He talks of the difficulty of losing patients for want of better facilities, more staff, and greater resources.  “The outcome of a baby weighing one and a half kilos [3.3 pounds] in Europe or America would be no problem at all, but here there’s quite a high mortality rate,” says Roldan.  “It’s very frustrating for the medical staff when you have patients die because you don’t have the means to treat them.” 

And Malakal is no anomaly.  At the MSF feeding station in Leer, a town in adjoining Unity State, they’ve treated roughly 1,800 malnourished children since mid-May, compared to 2,300 in all of last year.  North of Leer, in Bentiu, the site of repeated spasms of violence, the situation is especially grim.  “Over five percent of the children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition,” says CARE’s Country Director for South Sudan Aimee Ansari. “On the day I left Bentiu, CARE helped parents transport the bodies of children who had died from malnutrition to a burial site.”  In all, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), almost one million South Sudanese children under five years of age will require treatment for acute malnutrition in 2014.  UNICEF projects that 50,000 of them could die.

The Camps and the Countryside

At the U.N.’s Tongping camp in Juba — where nearly 11,500 of the area’s tens of thousands of internally displaced persons are taking refuge — the food situation is “not very good at all.” So John, a 17-year-old resident, emphatically assures me beneath the relentless midday sun.  “Outside, when I was living at home, we could have fruit or whatever we wanted.”  Here, he eats no fresh food and no vegetables.  Its sorghum and “the yellow food” mixed with sugar, oil, and water.  “This food doesn’t even compare,” he says more than once. 

Still, people here aren’t dying of malnutrition and even those in the ruder, more dismal camps in Bentiu and Malakal are luckier than most since they have access to aid from NGOs.  At a time when South Sudan needs them most, however, almost eight months of war, insecurity, and attacks on aid workers have severely limited the reach of humanitarian organizations.  Speaking of the entire NGO community, Wendy Taeuber, country director for the International Rescue Committee in South Sudan, says, “The remoteness of rural areas of South Sudan combined with the rainy season means that there are hundreds of thousands of IDPs still in need of additional assistance.”

Sitting in the trailer that serves as his office, I ask Paulin Nkwosseu, the chief field officer for UNICEF in Malakal, about the situation of those in less accessible areas along the Nile River where World Food Program distributions are limited.  “Due to the crisis, people have no income and no food, so they’re surviving on monthly food distributions from WFP,” he tells me.  “But they say that the food distributed by WFP is not sufficient for the whole family.” 

UNICEF works with NGO partners to reach people outside the camps, but it’s a struggle.  Nkwosseu walks over to a large wall map and begins to point out Nile River towns to the north like Wau Shilluk (currently suffering a cholera outbreak), Lul, Kodok, and Melut.  These, he says, are hubs where South Sudanese from rural areas go when faced with hunger. The reason is simple enough: the river is one of the few viable transport options in a country the size of Texas that has almost no paved roads and whose dirt tracks in the rainy season are quickly reduced to impassable mud. 

Even using the Nile is anything but a slam-dunk operation.  Earlier this year, for instance, a convoy of barges transporting food and fuel to Malakal was attacked by armed men.  Even absent the acts of rebels, soldiers, or bandits, food barges are regularly delayed by everything from mechanical issues to drawn out negotiations with local powerbrokers.  Air drops are costly, impractical, and — thanks to a lack of airfield infrastructure — often unfeasible.  Security is minimal and so thousands of tons of food stocks have simply been looted.  Even when road transport is possible, vehicles are attacked and food is stolen by both government and rebel troops, eager to feed themselves.  When food supplies do make it to the river towns, many in need are unlikely to make it in from the water-logged countryside in time.

America’s Limits

Among African nations, South Sudan has had an almost unprecedented relationship with the United States.  Aside from Liberia — a nation settled, hundreds of years ago, by former American slaves, whose capital is named after a U.S. president — it is the only African country for which Americans have evidenced a deep bipartisan commitment and “longstanding humanitarian and political interest as well as a deeper kinship,” says Cameron Hudson, who was the director for African affairs on the staff of the National Security Council from 2005 to 2009.

“For nearly a decade leading up to the 2011 declaration of independence, the cause of the nation and its citizens was one that was near and dear to the heart of two successive U.S. administrations and some of its most seasoned and effective thinkers and policymakers,” Patricia Taft, a senior associate with the Fund for Peace, wrote in a recent analysis of South Sudan.  “In order to secure this nation-building ‘win,’ both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations poured tons of aid into South Sudan, in every form imaginable. From military aid to food aid to the provision of technical expertise, America was South Sudan’s biggest ally and backer, ardently midwifing the country into nationhood by whatever means necessary.”

For all America’s efforts, the wheels started coming off almost immediately.  “We’ve gotten pretty good at understanding what goes into building a state, institutionally, but as far as what creates a nation that’s actually functional, we fell short,” Taft tells TomDispatch.  The U.S., she says, failed to do the necessary heavy lifting to encourage the building of a shared national identity and sat on its hands when targeted interventions might have helped reverse worrisome developments in South Sudan.

Still, the U.S. repeatedly pledged unyielding support for the struggling young nation.  In August 2012, for example, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Juba, was emphatic that the U.S. “commitment to this new nation is enduring and absolute in terms of assistance and aid and support going forward.”  A year later, announcing the appointment of Donald Booth as President Obama’s Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, made special reference to America’s “enduring commitment” to the South Sudanese people.

Lately, however, words like “enduring and absolute” have been replaced by the language of limits.  Speaking in Juba just days before the July Christmas party, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Anne Richard drew attention to the fact that the U.S. had given generously to South Sudan, but that such assistance would be of little use if the war continues. “There is a limit to how much aid can be provided in a year with so many crises around the world,” she said.

That doesn’t bode well for those already going hungry and those who will be affected by the coming famine, forecast by some to be the worst since Ethiopia’s in the 1980s. Here, limits equal lives lost.  A $1.8 billion U.N. aid operation designed to counter the immediate, life-threatening needs of the worst affected South Sudanese is currently just 50% funded, according to Amanda Weyler of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in South Sudan.  She explains that “any shortfall in funding potentially means that we cannot save lives of people that we may otherwise have been able to help.”

In a statement emailed to TomDispatch, Anne Richard acknowledged this very point, though she couched it in the language of “needs,” not lives.  She put the blame on South Sudan’s warring factions while lamenting the plethora of crises around the world.  “Even if Congress again funds our budget so that we can provide a solid share of support to aid organizations and U.N. appeals, we can’t cover them completely and other donor countries will also be stretched.  At some point, we may see reports of food and water shortages and healthcare needs going unaddressed,” she wrote.  “Ultimately, these crises are man-made and will not be alleviated until the fighting stops.” 

Do They Know It’s Christmastime At All?

It’s an overcast day, but the sun is strong behind the clouds and it’s bright inside the white tent of the Médecins Sans Frontières field hospital.  It’s also hot.  One of several large, aged metal fans pushes the heavy, humid air around these cramped quarters as the staff moves purposefully from patient to patient, checking progress, dispensing medicine, providing instructions.  Children cry and shriek, babble and laugh, and cough and cough and cough. 

A scrawny black and white cat slips through a maze of legs moving from the rudimentary pharmacy to the examination room past the bed where Nyajuma sits.  She’s putting on weight, 2.5 pounds since her arrival and so, for her, things are looking somewhat better.  But as the country plunges into famine, how many other Nyajumas will arrive here and find there’s not enough food, not enough medicine, too few doctors?  How many others will never make it and simply die in the bush?         

“When there’s a clash, when the conflict starts, it’s in the news every day.  Then we start to forget about it.  In South Sudan, the needs are only getting bigger, even bigger than in the beginning,” MSF’s Javier Roldan tells me.  “When the conflict becomes chronic, the situation deteriorates.  Food access is getting even more difficult.  Fewer donors are providing money, so the situation for civilians is deteriorating day by day.”

That embassy party in Juba seems light years away, not just in another state but another world — a world where things in Malakal don’t seem so bad.  It’s a world where choice cuts of beef sizzle and cold lager flows and the pool looks cool and inviting, a world where limits on aid are hard realities to be dispassionately explained and cursorily lamented, not death sentences to be suffered.

From Iraq to Afghanistan, American-style nation building has crumbled, exposing the limits of American power.  Before things are over in South Sudan, Washington’s great experiment in Africa may prove to be the most disastrous effort of all.  Just three years after this country’s independence, two years after Hillary Clinton stood in this city and pledged enduring and absolute assistance, at a time when its people are most in need, the U.S. is talking about limits on aid, about backing away from the country it fostered, its prime example of nation-building-in-action in the heart of Africa.  The effects will be felt from Juba to Jonglei, Bor to Bentiu, Malek to Malakal.

If things continue as they have, by the time the U.S. Embassy throws its actual Christmas bash, the civil war in South Sudan will have entered its second year and large swaths of the country might be months into a man-made famine abetted by an under-funded humanitarian response — and it’s the most vulnerable, like Nyajuma, who will bear the brunt of the crisis.  Experts are currently debating if — or when — famine can be declared.  Doing so will exert additional pressure on funders and no doubt save lives, so a declaration can’t come fast enough for Kate Donovan of UNICEF in South Sudan.  “Waiting for data to be crunched in order to make sure all the numbers add up to famine is deadly for small children,” she says.  “It is like ringing fire alarms when the building is already burnt to the ground.” 

If history is any guide and projections of 50,000 child malnutrition fatalities are accurate, the outlook for South Sudan is devastating.  What Donovan tells me should make Washington — and the rest of the world — sit up and take notice: “Half the kids may already be dead by the time famine is actually declared.”

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  A 2014 Izzy Award winner, he has reported from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and his pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. This story is the second in a series of on-the-ground reports from Africa pursued in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Additional funding was provided through the generosity of Adelaide Gomer.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me.

Copyright 2014 Nick Turse

Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com where you can read Tom Engelhardt’s important intro.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

CCTV Africa: “South Sudan Crisis”

1. On Wednesday, the commander of Libya’s Air Force joined with self-proclaimed general Khalifa Hifter in the latter’s campaign against religious extremist groups and against parties of political Islam, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. The Interior Ministry was also said to have swung to him for a while, but the deputy minister has denied this assertion. It is possible that a substantial group of police support Hifter’s “Dignity Campaign” against the dominance of fundamentalist militias and of a slight minority of parliamentarians who nevertheless have managed to take over the General National Council. Likewise Libya’s ambassador to the UN and the Culture Minister have declared for Hifter. The navy chief of staff, a Hifter supporter, survived an assassination attempt on Wednesday morning. Hifter denies receiving money from Egypt but says he does want to meet Abdelfattah al-Sisi, the general who made last summer’s coup against the Muslim Brotherhood. Hifter is agitating for the General National Council to be replaced by an interim judicial panel until new elections, now set for late July. Hifter does seem to be trying to make a secular-nationalist coup and says he wants to wipe out the Muslim Brotherhood. That is the polarizing rhetoric common in Egypt now, which refuses to see a difference between civil supporters of the dream and a terrorist group. Worse, Hifter may be a sort of nationalist extremist himself.

2. The government of Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan has launched air and ground campaigns against the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal belt near Afghanistan. Some 71 extremists were killed in these engagements, with four government soldiers dead. The Obama administration had been trying for years to get Pakistan to conduct a big campaign against its Muslim extremists. As the US prepares to leave Afghanistan mostly or altogether, Sharif may feel a new urgency in dealing with the problem. In Pakistan, unlike Libya, the government’s new seriousness in taking on extremists is not spilling over onto the Jama’at-i Islami, the major civil society grouping of Muslim fundamentalists. Rather it is targeting actual terrorists, the Movement of Pakistani Taliban, who have killed scores of innocents in bombings.

3. If Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki manages to return to power as prime minister, he may well launch a campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which holds entire neighborhoods of major Sunni cities like Falluja and Ramadi. Al-Maliki was persuaded to hold off by local tribal elders, but the latter have not delivered. Without an election hanging over his head, and given the political weakness of the Sunni opposition, he might decide to try to crush the al-Qaeda affiliate.

4. Former general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s “war on terror,” by which he actually means a war on pluralism and especially on the Muslim Brotherhood, was vindicated at the polls. Expatriate Egyptians voted early and their votes have been tabulated. They overwhelming supported al-Sisi, giving him 94.5 percent of the vote. Al-Sisi, if he wins the presidency, is likely to continue his campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Sisi’s campaign is the least honest of those covered here, since he surly knows that most Muslim Brotherhood members are not in fact terrorists. He has even made it illegal to interview a Brotherhood member directly and to say anything nice about the movement. If you want to drive people into being terrorists, you often can.

5. The Obama administration has sent 80 special operations troops along with drone support to the African country of Chad, allegedly to search for the hundreds of girls kidnapped by the extremist Boko Haram movement. Although it is true that Boko Haram operates in nearby countries as well, it doesn’t make sense to me that you would start with Chad. Does this have something to do with Libya, actually?

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related video:

Press TV: “Scores of militants killed in airstrikes in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region”

Russia has arranged for its supporters in the Crimean state parliament to vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, and has announced that there will be a popular referendum on the issue in the semi-autonomous province, which has been part of Ukraine since the 1950s and went with Ukraine when that former soviet socialist republic became an independent country in 1991.

It is not clear if Russia’s supporters in Crimea are serious about this accession to Russia or if they are just playing a bargaining chip intended to wring long term concessions from the interim Ukrainian government, such as a permanent lease of naval facilities in Crimea to the Russian navy.

While a Crimean secession from Ukraine is unwise and will cause a lot of trouble, it isn’t unprecedented in the last few decades and the US and the West have supported some secessions or country break-ups when they suited their interests, while opposing others.

The US supported the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in the late 1990s (both had been part of the Yugoslav federation in the Cold War, but it fell apart in the 1990s; Serbia’s claims on parts of Bosnia and on all of Kosovo as the main Yugoslav successor state were rejected by the US, which helped Bosnia and Kosovo secede.)

Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia in 1993, although that was a more amicable split than the Kosovo secession or the Crimean one, if it happens. Still, Slovaks voted to secede, and no one stood in their way.

The US was positively delirious about the break-up of Sudan and the creation of South Sudan 2011. (Forces in the US congress see the break-up and weakening of Arab Muslim states as a good thing). The wisdom of that secession is questionable, since South Sudan has promptly become a failed state and is now having a civil war. The violence down there was always blamed on Khartoum, but apparently there are social formations and economic conditions in the south that just aren’t conducive to order.

While the US was ruling Iraq, Joe Biden and other US politicians tried to break it up into a Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite state. No one said that a Kurdish secession would be contrary to international law.

Jane Harman when in Congress proposed breaking up Iran into ethnically based provinces. She left that body over a scandal involving Israeli intelligence.

Lots of Irish-Americans would be perfectly happy to see Northern Ireland secede from the United Kingdom and join Ireland. Boston donated money for terrorist actions against London in the 1980s in hopes of making that happen. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) was at that time an open supporter of IRA violence. Official US policy was more even-handed. (I’m not taking a position on N. Ireland; just sayin’). In 1998 George Mitchell negotiated a settlement between the UK and Ireland on Northern Ireland, which recognized Ireland’s legitimate interests in the north.

Mitchell’s careful agreement, in fact, would be a good model for keeping Crimea in Ukraine while recognizing Russian interests there.

But those pundits (and President Obama himself) who are suggesting that a Crimean secession from Ukraine would be contrary to international law or unprecedented, or that the US would always oppose such a thing, haven’t been paying attention. The US position on secessions depends on whether Washington likes the country affected. And Washington itself toyed with partitioning Iraq while it was a colonial possession.

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Related video:

Reuters: “Obama says Crimea referendum would violate international law”

They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America.  They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it out with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa.  They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific.  They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia.  All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed — until now.

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget.  Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally.  This presence — now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations — provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace. 

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world.  By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post.  In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120.  Today, that figure has risen higher still.

In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs.  This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection.  Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.        

Growth Industry

Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era.   SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001.  Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3 billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in supplemental funding).  Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed, too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.

A recent investigation by TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well as press reports, found evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved with the militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012-2013.  For more than a month during the preparation of that article, however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics on the total number of countries to which special operators — Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, and civil affairs personnel — were deployed.   “We don’t just keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview once the article had been filed.  “We have to go searching through stuff.  It takes a long time to do that.”  Hours later, just prior to publication, he provided an answer to a question I first asked in November of last year.  “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to 134 countries” during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email.

Globalized Special Ops

Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven explained his vision for special ops globalization.  In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said:

“USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where necessary or appropriate…”

While that “presence” may be small, the reach and influence of those Special Operations forces are another matter.  The 12% jump in national deployments — from 120 to 134 — during McRaven’s tenure reflects his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth.  SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments we do know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions being carried out by America’s secret military.

Last April and May, for instance, Special Ops personnel took part in training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.  In June, U.S. Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other allied Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in Aqaba, Jordan.  The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to carry out small unit tactical exercises with local forces.  In August, Green Berets conducted explosives training with Honduran sailors.  In September, according to media reports, U.S. Special Operations forces joined elite troops from the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia — as well as their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded coun­terterrorism exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java. 

In October, elite U.S. troops carried out commando raids in Libya and Somalia, kidnapping a terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in the latter before being driven off under fire.  In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian operations in the Philippines to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The next month, members of the 352nd Special Operations Group conducted a training exercise involving approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded while undertaking an evacuation mission in South Sudan.  Green Berets then rang in the new year with a January 1st combat mission alongside elite Afghan troops in Bahlozi village in Kandahar province.

Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be expansive enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans Regional Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign audiences.”  These would join an existing global network of 10 propaganda websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com, Sabahi which targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com.

SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted effort of the command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway.  “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. — from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center last year.  Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of departments and agencies where SOCOM is now entrenched at 38.

134 Chances for Blowback

Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as an antiwar candidate, President Obama has proved to be a decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief whose policies have already produced notable instances of what in CIA trade-speak has long been called blowback.  While the Obama administration oversaw a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (negotiated by his predecessor), as well as a drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (after a major military surge in that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the U.S. military presence in Africa, a reinvigoration of efforts in Latin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of yet). 

The White House has also overseen an exponential expansion of America’s drone war.  While President Bush launched 51 such strikes, President Obama has presided over 330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.  Last year, alone, the U.S. also engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  Recent revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of U.S. electronic surveillance during the Obama years.  And deep in the shadows, Special Operations forces are now annually deployed to more than double the number of nations as at the end of Bush’s tenure.

In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of U.S. military operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole regions aflame.  More than 10 years after America’s “mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much vaunted surge, the Iraq that America helped make is in flames.  A country with no al-Qaeda presence before the U.S. invasion and a government opposed to America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central government aligned with Iran and two cities flying al-Qaeda flags.

A more recent U.S. military intervention to aid the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw a coup there carried out by a U.S.-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing short of a terror diaspora in the region. 

And today South Sudan — a nation the U.S. shepherded into being, has supported economically and militarily (despite its reliance on child soldiers), and has used as a hush-hush base for Special Operations forces — is being torn apart by violence and sliding toward civil war.

The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals.  But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road.  As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has noted, the utilization of Special Operations forces during the Obama years has decreased military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,” and set the stage for a war without end.  “In short,” he wrote at TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.”

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences.  New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.  Strangely enough, those at the other primary attack site that day, the Pentagon, seem not to have learned the obvious lessons from this lethal blowback.  Even today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, more than 12 years after the U.S. invaded the former and almost 10 years after it began conducting covert attacks in the latter, the U.S. is still dealing with that Cold War-era fallout: with, for instance, CIA drones conducting missile strikes against an organization (the Haqqani network) that, in the 1980s, the Agency supplied with missiles.

Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.  But if history is any guide, they will be felt — from Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa, and, perhaps eventually, in the United States as well. 

In his blueprint for the future, SOCOM 2020, Admiral McRaven has touted the globalization of U.S. special ops as a means to “project power, promote stability, and prevent conflict.”  Last year, SOCOM may have done just the opposite in 134 places.  

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, on the BBC and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (just out in paperback).  You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. 

Copyright 2014 Nick Turse

Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com

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