I guess the Taliban never hide in homes and use the people inside as civilian shields? That is the assumption behind the latest confusing and contradictory ISAF press release about the Marjeh Offensive:

In anticipation of operations in central Helmand, a variety of organizations and individuals, including combined force commanders, have been paying close attention to civilian movements. Commanders in the area are reporting no significant increase in persons moving out of Nad-e Ali district in the last month.

Despite reports of large numbers of civilians fleeing the area, the facts on the ground do not support these assertions. Current estimates are that fewer than 200 families have left Nad-e Ali since Operation Moshtarak was announced. Combined force commanders are encouraging civilians to remain in the safety of their homes. Every effort is being made to ensure minimum disruption to the residents during the operation.

Ignoring the weird disconnect between the accounts of locals and the commanders in the area, in what universe are Afghans safe in their homes during a U.S.-Taliban gunfight? Especially when the main guy in charge of the operation seems to think the civilian exodus gives the U.S. leeway to use airstrikes willynilly?

As Noah Shachtman points out, there is a deep contradiction at the heart of the upcoming offensive: American generals are adamant that “clearing the town” will allow them greater freedom of action, while at the same time they urge people to stay in their homes for their own safety. The Marines want a long, slow deliberate buildup to minimize civilian casualties, while at the same time trying for a lightning strike to surprise and overwhelm whomever is still there. That just doesn’t make any sense.

ISAF really needs to get its many stories about this place straight.

An Open Letter to all Journalists and Pundits Covering Operation Moshtarak in Marjeh, Helmand:

When the Marine Corps spearheaded a massive new operation to retake parts of Central Helmand Province last year, there was little mention in the press about how common such offensives were. In just one area, Garmsir, it was the third year in a row a major influx of troops had to “liberate” the hapless locals from Taliban control.

Neither of the campaigns last summer, Operation Panther’s Claw, or Operation Khanjar, depending on whose military you followed at the time, was the largest nor the most geographically extensive the region had seen. In 2006, Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, and Zabul saw Operation Mountain Thrust, an 11,000 man campaign to remove the Taliban from selected areas.

So while it’s wonderful to hear the pretty words ISAF’s various officials say about the possibly in-progress operation in Marjeh (or Marja, Marjah, or Margah, depending on the transliteration scheme), it is important to remember that ISAF and U.S. forces are not strangers to this place. A brief list:

• May 12, 2007: “an air attack by Western forces killed at least seven civilians, including women and children, in Marja district of Helmand early on Friday, witnesses said on Saturday.”
• February 28, 2008: “Militants ambushed an opium poppy eradication force in southern Afghanistan, sparking clashes that left 25 Taliban fighters and a policeman dead, police said Thursday. Four other militants died when a bomb went off. Insurgents ambushed the drug eradication force Wednesday in Marja district of Helmand province, killing one police officer and wounding two, said Gen. Mohammad Hussein Andiwal, the provincial police chief.”
• May 21, 2009: “U.S. Forces in Afghanistan said Thursday 16 militants have been killed and a cache of drugs and weapons has been located as part of an ongoing operation. The operation in the city of Marjeh by Afghan National Army Commandos and coalition forces also resulted in the discovery of a cache of military weapons, including 10 rocket-propelled grenades and six mortars.”

That last bit—10 grenades and six mortars, or about 12 hours-worth of IED operations in Helmand alone, was sold by the ISAF PAO office as a “great blow against the insurgents” (the U.S. also seized and burned several hundred pounds of bagel topping).

I mention this not to attack ISAF for being active and trying to “shape” the campaign beforehand, but to inject some much needed context into our discussions of these operations. Public estimates indicate the town of Marjeh holds, at the most, 1,000 or so Taliban operatives—men who have vowed to blend into the civilian population when the troops arrive. It also contains some of—but by no means the majority—of Helmand’s vast opium industry.

Please, journalists, I beg of you: when ISAF portrays this area as a “breeding ground” for insurgents and drugs, ask questions—not just about the bizarre word choice (they’re just like cockroaches!), but about why they need 15,000 troops to secure a small town in a district with barely a hundred thousand people and some poppy farms.

To long term observers of Afghanistan, these operations happen with a depressing regularity—and all too often the coverage resembles cheerleading more than it does journalism. So I (furthermore) beg of you: please do not act surprised when we have to have another “surge” next year when more troops arrive, and please do not act outraged when all the farmers prevented from planting opium this year freak out because they’re defaulting on their narco-debts and their economies are crashing.

There is so much more to discuss about the misleading ways Helmand is portrayed—about its agriculture (which is more than just poppies), about how horribly USAID has failed ever to provide suitable crop alternatives even when it brags of doing so, and about how its people are so cynical with the Coalition they won’t really help the soldiers in any great numbers because of how often they’ve been abandoned after doing so—and so much to discuss about the history of Western operations there. It would mislead your readers to discuss Marjeh/Marja(h) in a vacuum, as if going into that area is a new thing. Marjeh used to be known for its vast cotton fields, and until just a few years ago Nad-e-Ali District wasn’t the closed off Taliban stronghold is now appears to be. Examining why things there are so bad now, and using that as the background for why we must now go occupy the area with a substantial percentage of the troops available in Afghanistan, would serve the public so much more meaningfully than the empty sloganeering that occupies the current discussion.

Love,
Josh

The Christian Science Monitor:

Since being deployed here six months ago, the United States Army company (1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment) has been pushing due west of the provincial capital, Kandahar, into what foreign forces call the “heart of darkness.” Zhari district – a patchwork of irrigation ditches, grape fields, and tightly packed mud compounds – is not only ideal guerrilla territory but also an area of enormous symbolic importance. Four miles west of Charlie Company’s patrol route lies the village mosque where one-eyed cleric-turned-Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar preached in the 1990s.

Like other infantry battalions fanned out from Kandahar, home to 800,000 people, these soldiers are carrying out Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy of blocking Taliban fighters from civilians whom they hide among and intimidate.

MSNBC:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Taliban fighters plan to disguise themselves as civilians during a looming NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan, a militant commander told NBC News.

“What, they will walk down empty streets?” the militant leader asked. “They (U.S. and coalition troops) will come in and announce that they have conquered the area. We will let them come in. They are welcome.

“They will ask, ‘Are there any Taliban in the area?’ We will say, ‘Yes, but they have left’,” the Taliban leader added.

“We will not fight them face-to-face,” he said. “We will shake their hands, as civilians. Then they will leave.”

Fox News!

Special forces have been infiltrating the town on “kinetic” missions — jargon for armed attacks.

“Special forces guys have been going in on assassination missions with the aim of decapitating the Taliban force,” a military source told the Sunday Times.

At U.S. Marine base Camp Leatherneck and the adjoining British base of Camp Bastion, troops and munitions have been airlifted in by night to avoid enemy rockets.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the element of surprise is not as important as letting Marjah’s estimated 80,000 residents know that an Afghan government is on its way to replace Taliban overlords and drug traffickers.

There really isn’t much more to say here, is there? At least we’re finally sort of paying attention to Kandahar.

Enough with the journalistic clichés, already.

The answer isn’t straightforward and raises troubling questions about who decides where American troops are positioned on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Military officials familiar with decision making in eastern Afghanistan suggest that delays in closing COP Keating were motivated by politics in Kabul and a desire to appease the Afghan government.

Although U.S. commanders had decided to close COP Keating, COP Lowell and OP Fritshe, the Barge Matal mission requested by the Afghan government changed the calculation. Military officials say with the Barge Matal operation under way, commanders on the ground simply didn’t have the resources required to evacuate Keating, Lowell and Fritshe; so the outposts remained…

Around 25,000 votes were cast in Barge Matal, approximately ten for every person in the village. A cynic might say U.S. forces were called in so Barge Matal would be secure enough for local officials to rig the vote. I have spoken to cynics within the U.S. military leadership in eastern Afghanistan. They go further than that. They believe the Afghan government used the military (which brought in the ballots by helicopter) to provide cover for vote rigging and that the Afghan request to secure Barge Matal had deadly consequences for U.S. troops.

So NBC’s chief foreign correspondent is outraged that the military might have killed off its own people to satisfy a corrupt government in Kabul. How would he characterize the previous eight years of operations in the country, then?

I ask this question seriously: one of the primary functions of the U.S. Army in Afghanistan is to support the government in Kabul. We have been knowingly complicit in government corruption for years—it was one of the few favors Seth Jones did us the favor of cataloguing in his grotesque of a book. Even assuming Engels’ portrayal of events is correct—which we cannot do, since buried at the end of his piece is his admission that he relied on bitter and cynical anonymous sources for his story—how is this any different from other soldiers getting killed on bad operations throughout the country?

The article of faith that we must have an Afghan face on Coalition operations, or that they must be Afghan-led, or at least have Afghans on them (which didn’t work out six months ago during the last Helmand Surge) has a few wrinkles in it, like the ANP’s habit of rampant corruption and brutality. But it does make for good copy when discussing the Marjeh Offensive, the offensive into Nad-e-Ali that has been publicized by General McChrystal’s staff at least since September.

The Quest for Marjeh began today, which means the newsmedia will be filled with pleasant, convenient ISAF-supplied myths about the place. Let’s track some:

The Times tells us that Marjeh is the only place the Taliban are left “in the south of the province” and it’s also where most of the Taliban’s opium crop is grown. Pretty much none of that is true—Nad-e-Ali isn’t even in the south of the province. They also repeat the meme that this time, everyone pinky-swears, they will turn the tide of the insurgency in Helmand, even though they said that last summer and the previous four summers before that (and couldn’t get their story straight anyway).

Al Jazeera, in its inimitable style, indirectly notes that General McChrystal cannot stop talking about opium when it comes to Marjeh. He also says that the offensive is all about demonstrating the Coalition brings security.

If only people were around to see it. Even as Karzai demands NATO stop attacking the insurgency through civilian areas, most of the people of Marjeh fled in terror. It’s not like they didn’t have any warning. Still, I would assume it’s difficult to wage a counterinsurgency when there are only insurgents and no civilian population to win over that could undermine them.

Andrew Exum once defined success in terms of “Afghans not intimidated.” I didn’t see i there “Afghans not driven from their homes in fear.” So how are we going to measure success this time? It doesn’t seem the Coalition cares much how its activities hurt and terrify the Afghans. Only the Taliban’s intimidation matters. That doesn’t strike me as a very sustainable way of designing operations.

I thought I’d made peace with the Small Wars Journal. Sure, about 70% of what they run is crap, but there is, on occasion, some compelling content they link to. I’d even come to grips with the free-wheeling nature of the site: despite the drawbacks, it does present a forum for soldiers and researchers to discuss wars (I’ve even taken advantage of that).

However. By allowing any old anybody to write essays, regardless of veracity, logic, or even general adherence to fact, I’m afraid I have to revisit my charge that SWJ aggressively dumbs us down. SWJ is not Wikipedia—it is not a hippie experiment, nor is it as rigorous. It presents shallow sloganeering in the the guise of authoritative analysis.

Which is a long way of introducing “Tribal Engagement: The Way Forward in Afghanistan.” When something is so fundamentally wrong, it can be difficult to know where to being. So in the interests of brevity, I shall only discuss the first paragraph in any detail.

Following the cooption of the powerful Shinwari tribe of eastern Afghanistan last week, it seems defense planners have finally realized the unsophisticated reality that tribes form the fabric of Afghan society.

Besides being the opposite of decades of universal academic consensus on the topic of tribe and identity in Afghanistan, this is circular logic: defense planners “coopted” a powerful tribe, so therefore tribes are the basis of society. That’s backwards. (Oh, and no one—not one person—who has ever had to work with Afghan communities considers their reality unsophisticated.)

The compounded impotence of the Karzai regime and the recent successes of direct tribal engagement have highlighted the potential of empowering tribal institutions, but years after the success of the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, why are we only now choosing to tap the power centers that have driven the history of Afghanistan for centuries?

Repeat after me: Afghanistan is not Anbar. Afghanistan is not Anbar. Afghanistan is not Anbar. Afghanistan is not Anbar. Afghanistan is not Anbar. Afghanistan is not Anbar. Afghanistan is not Anbar. Also, what successes? These first two assertions are unsupportable by any means.

Perhaps it is Afghanistan’s imperial legacy, which speaks to the “ungovernable” nature of tribes that have devoured armies whole, or perhaps naive political hopes for a robust central government, a situation more or less unknown in Afghan history.

Someone who actually ever read a book about Afghanistan wouldn’t say it has never had a robust central government. In fact, a robust central government has been the norm for Afghanistan—it is the chaos of recent years that is the exception.

A third possibility may lie in the popular myth that the “backward and anarchic” habits of tribes preclude their integration within the institutions of a modern nation-state, lest their inherently belligerent and barbaric nature lead to its ruin.

He must mean Steven Pressfield’s Small Wars Journal-approves hypefest about “tribesmen” and how they’re not like good old Western citizen-individuals. Again with the circular logic!

Whether stalled by daydreams of a different political reality in Afghanistan or by recalcitrant Afghan elites in Kabul, recent developments suggest that warfighters and scholars like Major Jim Gant, author of “One Tribe at a Time” and an outspoken advocate of tribal engagement, seem to be gaining traction within the defense establishment.

Right. Have we mentioned this is a bad thing?

But the question remains: what will a tribal strategy spell for the future of Afghanistan?

According to Kimberly Marten, a political scientist at Columbia? VERY BAD THINGS.

Almost point for point, this plan repeats the terrible mistake that the British colonial army made in the Pashtun tribal areas in what would become Pakistan, in the late 19th century.

The British disrupted local Pashtun power balances by injecting outside money into tribal politics. British intelligence officers created charts of which sub-tribes and leaders (or maliks) had the most influence, and paid them extra money. The favored maliks in turn used these funds for patronage, paying off their supporters. Canny Pashtun factions second-guessed the British, creating security problems that they then “solved” to look more powerful. British payments to the new “official maliks” became hereditary. This system violated the tribal code of equality among all Pashtun men, but the official maliks accepted it with enthusiasm.

You know we’ve said the same thing. So that thing about creating charts? Steffen Merten, the post’s author, works for Courage Services, a company whose income depends on charting tribal entities for the intelligence community. Merten perhaps could have done us the courtesy of revealing that he was writing ad copy for his employer before, you know, saying Afghanistan is just like Oman (and yes, he does that too).

According to ISAF (thanks Spencer!), Colonel Attaullah, the provincial deputy police chief, has been arrested on charges of facilitating IED networks and possibly a murder.

Attaullah has been at the forefront of security efforts in Kapisa—he was the government’s point man when an IED killed three U.S. soldiers in Sayad District; he was a voice of reason during the possible Tagab market attack last year; and so on.

Colonel Attaullah’s arrest isn’t exactly going over well. According to Pajhwok Afghan News, “Hundreds of people in Kapisa province staged a protest demonstration against the arrest of the provincial security chief by foreign troops.” They were blocking the road at Sayad, the same area where that IED killed several American troops last year.

Interestingly, the protests over Attaullah’s arrest do not seem related to the charges filed against him. “Only Afghan government had the right to arrest Kohistani and take action against him if he had committed any crime,” Muhammad Aman, one of the protestors, said. Governor Abu Bakar, who normally enjoys a polite but distant relationship with ISAF (several Americans accused him of being “worse than corrupt,” but we never gathered enough evidence for anything), said these sorts of arrests, “harmed their efforts for maintenance of security” in the area. Governor Bakar accused ISAF of arresting Colonel Attuallah without informing the local Afghans.

Thus far ISAF isn’t commenting on the matter. It also remains to be seen just what role Attaullah played in the insurgency in Kapisa. As we’ll see below, accusing him of being active around Mahmud-i Raqi would only make him responsible for violence in the last six months or so; there are years of entrenched insurgent cells elsewhere in the province.

***
Security and corruption in Kapisa have a troubled recent past. At the end of the summer of 2007, the U.S. and Afghan Armies were in the midst of their third attempt to clear Southern Kapisa of insurgents. Named Operation Nawroz Jhala, it was meant to be a showcase collaboration between small embedded training units, and elements of the Afghan National Army and Police. But they were thinly stretched: one embedded soldier who was active near the Tagab district center complained that for months his unit couldn’t “hold” any ground they cleared, since there were so few of them.

By the early part of 2008, government corruption was drastically affecting operations in Kapisa. A French-led ANA unit conducted a large operation to secure and hold the Alisay Valley. The original plan required the ANA to sweep the area and round up or kill any militants it could find so the police could move in and set up stations and checkpoints. According to a U.S. soldier embedded,with the Afghan units, though, barely any police showed up. Following the Serena Hotel bombing and the April parade attack, which rattled Afghanistan’s top political leadership, the ANA units were pulled out to provide security in and around Kabul.

At about this same time, something traumatic happened in the Nijrab Valley, near FOB Morales-Frazier, the primary base for U.S. and French operations in the province. An Afghan contractor was murdered. Said Mirjan was a popular figure among the communities of Nijrab and the upper Tagab—respected, stole very little if at all, and built good roads the people were happy to use. His death meant so much (and his life, to us, was so opaque), that we were surprised to find, almost a year later, that interview subjects still brought up his death as an example of how the Coalition cannot protect them from the “few dozen or so actual Taliban” fighters in the province.

Unfortunately, the western troops had bigger fish to fry. In June 2008, a few months after Mirjan’s death, Jane’s Terrorism & Security Monitor reported that two high-profile attacks in Kabul—the Serena Hotel and the Mujahidin Day Parade—were linked to the top Taliban commander of Kapisa, Qari Baryal. As a response, the Afghan government withdrew all the ANA from the area, and within months the entire Tagab area had descended into chaos. 2008 was the province’s worst year on record for ambushes, IED emplacements, and rocket attacks.

When I was there in the first part of 2009, the Tagab wasn’t terribly dangerous, but that was more a function of weather than anything else. Vehicle convoys still come under attack, however, which means the development people can’t let down their guard… even if they brag about building “sports stadiums.”

Last August, an NGO friend working in the area had reported that Mahmud-i Raqi, the provincial capital of Kapisa where Colonel Attaullah is accused of facilitating violence, had, along with a few districts north of there, come under increasing intimidation and threat from Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin:

Because they are close enough to Kabul, the militants count attacks there as attacks in Kabul—surely not good for the purposes of propaganda. “Our team sees a lot of movement of weapons and people from Pakistan with only a few intercepted by the security forces,” he says, “and there’s active insurgent surveillance along major roads where previously you’d never have seen them.”

As it stands now, after about 3 PM or so, locals seem to consider these areas—which, to repeat, were permissive and safe just a few months ago—to be out of the government’s control and firmly in the hands of the insurgents. They not just own the night now, but the evening and afternoon as well, even if night is still when they rocket district centers and shoot up police stations. The local security forces are doing what they’re doing most other places: the bare minimum possible to get past the election, with the hope that everything will go away afterward.

More recently, I’ve had my doubts about how the province is going, based off scattered reports of the French Army’s performance.

So, is Colonel Attaullah an insurgent commander finally taken off the streets? A murderer? We have no way of knowing. But I’ll keep a close eye on what’s going on, and report back anything I can dig up.

Photo: shop keepers in Mahmud-i Raqi, taken by me February 2009.

(For background on the COP Keating attack, also called the Battle of Kamdesh, see here, here, here, and here.)

Let’s summarize the Army’s report on the Battle of Kamdesh:

• Because the outpost was located in a deep bowl surrounded by high ground, the attackers were able to pin down defenders and prevent them from using mortars to repel the initial attack. Air support was at least 45 minutes away.
• Critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets which had been supporting C.O.P. Keating had been diverted to assist ongoing intense combat operations in other areas.
• Intelligence assessments had become desensitized to reports of massing enemy formations by previous reports that had proved false.
• Needed force protection improvements were not made because of the imminent closure of the outpost.
• Combat Outpost Keating no longer had a mission other than protecting itself from attack and the military had decided to close it in July 2009.
• The equipment needed to dismantle it was diverted elsewhere to support combat operations.

In other words, the base was poorly positioned, almost indefensible, the S2 shop had decided to disregard reports of a massing enemy, and command had forced the soldiers inside to adopt a seize mentality and no longer take an active role in their own defense while the materials required to dismantle the base—along with other forms of combat support—were diverted elsewhere. They were set up to epic fail, which is what happened (the actual soldiers are not in question, just their questionable leaders).

While we shouldn’t belittle the logistical side of this combat outpost—it is, literally, in the middle of nowhere, and extremely difficult to get to—we also shouldn’t minimize how badly the Army failed the men inside this base. In this video, for example, we can see the difficulty in bringing in a single power generator:

An informed commenter explained last October why Keating was built where it was:

As to why we build where we do, it’s all driven by logistics and the need for a steady flow of fuel tankers and other heavy trucks to be hauling material to the bases. Efforts to support the base at Kamdesh foundered because the road linking Kamdesh to Barikot was never improved and secured so that the base could be supported by a ground line of communication. That is the same reason that the Nuristan PRT is located at Kalagush which is many kilometers from the provincial center. Kalagush’s only virtue is that it’s accessible by a good, relatively secure road to the outside world. So it’s not surprising that the bases are down by the rivers which is where most decent roads are.

While that is understandable in a general way, it doesn’t explain how it makes tactical sense. It is nonsensical to build a base in a hostile area, then force its soldiers to hunker down without any additional support. In fact, doing so is downright negligent, and shows a bizarre disrespect for the common soldier. As the report above illustrates, such an arrangement lends itself to what I call forced vulnerability.

In a counterinsurgency, the force protection paradox says that the more you get off your base—the more you make yourself vulnerable, living among the people—the better off you are. You trade more casualties in the short term for significantly fewer casualties and, in theory, increased local support, in the long term. If you instead hunker down in your base, you might sustain fewer casualties in the short term, but you lose a strong chance of reducing them over the long run through continued on-the-ground engagement.

The valley near the COP at Kamdesh.

In Kamdesh, it seems, the Army leadership forced the soldiers at COP Keating into all of the disadvantages of forced vulnerability with none of the long-term advantages one gets from ground-pounding. It is, from the top down, a failure of leadership. However, in a very welcome change, Greg Jaffe indicates those responsible for deliberately placing the soldiers into danger for no real reason (they had planned on closing the base and forbidden off-base movement for months before the attack) might actually be held accountable.

The U.S. military has reprimanded an unusually large number of commanders for battlefield failures in Afghanistan in recent weeks, reflecting a new push by the top brass to hold commanders responsible for major incidents in which troops are killed or wounded, said senior military officials.

As many as five battlefield commanders have received letters of reprimand in the past month or have been the subject of an investigation by a general who recommended disciplinary action. A sixth commander received a less-severe formal letter of admonishment. None of the investigations or letters of reprimand has been released publicly.

The investigation into the Battle of Kamdesh does not condemn the base commander, but unlike his soldiers he is not praised, either. We can only hope the Army chain of command will face some sort of accountability for their failure to make responsible decisions.

(A common theme on Registan.net)

Most recently, the Foreign Minister of Colombia said, on his way out the door to attend the London Conference on Afghanistan, that he hoped NATO officials would look to Colombia for an example of how to properly fight a narco-insurgency.

Ignoring the rather significant problem that FARC is not an Islamist resistance movement and has a dissimilar set of motivating beliefs and history, recent news still doesn’t exactly make the prospect of exporting Colombia to Afghanistan look like a good idea: there are growing reports of armed militia groups terrorizing the countryside, for example. And there are also increasing reports of government corruption leading to more support for the resistance.

There are armed resistance groups in 24 of Colombia’s 32 provinces. They are committing “egregious abuses and terrorizing the civilian population in ways all too reminiscent of the AUC,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch, referring to the federation of paramilitary groups called the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that demobilized more than 30,000 men between 2003 and 2006.

So if Colombia cannot properly demobilize its militias, and it cannot ease government corruption to an extent that it doesn’t actively drive support for the resistance, and it cannot meaningfully affect the drug-derived income of those resistance groups except to drive up their profits… why do we keep looking here for answers?

Colombia is only an example of what not to do in Afghanistan. We should seek to avoid, not emulate, its recent history.

Dig the cliches:

Afghan border guards never search him, even though he passes through this bustling crossing four or five times a week. “What searching?” said Mr. Abdulmalek, a 34-year-old clothing store owner who like many Afghans has only one name. “There is no searching.”

Other Afghans say they can easily enter Pakistan by bribing guards on either side of the border with the equivalent of less than a dollar, or by paying taxi drivers a similarly token amount to drive them across. The guards do not ask those in the taxi for identification or search the trunk.

Funny thing: if you switch some nouns—replace “Afghans” with “Mexicans,” and “Pakistan” with “United States,” for example—you’d also have a reasonable approximation of North America as well.

Maybe next week the New York Times will get back on its feet.