Starting Points

Sep 21, 2009

Is It a Figment of Washington's Imagination?

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans--Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn't bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn't bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that's another story. It's Them--the Afghans--I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far--of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.

In the heat of this summer, I went out to the training fields near Kabul where Afghan army recruits are put through their paces, and it was quickly evident just what's getting lost in translation. Our trainers, soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, were masterful. Professional and highly skilled, they were dedicated to carrying out their mission-- and doing the job well. They were also big, strong, camouflaged, combat-booted, supersized American men, their bodies swollen by flak jackets and lashed with knives, handguns, and God only knows what else. Any American could be proud of their commitment to tough duty.

The Afghans were puny by comparison: Hundreds of little Davids to the overstuffed American Goliaths training them. Keep in mind: Afghan recruits come from a world of desperate poverty. They are almost uniformly malnourished and underweight. Many are no bigger than I am (5'4" and thin)--and some probably not much stronger. Like me, many sag under the weight of a standard-issue flak jacket.

Their American trainers spoke of "upper body strength deficiency" and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with fifty pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day-- as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect--but the US military is determined to train them for another style of war.

Still, the new recruits turn out for training in the blistering heat in this stony desert landscape wearing, beneath their heavy uniforms, the smart red, green and black warm-up outfits intended to encourage them to engage in off-duty exercise. American trainers recognize that recruits regularly wear all their gear at once for fear somebody will steal anything left behind in the barracks, but they take this overdressing as a sign of how much Afghans love the military. My own reading, based on my observations of Afghan life during the years I've spent in that country, is this: it's a sign of how little they trust one another, or the Americans who gave them the snazzy suits. I think it also indicates the obvious: that these impoverished men in a country without work have joined the Afghan National Army for what they can get out of it (and keep or sell)--and that doesn't include democracy or glory.

In the current policy debate about the Afghan War in Washington, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin wants the Afghans to defend their country. Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the committee, agrees but says they need even more help from even more Americans. The common ground--the sacred territory President Obama gropes for--is that, whatever else happens, the United States must speed up the training of "the Afghan security forces."

American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines. That is not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen--and ever faster.

'Basic Warrior Training'

So who are these security forces? They include the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). International forces and private contractors have been training Afghan recruits for both of them since 2001. In fact, the determination of Western military planners to create a national army and police force has been so great that some seem to have suppressed for years the reports of Canadian soldiers who witnessed members of the Afghan security forces engaging in a fairly common pastime, sodomizing young boys.

Current training and mentoring is provided by the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, Romania, Poland, Mongolia, New Zealand and Australia, as well as by the private for-profit contractors MPRI, KBR (formerly a division of Halliburton), Pulau, Paravant and RONCO.

Almost eight years and counting since the "mentoring" process began, officers at the Kabul Military Training Center report that the army now numbers between 88,000 and 92,000 soldiers, depending on whom you talk to; and the basic training course financed and led by Americans, called "Basic Warrior Training," is turning out 28,800 new soldiers every year, according to a Kabul Military Training Center "fact sheet." The current projected "end strength" for the ANA, to be reached in December 2011, is 134,000 men; but Afghan officers told me they're planning for a force of 200,000, while the Western press often cites 240,000 as the final figure.

The number 400,000 is often mentioned as the supposed end-strength quota for the combined security forces--an army of 240,000 soldiers and a police force with 160,000 men. Yet Afghan National Police officials also speak of a far more inflated figure, 250,000, and they claim that 149,000 men have already been trained. Police training has always proven problematic, however, in part because, from the start, the European allies fundamentally disagreed with the Bush administration about what the role of the Afghan police should be. Germany initiated the training of what it saw as an unarmed force that would direct traffic, deter crime and keep civic order for the benefit of the civilian population. The US took over in 2003, handed the task off to a private for-profit military contractor, DynCorp, and proceeded to produce a heavily armed, undisciplined and thoroughly venal paramilitary force, despised by Kabulis and feared by Afghan civilians in the countryside.

Contradicting that widespread public view, an Afghan commanding officer of the ANP assured me that today the police are trained as police, not as a paramilitary auxiliary of the ANA. "But policing is different in Afghanistan," he said, because the police operate in active war zones.

Washington sends mixed messages on this subject. It farms out responsibility for the ANP to a private contractor that hires as mentors retired American law enforcement officers--a Kentucky state trooper, a Texas county lawman, a North Carolina cop and so on. Yet Washington policymakers continue to couple the police with the army as "the Afghan security forces"--the most basic police rank is "soldier"--in a merger that must influence what DynCorp puts in its training syllabus. At the Afghan National Police training camp outside Kabul, I watched a squad of trainees learn (reluctantly) how to respond to a full-scale ambush. Though they were armed only with red rubber Kalashnikovs, the exercise looked to me much like the military maneuvers I'd witnessed at the army training camp.

Like army training, police training, too, was accelerated months ago to insure "security" during the run-up to the presidential election. With that goal in mind, DynCorp mentors shrunk the basic police training course from eight weeks to three, after which the police were dispatched to villages all across the country, including areas controlled by the Taliban. After the election, the surviving short-course police "soldiers" were to be brought back to Kabul for the rest of the basic training program. There's no word yet on how many returned.

You have to wonder about the wisdom of rushing out this half-baked product. How would you feel if the police in your community were turned loose, heavily armed, after three weeks of training? And how would you feel if you were given a three-week training course with a rubber gun and then dispatched, with a real one, to defend your country?

Training security forces is not cheap. So far, the estimated cost of training and mentoring the police since 2001 is at least $10 billion. Any reliable figure on the cost of training and mentoring the Afghan army since 2001 is as invisible as the army itself. But the US currently spends some $4 billion a month on military operations in Afghanistan.

The Invisible Men

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 US Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn't the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to "operate independently," but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of "Basic Warrior Training" 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for ten weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahideen--the Islamist fundamentalists the US once paid to fight the Soviets--and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

American trainers have taken careful note of the fact that, when ANA soldiers were given leave after basic training to return home with their pay, they generally didn't come back. To foil paycheck scams and decrease soaring rates of desertion, they recently devised a money-transfer system that allows the soldiers to send pay home without ever leaving their base. That sounds like a good idea, but like many expensive American solutions to Afghan problems, it misses the point. It's not just the money the soldier wants to transfer home, it's himself as well.

Earlier this year, the US training program became slightly more compelling with the introduction of a US-made weapon, the M-16 rifle, which was phased in over four months as a replacement for the venerable Kalashnikov. Even US trainers admit that, in Afghanistan, the Kalashnikov is actually the superior weapon. Light and accurate, it requires no cleaning even in the dust of the high desert, and every man and boy already knows it well. The strange and sensitive M-16, on the other hand, may be more accurate at slightly greater distances, but only if a soldier can keep it clean, while managing to adjust and readjust its notoriously sensitive sights. The struggling soldiers of the ANA may not ace that test, but now that the US military has generously passed on its old M-16s to Afghans, it can buy new ones at taxpayer expense, a prospect certain to gladden the heart of any arms manufacturer. (Incidentally, thanks must go to the Illinois National Guard for risking their lives to make possible such handsome corporate profits.)

As for the police, US-funded training offers a similar revolving door. In Afghanistan, however, it is far more dangerous to be a policeman than a soldier. While soldiers on patrol can slip away, policemen stuck at their posts are killed almost every day. Assigned in small numbers to staff small-town police stations or highway checkpoints, they are sitting ducks for Taliban fighters. As representatives of the now thoroughly discredited government of President Hamid Karzai, the hapless police make handy symbolic targets. British commanders in Helmand province estimated that 60 percent of Afghan police are on drugs--and little wonder why.

In the Pashtun provinces of southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strong, recruiting men for the Afghan National Police is a "problem," as an ANP commander told me. Consequently, non-Pashtun police trainees of Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek or other ethnic backgrounds are dispatched to maintain order in Pashtun territory. They might as well paint targets on their foreheads. The police who accompanied the US Marines into Helmand Province reportedly refused to leave their heavily armed mentors to take up suicidal posts in provincial villages. Some police and army soldiers, when asked by reporters, claimed to be "visiting" Helmand province only for " vacation."

Training Day

In many districts, the police recently supplemented their low pay and demonstrated allegiance to local warlords by stuffing ballot boxes for President Karzai in the presidential election. Consider that but one more indication--like the defection of those great Islamist fundamentalist mujahideen allies the US sponsored in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s who are now fighting with the Taliban--that no amount of American training, mentoring or cash will determine who or what Afghans will fight for, if indeed they fight at all.

Afghans are world-famous fighters, in part because they have a knack for gravitating to the winning side, and they're ready to change sides with alacrity until they get it right. Recognizing that Afghans back a winner, US military strategists are now banking on a counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to "clear, hold and build"--that is, to stick around long enough to win the Afghans over. But it's way too late for that to work. These days, US troops sticking around look ever more like a foreign occupying army and, to the Taliban, like targets.

Recently Karen DeYoung noted in the Washington Post that the Taliban now regularly use very sophisticated military techniques--"as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the US Army's Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments." Of course, some of them have attended training sessions that teach them to fight in "austere environments," probably time and time again. If you were a Talib, wouldn't you scout the training being offered to Afghans on the other side? And wouldn't you do it more than once if you could get well paid every time?

Such training is bound to come in handy--as it may have for the Talib policeman who, just last week, bumped off eight other comrades at his police post in Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan and turned it over to the Taliban. On the other hand, such training can be deadly to American trainers. Take the case of the American trainer who was shot and wounded that same week by one of his trainees. Reportedly, a dispute arose because the trainer was drinking water "in front of locals," while the trainees were fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramazan.

There is, by the way, plenty of evidence that Taliban fighters get along just fine, fighting fiercely and well without the training lavished on the ANA and the ANP. Why is it that Afghan Taliban fighters seem so bold and effective, while the Afghan National Police are so dismally corrupt and the Afghan National Army is a washout?

When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the United States: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on. That's how Afghan resistance, avoidance and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe--that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. "Our" Afghans try to get by.

Yet one amazing thing happens to ANA trainees who stick it out for the whole ten weeks of basic training. Their slight bodies begin to fill out a little. They gain more energy and better spirits--all because, for the first time in their lives, they have enough nutritious food to eat.

Better nutrition notwithstanding--Senator Levin, Senator McCain--"our" Afghans are never going to fight for an American cause, with or without American troops, the way we imagine they should. They're never going to fight with the energy of the Taliban for a national government that we installed against Afghan wishes, then more recently set up to steal another election, and now seem about to ratify in office, despite incontrovertible evidence of flagrant fraud. Why should they? Even if the US could win their minds, their hearts are not in it.

One small warning: Don't take the insecurity of the Afghan security forces as an argument for sending yet more American troops to Afghanistan. Aggressive Americans (now numbering 68,000) are likely to be even less successful than reluctant Afghan forces. Afghans want peace, but the kharaji (foreign) troops (100,000, if you include US allies in NATO) bring death and destruction wherever they go. Think instead about what you might have won--and could still win--had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or healthcare. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?

About Ann Jones

Ann Jones, author of Kabul in Winter, does humanitarian work in postconflict zones with NGOs and the United Nations

Welcome to the National Asylum - Nation

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September 16, 2009

Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours? One expects modulated nuttiness from the better element, particularly those

inhabiting the corporate and legislative spheres. But these days insanity is pervasive, spreading through all classes and walks of life. For years we have been treated to pinstriped fugitives from the asylum like Pete Peterson urging the nation into ruin by slashing the deficit; but on September 12 in Washington by tens of thousands were the sans-culottes screaming for fiscal propriety as though channeling the ruinous orthodoxies of Montagu Norman or Andrew Mellon. Many among these Glenn Beck legions were surely one stroke or tumor away from financial ruin yet were still ready to tear any advocates of publicly funded health insurance into tiny pieces as though they were hawking The Communist Manifesto at a revival meeting. Inspiring, was it not, to see such self-abnegation on the part of so many people prepared to die in the name of free enterprise!

Many of the Glenn Beckers are "birthers" too, making delusional forays into the supposedly dubious documentation of Barack Obama's delivery in a hospital in Hawaii. Sometimes I think the White House should knock these surmises on the head by releasing all relevant documents and testimonies. But of course this would merely throw napalm on the flames. Once, when writing some caustic remarks about the occupants of another ward in the national asylum, the 9/11 Truthers, I suggested that the "missing people" on the plane that hit the Pentagon had been kidnapped at an earlier stage in the operation and flown to an air base in Louisiana--the very same air base where George Bush briefly touched down in his erratic flight from Florida on September 11, 2001. George Bush then personally executed the captives.

It was a satirical sally. But I swiftly received serious letters from people vexed by the lack of detail. Where had Bush shot them? With what type of weapon? A summary burst from a machine gun? Or a .22 bullet behind the ear?

For all too many on the left, the so-called 9/11 conspiracy remains the magic key. If it can be turned, then history at its present impasse will be unlocked and we can move on. For those on the racist right, aghast at the reality of a black man (actually half-white, half-black) in the White House, the magic key to reversing this unpleasing development is Obama's allegedly fake Hawaiian birth certificate. Their suppositions and claims shift, but the essence is always the same: he's alien. He has no right to be president. And as with the Truthers, the provision of evidence rebutting their claims is merely fuel piled on the bonfire of their insanity.

Now move from the nuttiness of his detractors to the madness of Great Ones, in this case President Obama. His rhetoric is decorous, but the delusions are just as ripe and far more lethal than those of the Glenn Beck demonstrators under his window. How is one supposed to rate the rationality of a person who wins the White House in large measure because of popular outrage at the disastrous war in Iraq and who then instantly ratchets up another war in Afghanistan--an enterprise for whose utter futility history both ancient and modern offers copious testimonies?

From time to time one meets a madman in a shopping mall or at a bus stop who approaches one with discreet confidences about his mother, the queen of England, or about the messages beamed through the fillings in his teeth that warn him of CIA surveillance from the plane flying 30,000 feet above his head. It's an effort of will to remind oneself that this is a person in disheveled mental condition and that it would be unwise to be drawn into protracted discussion of royal lineage tracked through the Almanach de Gotha, or to peer into jaws suddenly opened for one's inspection. Similarly, with Obama, he advances ridiculous propositions with nutty aplomb, as when he claimed in his speech to Congress on September 9 that his healthcare plan was deficit-neutral. Why does he expose himself thus to well-merited derision? Is it that Obama simply cannot bear to displease anyone--unless they are in faraway places like Afghanistan?

Indeed, the president reached the apex of lunatic effrontery when he caused the assembled legislators to leap to their feet in stormy applause by pledging that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits." This is the same president, these are the same legislators, who are committing billions in red ink for the war in Afghanistan and the continued US presence in Iraq.

The 1970s are back, or so claims People magazine. I can see why. It's nostalgia for the last sane decade in American political life, when people assayed the state of the nation amid the embers of the '60s and of the Vietnam War and elected politicians who passed some admirable laws. It seemed America might totter into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Ronald Reagan who truly credentialed nutdom, setting the national thermostat at max degrees F, for Fantasy. The Republican Party is now entirely populated by mad people. Walk through the Congress and watch them babble and throw excrement at the walls. Then survey the "good" inmates mustered in the Democratic aisles, led by a president who at least once in the last campaign invoked Reagan as a positive force. They're less rambunctious but just as lethal, perhaps more so, in their depredations.

People start to go collectively crazy when they know that all the exits from our present state into the world of constructive reason are locked. Just think--a president elected on a huge wave of popular hope, unable to twist a single arm in his own party; unlikely even to pass financial reform amid the greatest wave of public hatred of Wall Street since the '30s; trying to pass off as healthcare "reform" a gift to the insurance industry of 30 million new customers, to be required by law to pony up insurance premiums and then be cheated. Doesn't that make you crazy too?

About Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn has been The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist since 1984. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the best-selling collection of essays Corruptions of Empire (1987), and a contributor to many publications, from The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal to alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. With Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch, which have a substantial world audience.

The World and Pittsburgh - Nation

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September 16, 2009

Perhaps it's time to update the slogan that evolved from the 1999 Seattle protests against corporate globalization: "Another World Is Possible." One year into a financial crisis that has seen governments--especially that of the United States--emerge as guarantors against risk for investors while remaining lax regulators of speculation and CEO greed, it has become all too evident that "Another World Is Necessary."

That slogan would sum up the urgency of the calls for change that will be sounded during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, on September 24-25, of leaders of nineteen wealthy nations and the European Union. Presidents and prime ministers will arrive with a sense of that urgency; they know that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is right when he says the world economy is "far from being out of the woods." But activists are determined to use Pittsburgh's streets, campuses, churches and union halls to demand a paradigm-shifting response to the crisis, one that recognizes that the neoliberal policies that got us into this mess are not going to get us out of it.

A muscular letter to President Obama--signed by more than fifty groups, including the Change to Win labor federation, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, USAction and religious groups--argues that "remedying the current crisis, avoiding future crises and achieving economic justice and stability will require a new approach to domestic and global economic governance." For instance, the letter notes, G-20 moves to establish new financial-sector regulation "must also include revisions to the WTO's 1999 Financial Service Agreement, which exports worldwide the extreme financial service deregulation that is a cause of this crisis." New, more robust approaches are also needed to stimulate economies, promote sustainable development, address poverty and tackle global warming.

The leaders of the world's largest economies have failed to address the pathologies created by deregulation that rewards banksters and burdens consumers; free trade that favors multinational corporations over workers and communities; and gradualist responses to extreme poverty and climate change. Frustration with these failures was summed up by United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard when he declared that "right now [the G-20] stands for chaos, and it stands for economic destruction." Steelworkers, headquartered in Pittsburgh, will host pre-summit forums, rallies and concerts highlighting anger at failed economic policies and (with the Alliance for Climate Protection, activist State Senator Jim Ferlo and possibly Al Gore) the need for government investment in green jobs.

Obama's pre-summit rhetoric was appealing, especially his idea that the Pittsburgh gathering can launch a "global race to the top" to replace the race-to-the-bottom policies that have so widened the gap between rich and poor. But Stiglitz observes that "the administration seems very reluctant to do what is necessary" to regulate "too big to fail" banks and corporations. Indeed, within the G-20, Germany and France have far more aggressively pushed proposals to regulate CEO compensation and require greater corporate responsibility. Differences between European and American business models certainly underpin some of the transatlantic wrangling. Still, it's remarkable that it is French President Nicolas Sarkozy--no lefty--who promises a walkout in Pittsburgh if there is no agreement to curb bankers' bonuses. He says he'll fight to get world leaders to explore alternatives to the "cult of the market," including creating indexes of well-being and of the "quality of public service."

Demands for a leap from the rhetoric of change to the reality are generating street heat, which is being turned up by global justice groups, the United Electrical Workers Union and community organizations ranging from the Thomas Merton Center to 3 Rivers Climate Convergence. Unfortunately, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and his aides, in their determination to promote their city as a global economic center, have imposed restrictions on dissent so wide-ranging that peace activist Cecilia Wheeler had to remind an early September city council meeting, "We are not terrorists.... We're the good apples here. We want [global leaders] to see overall that this is a small town with values, that welcomes everyone, that discriminates against no one."

Roughly 4,000 police and new rules to detain protesters have not made dissenters feel welcome. So many requests for permits to march, rally and set up camps in city parks have been stalled or denied that on September 11 the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed suit alleging that city, state and federal authorities had conspired to deny the demonstrators' free-speech rights by keeping them out of earshot of the G-20 summiteers. "All we are asking for is a safe place near the convention center so that the leaders inside can hear the people's voices," says Pete Shell, an antiwar organizer with the Merton Center.

Actually, activists are asking for a lot more. And rightly so. Changes in global governance that shake the grip of bankers and CEOs, even changes in the way leaders think about global governance, don't begin inside the cloistered gatherings of the G-20 or the WTO. They take shape outside, in the streets, where the victims of the race to the bottom have a right and a responsibility to declare that Another World Is Necessary.

About John Nichols

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

The Crusade Against Sex Trafficking - Nation

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This article is the first part of a two-part series. The next installment will explore alternative approaches to addressing the problem of trafficking for the purposes of forced prostitution. --The Editors

Gary Haugen is cradling the padlocks in his thick hands. A former high school football player--bristly crew cut, broad shoulders squeezed into a dress shirt--Haugen has more the mien of a military man than a lawyer, although his image is in keeping with the muscular work of the organization he founded and heads. The president of the International Justice Mission, an evangelical Christian organization devoted to combating human rights abuses in the developing world, Haugen is musing over the mementos of IJM's work in India and Cambodia. The padlocks look ordinary enough: heavy brass, a squat square one, a round one with a key. But they had once hung on the doors of brothels, until local law enforcement busted the establishments in raids initiated by IJM.

"Have you been to Tuol Sleng?" Haugen asks, looking down at the padlocks. He is speaking of the central Khmer Rouge detention center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, now a museum filled with photographs of the thousands who perished at the prison. "There it is--you see a factory where people got up every day and then went to work, and their job was to torture people as painfully and horribly as possible to extract a confession from them and then kill them.

"A lock on a brothel, for me, represents this element of violence and force," says Haugen. "The lock is on the outside of the door, not inside."

For Haugen, the locks are reminders of his calling: to break the chain of human rights abuses, one person at a time. He argues that the main problem facing the disenfranchised is not one of hunger, homelessness, lack of education or disease. Rather, the root cause of much of the suffering in the developing world is the failure of the criminal justice system to protect the poor from violence--the brutality that robs them of food, home, liberty and dignity.

In an effort to counter those failures, IJM marshals more than 300 Christian lawyers, law enforcement specialists and social workers who collaborate with local counterparts and police to provide services to victims of slave labor, sexual abuse, police brutality, illegal detention and land seizure. In the case of its best-known and most controversial work--brothel raids--IJM provides evidence of trafficking to police in countries including India, Cambodia, the Philippines and, in the past, Thailand; and it collaborates on "interventions" to remove victims from the establishments and arrest and prosecute their abusers. Although the raids have undoubtedly saved a number of trafficking victims from exploitation, human rights advocates have criticized the interventions for disrupting HIV-outreach efforts, heightening the potential for police brutality and subjecting adult sex workers and trafficking victims to possible deportation or long involuntary stays in shelters.

In light of the organization's tactics, Haugen's mention of Tuol Sleng is an uneasy one that points out the potential perils of IJM's approach--an example of state power used to prey on, rather than protect, its populace. Haugen acknowledges that law enforcement agents have often been the perpetrators of abuse, and he has testified against this police corruption in Congress. Nonetheless, he has based his decision to work with local police on the premise that power can be harnessed to bring about justice--especially when tethered to divine aims. As Haugen writes in his book Good News About Injustice, "God is the ultimate power and authority in the universe, so justice occurs when power and authority is exercised in conformity with His standards."

This philosophy found deep resonance with the Bush administration. Eager to complement his war on terror with a parallel "soft-power strategy," according to his speechwriter Michael Gerson, President Bush signed on to the "war on trafficking" with a vengeance. Although countertrafficking funds found their way to groups that worked more broadly on immigrants' rights and services, much of the money went to organizations like IJM, whose interventionist attitude was congruent with Bush's foreign-policy stance, and to groups that believed that prostitution was inherently exploitative and deserving of abolishment.

Part of the appeal of the law-and-order solutions proposed by groups like IJM is that they are highly visible and forceful responses to the horrifying abuses faced by trafficking victims and sex workers--injury, extortion, rape, even murder. (New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tried a similarly dramatic tack when he went so far as to purchase the freedom of two trafficked girls, with decidedly mixed results.) The narrative that frames such vigorous interventions as the noblest response to the scourge of sex trafficking is an understandable one, but it skirts the economic and social problems that make recovery so difficult for the "rescued." It also rips their lives out of context, so that an approach that might be suitable, if still controversial, in a country with reliable law enforcement and criminal justice systems is applied in a country where those systems are more likely to be part of the problem than the solution. The Obama administration seems to be aware of these issues, but rolling back the momentum on raid work in order to scrutinize its efficacy is a tough challenge--especially when there is always another young victim to rescue.

In 1997 Haugen launched IJM to answer the biblical mandate to seek justice. As he writes, "Over time, having seen the suffering of the innocent.... More and more I find myself asking not, Where is God? But, Where are God's people?" Dedicated to a "casework" model, IJM staff work to remove victims from exploitation. IJM then prosecutes the abusers under local law and assists victims with "restoration" by winning them financial compensation or providing "aftercare" services through partner organizations.

IJM's casework approach focuses on individual rescue. As Haugen has written, "The good shepherd would leave the ninety-nine to go find the one lost sheep because the one mattered." Sharon Cohn Wu, IJM's senior vice president of justice operations, concurs. "While there are millions of girls and women victimized every day, our work will always be about the one," she said in a public address. "The one girl deceived. The one girl kidnapped. The one girl raped. The one girl infected with AIDS. The one girl needing a rescuer. To succumb to the enormity of the problem is to fail the one. And more is required of us."

Thousands of Christians have answered Cohn Wu's call, joining IJM campus chapters, attending Haugen's talks at the Saddleback and Willow Creek leadership conferences, and swelling the organization's budget to $22 million in 2008. IJM has become a major force in humanitarian work and an even larger one in burgeoning evangelical activism.

IJM's rise was fueled by the millions in federal grants it received under the Bush administration, which also expanded the federal law on trafficking. Before the Bush era, the law created a State Department office to rank--and potentially sanction--countries on the basis of their countertrafficking efforts in its annual "Trafficking in Persons" report. When the law was reauthorized under Bush, however, it included a clause to suspend funding to organizations that "promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution." Those applying for funds for HIV education or outreach were subject to the same clause.

President Bush then released anti-trafficking funds to feminist anti-prostitution groups and to faith-based organizations like IJM. The funding decision outraged HIV-education NGOs and sex workers' unions, a number of which were cut out of HIV-outreach and countertrafficking funding or refused it in protest. Human rights advocates, meanwhile, raised concerns that IJM's criminal justice approach would cause "collateral damage"--putting women and girls on a collision course with police brutality, detention and deportation, and disrupting HIV services while failing to address the economic inequities that would replace one rescued girl with another victim.

Those concerns fell on deaf ears. IJM began receiving federal funding in 2002, and by the end of 2010 the organization will have received more than $4 million from the government, including a $500,000 grant to open an office--established just last January--to work against trafficking for forced prostitution in Samar, the Philippines.

IJM's ardent sense of mission--its moral clarity about justice work, dedication to the individual and passionate desire to find relief for victims--brought a revitalized engagement to believers and those concerned about trafficking. But those qualities often led to a quagmire in IJM's early years. Although the organization has refined its techniques, its operations have ambiguous, and sometimes troubling, results on the ground.

As for IJM's symbolic quest to provide individual rescue, finding "the one" for whom the group toiled and whom IJM had "saved" would prove nearly impossible. She is a cipher, a repository of innocence and redemptive hope that seemed to call more loudly to the IJM staff than the voices of trafficking victims and sex workers who decried the raids and their experiences of police brutality. "The one" was a symbol that IJM staff would always be driven to break free, even if she would wind up running away from her rescuers in the end. The shepherd claimed to have benevolent aims but did not always know the way to safety.

Ping Pong is frowning, her formidable charm dampened by memory. The sex worker is mulling over IJM's work in Thailand. As a health and legal-services advocate with the sex-worker organization Empower, she's seen the aftereffects firsthand.

"Oh, yes, there were problems," she says at last. "The deportation--and back to Burma! They were desperate to leave in the first place. The long detention. The girls running away. And the way they treated other NGOs, just expecting them to clean up the mess afterward. Even the other anti-trafficking groups couldn't get along with them."

We are meeting in Empower's Chiang Mai offices, perched over the Can-Do Bar, an "experitainment" venue cooperatively owned by sex workers and managed in compliance with Thai labor laws. The bar is a cavernous space--front patio, full bar, pool table, fairy lights and two poles for dancing.

IJM set up its Chiang Mai office in 2000, intent on tackling the northern city's trafficking and child-prostitution problems. Located near the Burmese border, Chiang Mai serves as the gateway to uncertain refuge for Burmese and ethnic Shan migrants seeking escape from a despotic regime, or fleeing the rape and plunder of a Burmese military determined to eradicate a Shan insurgency through the cruelest means possible. Thailand has thrived on the underground labor of these migrants, who often work the construction sites, wash the laundry and sell sex--largely without benefit of documentation or legal protections.

The group's early raids soon resulted in IJM being branded vigilante "cowboys" and "cops for Christ" by other humanitarian workers. The organization even busted the same brothel twice, in 2000 and 2003, each time calling local NGOs in a panic afterward to ask for translation help--no one had realized the frightened women and girls were Burmese and Shan.

In accordance with Thai laws, older, voluntary prostitutes caught in IJM raids were deported to the border, while younger ones, automatically defined as trafficking victims on the basis of their age, were moved to government rehabilitation centers, where they were often required to stay for months or years, waiting to testify in court and be repatriated directly to their families. As Thai law did not grant trafficking victims temporary legal documents at the time of IJM operations in country, the girls were not allowed to leave the shelter grounds. (The new law, passed last year, allows for the possibility of temporary residence for foreign trafficking victims, but it remains to be seen if this provision will be implemented.)

Rather than face a potentially long period of detention, some rescuees took matters into their own hands, knotting sheets together to escape shelters--one was hospitalized with back injuries when she fell during an escape attempt.

Ping Pong sighs, recalling the reaction of the women and girls rescued in an IJM raid in 2003. "They were so startled, and said, 'We don't need rescue. How can this be a rescue when we feel like we've been arrested?' All their possessions were taken away, they were photographed by the media and some of them couldn't leave for quite a long time. The women who get rounded up usually wind up back here and doing sex work again--but this time with more debt from having to make the journey or be retrafficked again.... We wrote a report critiquing the raid, but then IJM accused us of supporting brothel owners--so we never talked to IJM again." In a 2003 position paper, IJM had argued that Empower turned a "blind eye" to child prostitution by failing to report brothel owners they knew were practicing it "in order to further their work among adult commercial sex workers."

According to Empower staff member Liz Hilton, in the late '90s, before IJM began its work in Thailand and when police raids were at a high, brothel owners would occasionally drop off women and girls at the Empower office after learning of an impending raid. Empower staff would then assist the women in deciding what their next steps would be. Should the brothel remain open, they could return there to work. Others sought work elsewhere, returned home or entered shelter programs voluntarily. Hilton says, "After they were deposited on our doorstep, well, we eat first--it's Thailand!--and we see what everyone needs and wants." Hilton recalled two cases where girls under 18 were dropped off by brothel owners, and both were referred to shelters and services. According to Hilton, Empower made it clear to the brothel owners that "there was no guarantee that they'd be willing to go back" and that Empower had as its dictate "whatever the women want." Even so, "to be honest, sometimes the best interests of the women and what they want fits more closely with brothel owners than with the rescue organizations or police," says Hilton, meaning that sometimes the women wanted to continue working rather than face deportation or receive alternate vocational training. Still, the evacuation prompted by the threat of the raid did mean that some who wanted to leave got the chance to do so.

A number of trafficking victims from the 2003 raid initially refused to provide their real names and addresses in order to protect themselves and their families, according to Ping Pong. They were willing to stay in the shelter rather than face a return to impoverished villages and the shattering shame at the discovery of the nature of their work or the possibility of detention in Burma for their illegal exit from the country. Burmese officials are not above extorting the women's families, and Ping Pong recounted anecdotes of entire households being forced to move because village gossip broke out after Burmese officials came to locate the women's relatives in the repatriation process. The victims eventually relented and were repatriated--my efforts to find and speak directly with women and children recovered in IJM-initiated raids in Thailand were unsuccessful.

"IJM talks about saving an individual," says Joe Amon, director of the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch. Amon met with the group in 2007 to discuss its tactics. "And what's incredible is that it's not clear if that individual has been saved. IJM is not clear on how aftercare leads to protection for these kids. I asked them about deportation of these girls. And they had no tracking for that, for any minors that had been repatriated. That to me is incredibly troubling."

Ben Svasti is the executive director of Trafcord, a Thai organization that provides liaison among social workers, police and lawyers on trafficking cases. Trafcord used to work closely with IJM--the group's undercover investigators would hand over evidence of trafficking to Trafcord, which would launch an inquiry and decide the best course of action.

"Half of those IJM cases didn't hold water," says Svasti. Part of the problem was that IJM had difficulty differentiating between voluntary sex workers and trafficked women and girls, a difficult task even for Trafcord. "IJM would go in and ask, Do you like working here?" says Svasti. "The girl says no, and then they'd assume she wanted to be rescued. But you very rarely get a woman who says, I like this kind of work."

Svasti links this problem with US policies that conflate trafficking and prostitution. "I remember talking to US officials who were confused that there could be voluntary prostitution," he says. "They thought, 'Why would we need to differentiate? It's all forced and largely the same as trafficking. If we come across it, we should shut it down.' If you think that sex work is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, then I guess you can say you are rescuing people to take them out of it."

Christa Crawford served as IJM's country director in Thailand in 2001 and '02, after which she worked for the United Nations and wrote a book on using international law to fight trafficking. As she explains it, American perceptions of trafficking led to policies centered on eradicating large-scale brothel prostitution, rescuing "an innocent pre-pubescent girl victim who has been kidnapped or tricked" and targeting traffickers who are part of international criminal rings. "That does exist. But the on-the-ground reality often consists of the big murky middle," says Crawford, referring to the family members, neighbors or formerly trafficked women who often pull others into prostitution.

"There were degrees of volition involved," Crawford continues. "Under international law the minors can't consent to prostitution, but it was important to understand what they were thinking. As for the women, they were making a rational decision under horrible conditions--to be raped for free in Burma or paid to do commercial sex work is one situation. For me, they are making a rational decision, but that's a decision no one should have to make. We should be talking about the labor laws, migration laws and the situation in Burma--just as much as working with the courts and police."

A high-ranking police officer at the provincial level agrees with Crawford's assessments. "The 'victims' we found intended to come and work in prostitution. That's the majority of the people we found, I would say 80 or 90 percent, back then when we were working with IJM, and now, too," he says, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I feel bad for the women--and they get so angry about what we're doing."

IJM harnessed US influence to pressure local NGOs and police to fall in line. In one IJM-initiated case, Trafcord's "slowness" in taking action on raiding a brothel earned it a rebuke from the State Department, according to Svasti, which raised diplomatic hackles in Thailand and in effect severed the relationship between IJM and Thai countertrafficking efforts.

Stymied by Thailand's inflexible laws on detention and deportation and shut out by Thai organizations, IJM gradually tapered off its countertrafficking work there; now it focuses on helping ethnic minorities file for legal citizenship. It shifted its countertrafficking efforts to the next battlefront--a neighboring country with an appetite for child prostitution, Cambodia.

Head north out of Phnom Penh on National Road 1 for eleven kilometers and turn left, and you'll find what was once Cambodia's most notorious haven for child prostitution. These days, visitors who come to Svay Pak during the day will find an open-air billiards area, a few drugstores and one or two gold shops that form part of an informal banking system for the poor and undocumented, who display the gold as a form of aspirational fashion or tuck it away for safekeeping. A few young men and women are cutting and stacking rags, and farther down, past a dusty marketplace full of the smell of overripe fruit and empty of customers, is a recycling outpost where a woman with a scarf wound around her head is at work crushing water bottles. Svay Pak is a town of scraps and remnants--including a diminished child-sex trade that lingers on, despite the efforts of IJM and the Cambodian police.

It's a melancholy ending to what was supposed to be a happily-ever-after story--after all, Svay Pak helped IJM make its name. The predominantly Vietnamese village was the staging ground for IJM's most celebrated raid, in March 2003, which became the subject of a Dateline NBC special and Haugen's book Terrify No More.

"They would bring the youngest of girls and sit them on your laps in the streets," said Patrick Stayton, who became IJM's field office director in 2007, after the first IJM raid. "There were girls that were anywhere from 5 to 8. After that [IJM raid] they no longer had to have every orifice of their body violated ten times a day.... That ended for at least a few that day."

I first met Stayton in February 2008. The tall lawyer had a deep, rolling voice--a natural fit for singing in a chorus, which he says serves as "one of my outlets"--and an intense gaze that radiated moral seriousness and genuine, if guarded, warmth.

He folded himself into a wicker chair, and we turned to his work, faith and the classic conflict that IJM had encountered: how to balance the needs of trafficked women and girls with the potential for disruption in the lives of adult sex workers and the distribution of HIV services.

"I believe that God is all-powerful. He could do this, but I think it pleases him to let his creations be his hands and feet here," he said. "I have an opportunity to bring heaven on earth in places that are already hell on earth. I believe in a God who created us with the ability to feel this kind of pain, and to understand and recognize and see it, a heart to want to do something about it. I think the evil that happens here breaks his heart.

"Am I happy about the potential disruption? No. But I'm looking at the girl there, the 15-year-old girl who is nothing more than an organ for rent," he says. "That's what we find unacceptable. And I think that IJM has weighed that cost--I have personally weighed that cost. I wouldn't be working with IJM if I didn't feel that cost was one I could take."

IJM was prepared to stake it all on its first major intervention in Cambodia. On March 29, 2003, it staged an ambitious and massively publicized raid. Haugen had agreed to embed a crew from Dateline, hoping that the TV segment would create enough public outrage to force Cambodian authorities to shut down the village, should the raid fail.

Posing as prospective clients, IJM investigators had amassed videotaped evidence that around forty girls, some as young as 8 or 9, were being offered for sexual services. After the raid, IJM was able to count thirty-seven girls among the rescued; the ensuing court case resulted in six convictions. I was unable to meet the girls rescued in the raid or any from subsequent interventions; shelter managers said they wanted to protect the girls from too much media exposure. But in August 2008 Dateline ran a follow-up story with the girls, who appeared healthy and happy, and had dreams of becoming doctors and dance teachers.

The Svay Pak raids seemed to close on that triumphant note--but the story after the redemptive ending is far darker, according to Peter Sainsbury, a consultant who worked with Cambodian human rights group LICADHO to review the IJM raid. A number of bystanders had been caught up in the intervention, including a noodle seller suffering from high blood pressure. Although Sainsbury notified IJM staff of her condition, little was done to earn her release or provide her with medical care, and she died in custody. Her body was returned to her family with teeth missing--prison guards had used pliers to wrench out any with gold fillings.

As for the children, a number of them were addicted to ketamine and injectable drugs, according to Sainsbury, and cut deals with police in the safe house in order to procure them. At least twelve of the victims ran away, some of them later reappearing at Svay Pak to continue prostitution, according to local sources. A police raid a year later netted a number of the rescuees from the high-profile March 2003 IJM raid. Within days of the later raid, all the girls had fled the shelter.

A USAID-funded "census" of sex workers in Cambodia uncovered the fact that the number of underage children offered for prostitution actually increased after the raid, from forty-six before to twelve directly after to fifty-five by May 7 of that year.

"We were a little surprised at the increase after the raid," said researcher Thomas Steinfatt by phone. "But a lot of the girls have a debt contract. If [a girl] winds up in a shelter after a raid, she wants to get out because her family will be pressured to pay back the debt. They won't be able to do that, so the 15-year-old [sister] may get sent. Then the 13-year-old may get sent as well. That's one way the larger number could be accounted for. I argue that the contracts should be null and void, but the girls and women are not going to see it that way."

Those who remained or returned to Svay Pak faced an additional challenge: according to Sainsbury, pimps believed that local HIV-education and social work NGOs had aided IJM and the police, and after the raids cut off the groups' access to the women and barred them from providing care.

In an effort to put a definitive end to child prostitution in Svay Pak, IJM raided the village multiple times after its initial intervention, and the Cambodian police also conducted 100-day saturation/surveillance operations. In his report on the impact of these initiatives, however, French economist Frederic Thomas discovered that the raids had merely dispersed the problem. The women and girls of Svay Pak who hadn't returned to Vietnam had been relocated to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, the town just outside the famous Angkor Wat ruins.

By 2007 business in Svay Pak had recovered and reappeared more covertly. Pimps would search clients for cameras, according to Interior Ministry and IJM sources, or use intermediaries like hotel staff and motorcycle-taxi drivers to help deliver children from the village directly to clients' hotel rooms.

Shortly after its first Svay Pak raid, IJM launched a police-training initiative in Cambodia that brought its own controversy. USAID awarded a nearly $1 million grant to the organization to train police in countertrafficking techniques--a decision that fueled criticism from human rights advocates concerned about corruption. Cambodian police are notorious for their involvement in trafficking, through extorting protection money from brothel owners, or through assault and rape of sex workers and trafficking victims.

According to a 2006 USAID-funded study that drew on interviews with 1,000 sex workers and sixty police officers, approximately a third of the freelance sex workers surveyed had been raped by a policeman in the past year; a third had been gang-raped by police. As for sex workers who worked in brothels but also accepted clients outside, 57 percent had been raped by a lone policeman; nearly half had been gang-raped by law enforcement. Fifty percent of freelancers and nearly 75 percent of the brothel group had been beaten by police in the past year.

The police themselves testified to their behavior:

Frankly speaking, I did not like sex workers in the past. I have recently abused many hardheaded women who were working in the parks at nighttime. I beat them when they refused sex with me.... I can't remember the number of beatings. Because I thought that sex workers needed extreme sex from men [laughs]. People in my area called sex workers pradap (meaning "equipment that people can use for doing something," a public vagina for men). Sometimes I asked for some money from them to buy beer or wine.... Sometimes I f***ed them on the stone bench. I never paid them for sex.... There were many policemen who used to work in this park and they did the same.... Now I realized that women become sex workers because they have no job and no money to do business. I know that sex workers have suffered a lot from men, especially men who have guns and power like policemen. I am so sorry for what I have done to those sex workers. Maybe at that time I was too young to know everything in this society. About five years ago, I arrested one woman who was walking on the street late at night. I threatened her to give me some money. I needed money for buying beer and cigarettes. That woman told me that she had no money. I beat and forced her to find money for me. She took off her earring and sold it for money to buy wine for me. I raped her on the ground near Wat Phnom. I used a condom and I raped her three times. I beat her when she was crying for my mercy. [Respondent silent for a while.] I will never do it again. I did many wrong things in my life. I want POLICY [the project that performed the study] to train police about women's rights.... I want to be a good man and take care of my family.

Such stories, according to a US government official who works on anti-trafficking, speaking on condition of anonymity, raise serious questions about "whether or not working with police as allies on this issue was a good [policy] in Cambodia."

Indeed, the "war on trafficking" blew up in Cambodia last year. In the wake of US pressure on trafficking and the advent of a new countertrafficking law, the Cambodian government launched a campaign of indiscriminate sweeps of streets and brothels. Security forces harassed HIV-outreach workers, disrupting condom-distribution efforts, and caged sex workers and street people in detention centers--actions that drew criticism from UN agencies and other civil society groups.

Cambodian government officials responded with indignation. "It is not true police are using this law to arrest and extort money from the suspects," said Gen. Bith Kim Hong, head of the anti-trafficking police. "We never arrest prostitutes, but rather we save them from brothels."

According to LICADHO, the sweeps resulted in the murder of three detainees, who were beaten to death by prison guards, and the suicides of at least five others.

IJM did not help conduct the sweeps and condemned them publicly--Stayton even attempted to contact the local sex workers' collective to offer his help in investigating the allegations of abuse. He was rebuffed by silence, however--a representative of the collective argued that the sweeps were an unsurprising consequence of US pressure on trafficking, in which IJM has played a strong part, and of a policy that favors engagement with law enforcement while failing to heed the voices of those they ostensibly protect.

Some in the human rights community remain open to dialogue with IJM and to the possibility of positive collaboration with the police. Joe Amon of Human Rights Watch offered a slew of possible modifications to IJM's work, including establishing formal mechanisms like citizens' commissions and independent investigations to pursue complaints about police abuses. As for the sex workers, IJM could engage in "real dialogue with sex workers' groups, which have their own ways of gathering information and informing police they trust. They could also provide legal representation for adult sex workers, particularly those abused by police, or they could support local legal NGOs to do so." In the absence of those safeguards, Amon felt that IJM's strategies have yielded mixed results at best.

It's unclear how IJM may be addressing the potential complications of working with such volatile partners. The organization did not respond to repeated requests to speak on concrete strategies in the field to avoid or counter police corruption and brutality. IJM staff did, however, mention the protocol they had issued to local police, which advises them on ways to shield sex workers from the media and to reassure them they are not being arrested, and which explains techniques for conducting raids so they do not implicate social service NGOs operating in the area. My request to see the manual, however, resulted in no response. Asked about the provision of legal representation for adult sex workers, Haugen responded by noting that most of the women were undocumented and therefore less likely to press charges against law enforcement.

For Marielle Lindstrom, weighing the balance of IJM's work in Cambodia is a difficult task. Formerly chief of the Asia Foundation's anti-trafficking project, Lindstrom was in charge of disbursing the major USAID grant on the issue and served as main coordinator on Cambodia's anti-trafficking strategies, convening a task force of government officials, ministries and more than 200 NGOs. She acknowledges that IJM is "doing a good thing rescuing the children" and could have a strong positive effect should its training be incorporated into the national police academy, but she is torn about the overall impact of the organization's work.

"In the end," she says, "it's the way of thinking that troubles me. Do you want to make a difference in one person's life, or change the system? Many people are here because they've been called to do something, they have a calmness and a conviction. They know this is right. For me, I'm only human. I doubt myself all the time. I need to consider different approaches. I'd much rather say that God tells me to do this. It would be easier." Lindstrom sighs again. "Because what about your responsibility to a fellow human being, to what they want? Do we ever ask them? Some see proof of their faith in that one person they rescue. That's my concern--there's no self-doubt. It didn't cross anyone's mind to work with sex workers on the law, for example. And we talk about the minimum standards of assistance, but victims are not consulted in the creation of those standards."

Before I left Cambodia, I met with the secretariat of the sex workers' collective. Three of them had been trafficked--although I didn't ask for details, they provided them, their stories of deception by friends and family.

At the end of our conversation, I asked if they had any questions. They had only one. "Sister," Preung Pany said, "we tell our stories to so many journalists, so many people like you, but then nothing changes. Still we are raped by the police, still there are young ones in the brothels. There are so many people working on this--the rescuers, the HIV people, people like you--and so much money going into this problem. But why doesn't anything change?"

About Noy Thrupkaew

Noy Thrupkaew is a freelance writer based in New York City.

Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books

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By Garry Wills

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama's presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain.^[1] Obama's nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo's claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to "battlefield law."^[2] On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking "state secrets"—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama's attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so.^[3] Obama refused to release photographs of "enhanced interrogation." The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.^[4]

The President said that past official crimes would not be investigated—certainly not for prosecution, and not even by an impartial "truth commission" just trying to establish a record. He said, on the contrary, that detainees might be tried in "military tribunals." When the British government, trying a terrorist suspect, decided to use some American documents shared with the British government, Obama's attorney general pressured it not to do so. Most important, perhaps, was the new president's desire to end the nation-building in Iraq while substituting a long-term nation-building effort in Afghanistan, run by a government corrupted by drug trafficking and not susceptible to our remolding.

Even in areas outside national security, the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush's. Gay military personnel, including those with valuable Arabic-language skills, were being dismissed at the same rate as before. Even more egregiously, the Obama administration continued the defiance of the Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause, which requires states to recognize laws passed by other states, when it defended the Defense of Marriage Act, which lets states refuse to recognize gay marriages legally obtained in another state. Many objected when Dick Cheney would not name energy executives who came to the White House in 2002, though Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, had been forced to reveal which health advisers had visited her. Yet the Obama team, in June 2009, refused to release logs of those who come to the White House. (It later reversed itself, but only in response to a lawsuit.)

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him during the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, "Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place." A White House official told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, "It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say "estimated" because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

An example of this imperial system is the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.^[5] In the 1960s, to secure a military outpost without fear of any interference from indigenous peoples, the two thousand Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly expelled, deprived of their native land, and sent a thousand miles away. (It is the same ploy we had used in removing native peoples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and Lib Island, so that we could conduct our sixty-eight atomic and hydrogen bomb tests there.) Though technically Diego Garcia is leased from the British, it is entirely run by the United States. It was the United States that expelled the Chagossians and confiscated their property. Diego Garcia has become a vast armory, as well as a storage and staging area and harbor and launch site, from which supplies and air strikes are fanned out over the Middle East, especially to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. No journalists are allowed to visit it. It was funded on a vast scale by various deceptions of Congress. Even the leasing terms with Great Britain were kept secret, to avoid congressional oversight.

That is just one of the hundreds of holdings in the empire created by the National Security State. A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

On January 25, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales signed a memo written by David Addington that called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete." Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete. Few people even consider anymore Madison's lapidary pronouncement, "In republican government the legislative authority necessarily predominates." Instead, we are all, as citizens, asked to salute our commander in chief. Any president, wanting leverage to accomplish his goals, must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief, the mystery and majesty that have accrued to him with control of the Bomb, the awesome proximity to the Football, to the Button.

Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made. As Cyrano said, "One doesn't fight in the hope of winning" (Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès).

— September 10, 2009

Notes

^[1]Jane Mayer, "The Secret History," The New Yorker, June 22, 2009.

^[2]Charlie Savage, "Obama's War on Terror May Resemble Bush's in Some Areas," The New York Times, February 18, 2009.

^[3]John Schwartz, "Obama Backs Off a Reversal on Secrets," The New York Times, February 10, 2009. See also my recent discussion of the Reynolds case, "Why the Government Can Legally Lie," The New York Review, February 12, 2009.

^[4]Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman, "Obama Tilts to CIA on Memos," The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2009; R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, "CIA Fights Full Release of Detainee Report," The Washington Post, June 17, 2009.

^[5]See David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). See also the review by Jonathan Freedland, "A Black and Disgraceful Site," The New York Review, May 28, 2009.

Starting Points

Sep 21, 2009

Meet the Afghan Army - Nation

Is It a Figment of Washington's Imagination?

By Ann Jones

About Ann Jones

Welcome to the National Asylum - Nation

September 16, 2009

About Alexander Cockburn

The World and Pittsburgh - Nation

September 16, 2009

About John Nichols

The Crusade Against Sex Trafficking - Nation

About Noy Thrupkaew

Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books

By Garry Wills

Notes