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Finding Bergdahl - Part 4

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Photo illustration ©2014 Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

This is the fourth installment of Robert Young Pelton's account of his involvement with the 2009 search for Private Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. Read the first part here, the second part here, and the third here.

In August 2010, I traveled to Kabul for meetings with the stringers who worked for my online news outlet, AfPax, which provided information on Afghanistan to NGOs, private-sector players, and US officials. As usual, I made time to drop by the big green fortress of General Abdul Rashid Dostum.

It’s always important to check in with Afghan power brokers. Once they know you’re in town—there are no secrets in Afghanistan—you must stop by to say hi, or else it might be considered an insult. In November 2001, I traveled with Dostum and the Green Berets of ODA 595, who in the months following 9/11 had ridden together on horseback, decimating the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. Despite Dostum’s subsequent roller-coaster career, we had remained friends.

As I waited for my meeting with Dostum, I relaxed on an overstuffed couch, sipping tea and nibbling stale pistachios. Three swarthy Afghans wearing magnificent pastel turbans were eyeing me from another couch. They were members of the Zadran tribe, and they probably were wondering what I was doing in the inner sanctum of a notorious warlord.

“Are you an American?” one of the Zadran elders asked gruffly in bad English.

I nodded.

Then he blurted angrily, “Why don’t your people want your soldier back?”

The soldier’s name wasn’t necessary. The elder was talking about Bowe Bergdahl, the Army private who, a year earlier, in the predawn hours of June 30, 2009, had wandered away from his outpost in Paktika province. A few hours later, the US military had asked me and my AfPax intel team to track the missing soldier before calling us off in a flustered attempt to take control of the situation. Any semblance of control, however, would not emerge for five long years.

In the meantime, Bergdahl’s fate was not the lingering mystery the media would later make it out to be. On July 2, the Taliban organized a big news day as they and Mullah Sangeen, an Afghan militant from Paktika, went public about the missing private, telephoning reporters for Reuters and the AP in Kabul with confirmation that insurgents had captured Bergdahl and sold him to the Taliban-linked Haqqani Network. The Haqqani were holding Bergdahl in the Zadran city of Miranshah, a few miles over the Pakistani border.

My AfPax team was not the only outfit tracking Bergdahl the day he disappeared. Brigadier General Edward Reeder, who was then commander of the US Special Forces in Afghanistan, called a former Taliban governor who told the general that the private had been smuggled into Pakistan and handed over to the Haqqani. According to Linda Robinson, who wrote One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare, Reeder remembers relaying the information up the chain of command, and he was puzzled when there was no follow-up.

A week later, according to Reeder, President Hamid Karzai’s older brother, Qayum, called him to relay the Haqqani ransom demands for Bergdahl: $19 million, plus the release of 25 Talibs detained at the largely unsanctioned holding pens at Gitmo, in Cuba, and Bagram Airfield, north of the Afghan capital. The elder Karzai also mentioned that he had something else: a videotape of Bergdahl, dressed in Pakistani clothes and asking to be released. Reeder relayed the demands via the appropriate channels, but there was no official US response.

The kidnappers waited a few days, and then allegedly asked Qayum to relay a second ransom offer to Reeder: $5 million, with no mention of a prisoner swap. But once again, the US did not enter into negotiations with the kidnappers. By this time my network had deduced and pinged Bergdahl’s movements, and Reeder had confirmed the private’s location in Pakistan. So why did the top US command ignore what was considered “actionable intel,” and continue to chase its tail by searching for Bergdahl in Afghanistan for months to come?

A year later I had forgotten about Bergdahl, like most Americans. The Zadran elder reminded me that the private was still out there in the boonies.

“Sirajuddin [Haqqani] is very angry at the Americans for refusing to take back their prisoner,” the elder told me, referring to the Haqqani tribal leader who was presumably footing the bill for Bergdahl’s internment. “There are many expenses, and he has been there too long.”

I assumed he was referring to the aspect of the Pashtunwali, the unwritten Pashtun code that deals with keeping an enemy soldier alive. It is considered a favor and deserving of compensation.

“Sirajuddin is eager to make the exchange before [the holiday of] Eid because he needs the funds,” the elder continued, “and has lowered his price to $3 million.”

It was also not unusual for Afghans to call in their chits before Eid to help shoulder the burden of the many gifts and parties that come with the end of Ramadan.

The Zadran elder seemed to assume that since I was American, I somehow had the authority and the ability to purchase my fellow tribesman’s freedom. I explained to the elder that this was not the case, and said that if he gave me his cell-phone number, I would relay the ransom demand to the appropriate authorities.

Later, during my meeting with General Dostum, I mentioned my exchange with the elder, and that things seemed to be going badly in the bid to get Bergdahl back. The general knew of Bergdahl’s predicament and apologized that he didn’t have the money to pay the ransom. He added that, even if he did, he didn’t think the Americans would reimburse him. “This is a game America has to play with Pakistan,” he said, summarizing the dilemma.

I later gave the ransom information and the Zadran elder’s phone number to the American military secret squirrels that I knew in Kabul. It wasn’t surprising when I heard nothing back.

Bergdahl had slipped away from the pubic consciousness. His name would emerge briefly in the media from time to time, and then it would disappear. The increasingly frustrated Taliban would continue to release proof-of-life Bergdahl videos. But it would take a lost war to bring the private back into white-hot focus.

***

Four years after my strange encounter in Dostum’s compound, Bergdahl was released. He is a now a sergeant with a paper-wrangling job at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where his responsibility is centered on homeland security.

A tidal wave of hatred directed at Bergdahl swelled after his release, cresting with his return to the United States. Over the years, a wide variety of pundits criticized the Obama administration for neglecting America’s sole prisoner of war. Many also pointed out the president’s failure to follow through on campaign promises to close Gitmo's detention center. Ironically, when Bergdahl was liberated, these criticisms morphed into a debate over the terms: Was the young private’s freedom worth the release of five Taliban from Gitmo? According to the polls, most Americans thought it was a bum deal.

Bergdahl’s story runs parallel to the dead-end path of America’s war in Afghanistan—a war we never figured out how to win, in part because its ill-defined objectives were dictated by the even murkier “war on terror.” This is a war that, alongside a misguided campaign in Iraq, seems to have only amplified the problem it was supposed to solve. The power vacuum left in its wake has been filled by an assortment of monsters and opportunists. It could be argued that with the prisoner swap, the once almighty United States had lost its grip, fatigued by dual wars. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that just few months later, Russia’s disingenuous occupation of Ukraine has all but bankrupted the former Soviet republic, while the Islamic State has established a brutally violent caliphate that stretches across a swath of Iraq and Syria. 

Berghdahl is also a reminder of the irony of the Afghan war: The enemy—Taliban insurgents and al Qaeda jihadists—were largely based in Pakistan; the troops—America and its allies—were in Afghanistan. By the time American officers deployed to Afghanistan grasped this dynamic, they were rotated out and sent back home. Those who understood relations between the two countries soon learned the mantra: The Department of Defense owns Afghanistan; the State Department and the CIA own Pakistan. Everyone else, butt out. It was a turf war that further complicated an already convoluted situation.

Although the peaceful release of what appeared to be a healthy but emaciated Bergdahl created shock waves, America has since been exposed to more disturbing images of what can happen to hostages. Since mid August, the Islamic State has released videos of its members beheading American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as British aid worker David Haines. A group that claimed to be an Algerian branch of the Islamic State beheaded a French mountain guide, Hervé Gourdel. The staged videos flashed around the globe within hours, gruesome reminders that Bergdahl could have met the same fate.

The graphic videos also triggered an immediate American response, including  airstrikes. Given the instability throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, it’s not hard to imagine a similar slippery slope that could draw the US back into an escalation in Afghanistan in the same way that it has been drawn back into northern Iraq.

Bowe Bergdahl. Image courtesy US Army/via Flickr user Global Panorama

When Bergdahl went AWOL, the US military and the media, of course, did not view his disappearance as a catalyst for peace talks. Instead, it was considered an isolated incident that was overshadowed by a much larger event: the Afghan surge. On July 2, 2009, the same day that the Taliban and the Haqqani were calling reporters in Kabul to claim credit for Bergdahl’s abduction, the US and its allies were conducting their own media event, the first big show of the escalation—Operation Khanjar, a carefully orchestrated attack intended to clear the Taliban out of the poppy-growing region in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

The military command asked my AfPax outfit to tell them everything we knew about the next area on their hit list: the poppy fields of Marjah. They were frank that their learning curve started at zero. I was hesitant to point out that the irrigation used to nurture the flowers in Marjah were courtesy of a 1950s American development program. Back then, the area was known as Little America, complete with wide streets built by the giant American contractor Morrison Knudsen.

Operation Khanjar was designed to win hearts and minds, but it only ended up pissing off more Afghans. It turned out that, much like the California fields of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Helmand provided income for migrant workers. With the poppies gone, so were the jobs. 

The surge was supposed to be the last big push for stability—the deployment of additional troops (30,000 American, 10,000 NATO) to fight a growing Taliban-led insurgency in southern and western Afghanistan. It was a make-or-break effort to stabilize the region and push out Islamic fundamentalists so the US could declare victory and exit. The surge, championed by a bookish senior Army officer named David Petraeus, had worked in Iraq, in 2007. Now, with General Petraeus in charge of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), the question was whether a surge could buy enough time to justify an American military drawdown in Afghanistan.

The strategy dated back to November 24, 2009, when President Obama held an evening meeting with his top national security advisers to decide the future of Afghanistan. Presidents don’t like long wars with ambiguous outcomes, and Obama had had no problem quickly shutting down Bush’s war in Iraq. The American public knew they had been fed a bunch of bullshit about yellowcake, aluminum tubes, and weapons of mass destruction, but Saddam and his sons had been executed, and the oil-rich country was trending toward peace. A week later, Obama announced a schedule for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, which he had promised the country when he took office.

Obama was not so sure about Afghanistan. Like much of the public and the military, he saw direct links between 9/11, al Qaeda, and the Taliban, the turbaned fundamentalists who had defeated Afghan warlords in 1996 and brought a harsh peace to the country until the US invasion after 9/11. The Taliban were not wild-eyed jihadists intent on conducting international terrorism; they were often uneducated rural veterans of the Soviet conflict who wanted to install an Afghan government based on traditional religious principles. Confident thanks to their ouster of the Soviets and steeped in historical narrative about defeating the British before that, they saw time as their best weapon. They were willing to bet that the invaders would simply grind themselves down under the friction of their own effort. In late 2009 and early 2010, the Taliban were right on the money. But they couldn’t shake the terrorist image and move toward political legitimacy. 

The Taliban knew that their biggest mistake was allowing Osama bin Laden to set up his al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan after the Saudi and his  operation were booted out of the Sudan. Osama probably didn’t even know about the Taliban when he landed in Kabul in a chartered Ariana 727 on May 18, 1996. We now know that the self-professed mastermind of 9/11 was actually a Pakistani named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had studied mechanical engineering in North Carolina in the late 1980s; the hijackers were mostly Saudis. After the US invaded Afghanistan, al Qaeda fighters and jihadists from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Chechnya, Iran, and other countries joined the Taliban’s attempts to repel the US forces, hence the conflation in the minds of many Americans, who considered the Taliban and al Qaeda to be one and the same. However, it is worth noting that no Afghans or Taliban were directly involved in 9/11.

But these kinds of intellectual and geographic subtleties were too complicated for American politics. So politicians developed a less nuanced storyline: The bearded, black-turbaned, often one-legged Taliban were the bad guys. Got it?

The Taliban played to type, finding only four countries that supported them: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan. They were featured in numerous NGO documentaries as Darth Vader–ish religious fanatics who oversaw the highly publicized destruction of the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan, along with symbols of the contemporary world—television sets, cassette players, white socks, and kites.

As a presidential candidate in 2007, Obama talked about Afghanistan as “the war that has to be won,” insisting that al Qaeda still operated in the country. The truth was that five years earlier, al Qaeda, foreign jihadists, senior Taliban officials, including the organization’s reclusive leader, Mullah Omar, all had hightailed it into Pakistan. Every summer, the Taliban sent supplies and troops across the border into Afghanistan to harass US forces and their allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

By 2008, Afghans appreciated the billions of dollars in free American money, but they still saw the ISAF as meddlers, occupiers, and harassers. Violent attacks and local grievances against central government political appointees turned village after village toward the Taliban. The corrupt and inept US-backed Karzai government was undermining the chief principal of counterinsurgency: You don’t win the hearts and minds of the people by preying on them. Locals may not have liked the Taliban, but they had brought peace and stability during their five years in power. 

Afghanistan was a beggar nation, and America, the invader, was its main source of sustenance. In such a shattered country, the US military saw peace as attainable only if it were bought on a small scale—village by village, region by region—and never on a macro scale that would bring security to the entire country. Be our friend and get money; dislike the Taliban, and that means you like us—this was the faulty binary narrative in which fealty was exchanged for payments and economic development.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believed that the US should focus more on Pakistan, the fractured ethnic tinderbox that possessed nuclear weapons. Obama agreed. In February 2009, just a few months into his new presidency, he announced that he was bringing in former CIA official Bruce Riedel, seasoned diplomat Richard Holbrooke, and think-tank star turned Pentagon planner Michèle Flournoy to overhaul US policy in the region.

Twenty years after the Soviets were defeated by US-backed jihadist groups supplied via Pakistan, it may seem stunningly obvious, even to the unsophisticated, to include Pakistan in the Afghanistan equation. But remember the mantra: The State Department and the CIA handled Pakistan, and the Pentagon handled the fighting and peacemaking in Afghanistan. It was a tag team from hell, since Pakistan relied on US money to prevent it from sliding into the abyss, while it used that same money to pull Afghanistan into the same fundamentalist quagmire.

Conflict in this part of the world makes strange bedfellows. The CIA was already running a covert war against al Qaeda in Pakistan in conjunction with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, Pakistan’s spy agency. The ISI had funneled US money and matériel to the Afghan mujahedeen who drove out the Soviets back in the 1980s. It was also the directorate that had supported the Taliban when they were in power. And it was the ISI that reputedly continued to work with al Qaeda and the Haqqani. Pakistan needed radical Islamists like bin Laden and Mullah Omar if they were to have any influence inside Afghanistan and against India once the US left. The irony of the CIA joining forces with the Pakistani security apparatus that reputedly supported America’s enemies may have been lost on the American public, but it would become increasingly obvious over the next few years.

In 2008, General David McKiernan, commander of the ISAF and US Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A), was becoming alarmed by reports of increased violence in Afghanistan. My business partner had introduced McKiernan to Obama the candidate, and when the general wanted to make a strong statement to his new commander-in-chief—we are at war in Afghanistan—he came to us.

The gruff former tanker was not a fan of PowerPoint, so he asked me to put together photos of Afghanistan that I had taken on multiple trips to the country since 1995, when I first interviewed the Taliban, an organization virtually unknown to the West at the time. My partner and I backed up the emotional punch of the images with simple statistics. The object of the exercise was to demonstrate that violence was increasing, and the way to stem it was greater engagement with the Afghan people. America was not on a peacekeeping mission. America was at war, battling Pakistan’s proxies.

The general presented the material as part of his request for 30,000 additional troops to stem the rising tide of insurgency.

No sale. Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly turned down McKiernan and, in May 2009, Gates fired the four-star general, saying he needed “fresh thinking” and “fresh eyes” on Afghanistan.

As it happened, McKiernan’s successor, General Stanley McChrystal, also agreed with our assessment. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF’s own errors,”McChrystal wrote in a 66-page report to Gates, “have given Afghans little reason to support their government.”

McChrystal upped McKiernan’s ante, privately asking for 80,000 to 90,000 additional troops. After detailed discussions and a review of the policy overhaul led by Riedel, Holbrooke, and Flournoy, the president approved an Afghan surge that immensely increased the size of the American commitment—21,000 US troops for a total of 68,000, along with 10,000 more from the ISAF. The surge would start in the summer of 2009 and peak in December 2010, with more than 100,000 troops in the country. In addition, a flood of contractors, training and development programs—and money—would magically turn “bad Taliban” into “good Taliban.” In just 18 months, those extra troops and civilians would supposedly alter the course of one of the world’s poorest countries, one that had been at war for 30 years.

The surge brought with it a new energy in violence. Counterinsurgency tactics are carrot and stick. The “stick” was rapidly increased pressure on violent actors. The “carrot” was money provided to villages or regions that agreed to play nice. The increased attacks dramatically escalated military and civilian casualties. As best as can be estimated, in 2008, before the surge, 153 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. In 2009, that number jumped to 310 fatalities; in 2010, it increased to 496. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since the arrival of American troops was 2010, with 2,777 killed. Another 3,000 were killed the following year, most of them by the Taliban.

Despite a decade of escalating violence, the number of Taliban insurgents inside Afghanistan remained fairly low, numbering only about 20,000 to 30,000 fighters. Contrast that with more than 100,000 US and allied troops post-surge, along with more than 112,000 contractors. As the Taliban predicted, the weight of the effort and the lack of short-term benefits were beginning to buckle American resolve. The Afghans’ centuries-old view of warfare was proving to be the correct one.

And one of the stubborn facts that showed how powerless America was in the region remained the ongoing, uncomfortable story about a young soldier from Idaho still sitting captive in Pakistan.

Bergdahl’s best hope was McChrystal, the aggressive, smart, and gung-ho Ranger-turned-four-star general. But at the midpoint of the surge, McChrystal was taken out, not by an IED or a sniper, but by an obtusely sourced yet damning article, “The Runaway General,” written by Michael Hastings and published in the July 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. In it, McChrystal and his aides criticized the State Department, Obama, and his strategy; accused the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, of betraying McChrystal; and mocked Vice President Joe Biden

Obama promptly sacked McChrystal and replaced him with General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM chief and the architect of the surge in Iraq. This was the man who wrote (or, at least, co-wrote) the book on defeating insurgencies, along with James F. Amos and John C. McClure—US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The tactic of “driving out” the Taliban from the “white spaces” to allow the “government to flow in” may have worked in Iraq—temporarily—but in Afghanistan it would prove to be a total fiction. 

At the funky, yellow, quasi-Germanic house that passed for ISAF’s headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus surrounded himself with boisterous “COINdinistas,” or counterinsurgency wonks. They were typically DC-based think-tank pundits who parachuted in for a quick whistle-stop tour of military operations, and then jetted home so they could tell journalists, politicians, and high-paying Beltway clients that they had “just come back from the war” and were ready to share what they had learned.

They were overwhelmingly right-wing, hawkish and abstractly philosophical in approach. Their insights were usually rooted in archaic, unrelated wars like those in Malaysia and Vietnam. Petraeus liked them because they insisted it would take 12 years to end the insurgency…and a lot of money. All Petraeus had to do was trot out his crew from Iraq to wax poetic about “white space, engagement, metrics, microhydro, rational legal authority, and COIN, or counterinsurgency.”

America had already been in Afghanistan for almost nine years and spent billions. Under Obama’s surge-and-drawdown schedule, however, the general only had 18 months to turn things around. Obama had already decided he was done with Afghanistan.

McCrystal as a tactician had ignored most of these pundits’ advice, but Petraeus knew these highly visible experts could help shape and generate support for his efforts, not with the Afghans but with the American public. After all, Petraeus was considered the thinking man’s general, a warrior statesman with his eye on the White House. He liked plans, analysis, statistics, and polls, and he liked selling success. And the trick Petraeus knew was that winning a war halfway around the world was really about convincing Americans back home that you were winning.

About this time, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s best-selling book, Three Cups of Tea: One Mans Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time, became an improbable must-read for AfPax policy wonks. The emotional book described Mortenson’s transition from mountain climber to humanitarian committed to educating girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and allegedly included a few stretchers, like the time Mortenson was supposedly captured by the Taliban. As a template for building peace in Afghanistan, the book had some fatal flaws that the military didn’t pick up on. One was that the schools Mortenson built in Pakistan were in Shia areas, not in Sunni, Talib-controlled ones, and that much of the book was complete bullshit designed to raise funds from starry-eyed audiences. Long before Three Cups was exposed as a fraud, it was heresy for me to point out its failings in front of newly arrived COINdinistas and senior officers brought in by Petraeus (then still the commander of the CENTCOM theater). In late 2010, the book and its mantra of talking to the Afghans were very much in vogue. The idea was that if you talked to the locals (and, of course, paid them), they would be less inclined to kill you.

Like the Vietnam era, CIA-run Phoenix Program, the cuppa-tea approach included an element that armed local militias while entering into a dialogue with them. The concept hid an equally robust program of targeted killing and capture. Chatting with local militias over tea provided better intel to target Taliban fighters, money men, trainers, and IED instructors. Soon, shadowy Afghan operators who worked by night began filling up a secret detention center at Bagram Airfield.

There was another small group of civilian advisers, mostly outsiders who knew the players in Afghanistan—educated, bookish, NGO-ish people who had been in the country during the pre-Taliban era. They offered a different perspective to the military, which usually ignored their advice and insights. Unlike the braying, cuppa-tea brigades who hoped to replay their Iraqi success in Afghanistan, this was a quieter crowd.

The British aggressively used some of these odd people to structure peace deals in Helmand province in the south. And it worked, at least until Karzai found out and reversed their gains. No one was going to get between Karzai’s cronies and a loose development dollar. My small group had helped pacify the west and the north simply by bringing adversaries together and cutting through the layers of partisan politics and badly researched reports that had polluted American thinking in-country.

The military even approached me to write detailed guides to hostile regions, as I had done in my book The Worlds Most Dangerous Places. This approach meant removing the post 9/11 labels clumsily applied to local power brokers and working closely at ground level to effect change. Every war is local. We were working in real time with real issues—no money, no backroom deals, no rosy promises. It was a matter of forging trust face-to-face and, most importantly, delivering on promises. We worked the carrot end of the solution, hoping that the existing power brokers would lightly apply the stick to incalcitrants.

Bowe Bergdahl. Image courtesy of AP/the Bergdahl family

Late in the evening on Friday, August 22, 2008, at a time when the intensity of American airstrikes was at its highest, a special operations team decided to act on intel that claimed a senior Taliban commander was attending a religious ceremony in the village of Azizabad, in the Herat province of western Afghanistan. The event was being held to honor the memory of a former deputy police commander, Timur Shah, who had been killed a few months earlier.

As the Marines and Afghan commandos rolled into Azizabad, the village guards began firing back, and soon the entire place erupted in gunfire. The Marines called in air support. An AC-130U gunship was on station, and began pounding the mud structures where the gunfire was coming from. The gunship’s 40 mm grenade launcher and 105 mm cannon soon turned eight homes into rubble. Predators armed with missiles and Apache gunships were also said to have taken part in the raid. By 8 AM the fighting was over. The villagers collected the bodies of the dead and brought them to the mosque. As is customary, many of the dead were taken back to their villages and buried the next day.

In the original after-action report, the Marines claimed they had solid intel that a Taliban commander named Mullah Sadiq was in the village. Based on the Marines’ report, the Pentagon originally said that 30 Taliban were killed in the raid. One week later, US Lieutenant Nathan Perry, an ISAF spokesman, issued a clarification: “Among the 30 bodies, five of them we believe now were not combatants—two women and three children.” Perry said that they were family members of Mullah Sadiq.

By September 3, the US was still dismissing a UN report that supported the local version of the events—that the fatalities included 60 children, 15 women, and 15 men. According to testimony collected by the Afghan government, there were no Taliban in the village. The regional Afghan commander in charge, General Jalandar Shah Behnam, claimed that the Americans were confused about their target and had used bad intelligence before the attack. The Afghan commander also confirmed the death toll. President Karzai was furious and demanded dramatic curtailment of how the US was running the war.

The State Department responded by calling the villagers liars, insisting that the Taliban had spread false rumors. In a Washington Post story, a military spokesperson characterized the casualty claims as “outrageous.”

General McKiernan turned to us to find the truth. It wasn’t pretty. Our Afghan intel team confirmed that not only were there significant casualties, but that the after-action report had not truthfully described the full extent of damage and death. The Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) had been tricked by a Karzai-appointed commander.

The locals had cell-phone videos of dozens of dead children and, as one would expect, knew the name of every casualty. The gunfire and airstrikes had killed a total of 61 children sleeping in their homes. Fifteen men and 15 women also died. It turned out that an Afghan commander named Mohammad Nader insisted that a senior Taliban was in the village. Our analysis: He apparently used the special operations team to wipe out his competition.

When General McKiernan’s staff asked us what should be done, we suggested that they should talk to the real power players, like General Dostum in northern Afghanistan and Ismail Khan, the famous warlord, in western Afghanistan. In 1979, Khan was the first muj commander to attack the Soviets, at Shindand air base, kicking off the ten-year jihad. The short, silver-bearded Tajik was a legend, and the CIA and Special Forces had supported his successful bid to overthrow the Taliban in late 2001. He had been deliberately ostracized and defanged, however, to make room for Karzai’s flunkies. We suggested that someone on McKiernan’s staff needed to go to Herat province before Karzai made political hay out of the tragedy.

***

On May 4, 2009, disaster struck again out west. A B-1B was called in to support another MARSOC mission. The strategic bomber, along with F-18s, dropped loads of 500- and 2,000-pound bombs on the village of Granai, in Farah province. The airstrike killed more than 120 civilians, as well as an unknown number of Taliban fighters. Among the victims were 90 children. The policy at the time was that the military, through the Afghan government, pay $2,000 in blood money for each dead civilian and $1,000 for each wounded one.

It was not enough. MARSOC, a newly formed Special Operations Unit that had been deployed to Afghanistan in 2007, was using overwhelming kinetic force. They had nicknamed themselves Taskforce Violence. MARSOC was directly responsible for the extraordinary number of civilian deaths in Azizabad and now in Granai. After both these events, President Karzai, a man who literally owed his life and his position to US forces, began to forcefully condemn American military action in his country.

General McKiernan dispatched our team to calm things down. To show we meant business, we secretly flew in with one of McKiernan’s one-star generals to meet face to face with Khan and others.  

The general had been part of previous meetings that we had set up with the Taliban, whose members had traveled to Kabul for discussions that were held on the top floor of my friend’s Italian restaurant. I attended the meetings unarmed, but some of my team consisted of former commando officers, who sat quietly with their hands on their weapons.

Learning grievances directly from Taliban commanders quickly taught the military that anger at corrupt and ineffective Afghan government appointees drove the dynamics of war. In addition, there was a shadow war in which more than 2,000 Afghans on the Joint Priorities Effects List were targeted for capture or assassination. Afghans never knew whether the US considered them friends or enemies.

We flew out west and met with all the senior government and warlord officials, and then flew back to Kabul.

When a CIA contractor based in Herat heard about our program, he was impressed. “You met with everybody, flew a bird out here, brought in a one-star, and we [the Agency] had no idea you were here.”

With Karzai and his government discredited, America had lost the linchpin to counterinsurgency. In 2001, a Gallup Poll showed that only eight percent of Americans thought the war in Afghanistan was a bad idea. Ten years later, a Gallup poll revealed that 39 percent of Americans thought it was a mistake. Inside Afghanistan, the population was even more emphatic in its opposition to continued fighting. By 2010, an Asia Foundation poll showed that 83 percent of Afghan adults supported peace talks with the Taliban.

The surge was not working. “The right war” was going very wrong. 

US army soldiers herding sheep in Afghanistan's Herat province in 2011. Photo via Flickr user The US Army

In the spring of 2009, Barnett Rubin arrived in Afghanistan and didn’t like what he saw. At the time, Rubin was a 59-year-old political scientist, Fulbright Fellow, and author of eight books who was known for his insight into the region. The Yale-educated scholar had traveled to Afghanistan dozens of time over the years. His immersion in the subject, his knowledge of Dari, and his first-name relationships with many of the Afghan players made him an ideal choice to become senior adviser to the UN during the 2001-02 Bonn agreement that put Karzai in power. He advised on the new constitution and the development strategy for Afghanistan. He knew how things worked.

When Karzai had floated the idea of a peace council in 2004, the US promptly swatted down the Afghan leader’s trial balloon. The Afghan president tried again in 2008, first with a casual, post-Ramadan dinner in Saudi Arabia between his brother and King Abdullah. The idea was to hold exploratory talks between Karzai and moderate ex-Taliban. Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the onetime international spokesman for the Taliban, Abdul Salem Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Fazel Hadi Shinwari were among the leading Afghan figures who met with the Saudi monarch to discuss the proposal. The problem was that the members attending were ex-Talibs who were not likely to have any influence on Mullah Omar and his inner circle.

Rubin remembers, "I tried to get the US to support Afghan efforts to achieve a political settlement because the Taliban was not Al Qaeda. A military victory was impossible, and you couldn’t conceive what a military victory would look like.”

Unlike many post-9/11 experts, Rubin knew the roots of Taliban violence, and grievances were limited to Afghanistan. The lack of enthusiasm for the Taliban’s overly conservative cause based on rural tribal traditions forced them to accept the support of al Qaeda and darker elements of Pakistan’s terrorism groups. Those were the only supporters of the Taliban’s bid for a Pashtun nationalist government. Perhaps if the US could see past the simplistic view of the Taliban as evil supporters of Al Qaeda, a deal could be reached. Perhaps if the Taliban could emerge from the seventh century and embrace modern politics, they could meet their enemies halfway.

The Taliban had other problems—ones that made them challenging as potential partners in peace. They were mostly illiterate and rural, and prone to shifting tribal alliances. The structure of the Taliban inside Afghanistan was cellular, loose, and confusing. The Taliban groups inside Pakistan were more centrally organized, but opaque and erratic. To make matters worse, few people inside the Taliban had ever seen the Taliban leader, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, let alone talked to him. He had no fixed address or formal diplomatic corps. He was rumored to be inside Pakistan, where he was the head of the shura, or tribal council, in the city of Quetta, in Balochistan province. The US wanted to find him so badly that they had put a $10 million bounty on his head. And yet after a decade no one seemed to have a good fix on the reclusive spiritual leader. 

An insider who was part of the attempts to start US peace talks with the Taliban told me, “We knew that communications were going in and coming out from a person who called himself Mullah Omar.”

But was there an actual person with that name?

Back in 1995, when I was researching the first edition of Dangerous Places, I tried to meet Omar, but he wouldn’t talk to an infidel. So I hired a Turkish TV journalist friend, Coskum Aral, to interview the Howard Hughes of mullahs in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Aral later told me that although the other mullahs agreed to be interviewed on camera, Omar would agree only to a voice-over; in the segment that was broadcast on Turkish TV, viewers could only hear his voice, not see his face. Perhaps he was embarrassed about the appearance of his sewn-shut eye.

To make matters even more complicated, the spiritual leader’s lack of sophistication had created some bizarre forms of outreach when he was the head of the Taliban government. In August 1998, two days after President Clinton launched cruise missiles at bin Laden’s training camps in Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan, the mullah made a cold call to a mid-level US State Department official for Asia and the Near East in Washington on an open phone line. Speaking via a translator, the mullah had nothing in particular to say except that he wanted proof of bin Laden’s crimes and was open to dialogue. He did have some unsolicited advice for the State Department official on the other end of the call: The US government should force President Clinton to resign, and it should remove its troops from Saudi Arabia. American military strikes “would be counterproductive,” Omar said, according to the declassified record of the exchange, and would “spark more, not less, terrorist attacks.”

His cranky call was ignored. That was the last time Mullah Omar ever spoke directly to America.

In the spring of 2009, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, suggested to an American civilian adviser that someone should set up an office where the Taliban and the US government could communicate, but that the facility should not be located in Pakistan. Launching into talks with a holed-up insurgent group without including Pakistan—or the Karzai government—would be tricky. Saudi Arabian intelligence has always worked closely with Pakistani intelligence, so Pakistan could be kept in the loop that way… when appropriate. The problem, as stated in a secret May 2009 meeting between Richard Holbrooke and the Saudis, was that “the US might be able to live with some degree of instability in Afghanistan, but not with an unstable Pakistan.”

Around this time there were a few false starts in the peace process. President Karzai appointed his elder brother Qayum to handle talks with the Taliban. Qayum, the longtime owner of a Baltimore restaurant called The Helmand, was responsible for bringing his brother Hamid to the attention of the State Department and the CIA after 9/11 as a potential leader. The CIA saw much of Mullah Omar in the suave, soft-spoken, multilingual Karzai. Qayum also made sure that his thuggish half-brother Ahmad Wali was the CIA’s main contact in Kandahar. The Taliban, quite understandably, viewed the Karzai brothers as American puppets, but they were at least a known quantity since Karzai was suggested as the Taliban ambassador to the UN (Mullah Omar nixed the idea).

Qayum and the Saudis agreed to host a Taliban go-between. One of the first things discussed was a “confidence-building” measure. The Taliban allegedly suggested that the Americans release the six senior mullahs being held in Gitmo. To the Taliban, this seemed like a lay-up request. After all, hadn’t President Obama said he was going to close Gitmo by the end of the year? But the government of Afghanistan was powerless to convince the Americans to spring prisoners from Gitmo, or free the hundreds of detainees at Bagram. The Brothers Karzai failed to build a path to peace with the Taliban.

It wasn’t so much the surge that rekindled interest in peace talks, but rather the knowledge that after the surge the Americans would be getting ready to leave, and that would create a power vacuum. It sparked a series of odd and secret Afghan-Taliban peace talks, beginning in 2010.

The most bizarre meetings were held in January in the Maldives, an archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean. The Maldives normally cater to rich European honeymooners, so the sight of black-cloaked Talibs strolling along the beach must have seemed strange to vacationers. 

It turned out these Iranian-sponsored boondoggles were only between low-ranking, ex-Taliban Afghan government politicians and splinter groups based in Pakistan, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami. The only significant outcome was that the secret peace talks seemed to show up overnight in the New York Times, courtesy of an aggrieved American three-letter agency.

Obama was concerned by the failure of the surge, as well as by Afghan efforts to forge a separate peace and the meddling of arch-enemy Iran. He convened a national security meeting in February 2010 at the White House with Secretary of State Clinton, Defense Secretary Gates, and national security adviser Thomas Donilon. According to Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden wandered in toward the tail end of the discussions. Also in attendance was General Douglas Lute, Obama’s chief military adviser in Washington. Lute’s mantra: “Everything in a counterinsurgency has to do with the political outcome, not the military outcome.” His contribution to the meeting was to pitch what was by then the staggeringly obvious idea that the surge in Afghanistan was not going to work.

The group discussed peace talks with the Taliban as a way out. Turkey and Saudi Arabia were suggested as possible venues. The American government was running out of time. If it couldn't come up with an exit strategy by the following summer, Afghanistan was going to look a lot like it did in 1992 when the Soviets bailed. Simply packing up and removing foreign troops would plunge the country into the hell it had endured from '92 until the Taliban brought peace in 1996.

Although the US government insists that formal peace talks with the Taliban began just last year, they actually started in 2010, although not very auspiciously. In the summer and fall of that year, the allies flew a senior Taliban leader named Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour and two other Talibs from Quetta, Pakistan, to Kandahar for three meetings with Karzai’s Afghan High Peace Council. Mansour was the minister of civil aviation during the Taliban’s rule and now was the second-ranking Taliban commander, after Mullah Omar. It’s not clear who ponied up the multiple payments, but someone gave Mansoor $64,000 per meeting.

That quickly began to look like a bad investment. In November, a British military aircraft was used to fly Mansour to Kabul, where the senior insurgent leader was brought to the presidential palace and ushered in to meet President Karzai. Two senior Afghan officials, however, claimed that the man was not Mansour. He was an impostor—possibly a shopkeeper from Quetta. Or Mullah Omar posing as a shopkeeper from Quetta. Or a ISI spy who wanted to know what Afghanistan was putting on the negotiating table. Or a con man looking to make an easy buck. It was difficult to know. The Washington Post quoted one of the officials as saying, “He was a very clever man.”

The embarrassing incident underscored how tricky it was going to be to forge a deal with the Taliban. The US and its allies—even officials in the Afghan government—would be trying to negotiate with shadowy characters from an underground movement, some of whom had not been seen in years. And what guarantee would America have that the Taliban who cut the deal would be viewed as legitimate by the Afghan people? After a decade of fighting the Taliban, America now had to go find their enemies and negotiate instead of shooting them.

The way to answer these questions would lead back to none other than Bowe Bergdahl. Whichever group could prove that they were in control of the Haqqani and could release the private was the group that had the power to enforce the submission of other powerful insurgent groups across Pakistan and Afghanistan. 


Chemical X Secretly Sells Art Made from Ecstasy

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Chemical X Secretly Sells Art Made from Ecstasy

We Asked Three Doctors How Illegal Drugs Affect Your Sperm

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Photo via Flickr User Imagens Evangelicas

Life is full of hard truths. One of the hardest is that you can only party for so long before your body starts asking you nicely to please chill out, or you accumulate so many responsibilities that drinking five beers and popping a molly just isn't wise anymore. And when you decide you're ready for the ultimate responsibility, having a kid, you'll have to hope your genetic material isn't so damaged from shoving coke mixed with Ajax into random orifices that your offspring have to suffer serious medical problems.

But what if you knew how badly you're screwing your body up before it's too late? Not to get all Daren the Lion on you, but I asked two reproductive experts—Dr. Ricardo Yazigi of Shady Grove Fertility Center in Maryland and Dr. David Nudell, a Bay Area-based male reproductive urologist—plus Fernando Caudevilla (also known as Dr. X, the drug whisperer) to explain the way drug use can negatively impact sperm. The general consensus is that the use of just about every illicit drug causes damage to the testicles and prevents the creation of testosterone—the linchpin substance for the entire male reproductive system. 

For the purposes of this piece, we leaned heavily on a 2012 study called "The Insults of Illicit Drug Use in Male Fertility" from the American Society of Andrology's Journal of Andrology, which is available here.

Marijuana

According to the 2009 National Study on Drug Use and Health, marijuana has the highest usage rate of any illicit drug in the United States, which means you probably have all or some of these problems with your sperm.

The cannabinoid compounds in marijuana are actually synthesized by the human body, so our cells have natural receptors for them. If the cannabinoids latch onto cells in the testes or the sperm themselves, some unwanted side effects could occur and ruin your day. According to Dr. Yazigi:

"About 33 percent of chronic users will have low sperm counts. Binding of the active components and metabolites of marijuana to receptors on sperm themselves has also been shown to lead to decreasing motility rates. What is less clear are the effects of more occasional users—no good studies have been done but the prevailing thought is that while these men will have rapid recovery to their sperm function with briefer cessation in use, they should avoid use when trying to get pregnant as well."

Cocaine

Coke is, of course, the legendary "boner killer," in that it causes vasoconstriction (the narrowing of blood cells), which leads to erectile dysfunction. It's difficult to pinpoint what else it does, because any studies done on human beings are going to be complicated by the fact that cocaine just makes you want to party more. I asked Dr. Yazigi why we don't have more information on coke's effects, and he responded that human tests aren't pure "because most of the time there's coexistence of the use of cocaine along with alcohol and cigarettes and other drugs, so the single cocaine users are almost a rarity."  Also, he reminded me that you can't force a group of people to do cocaine and then reproduce. You know, ethically.

Animal studies have been done that conclude that there are receptors for coke in the testicles and sperm. "There's abnormal anatomy of the testicular tissue. There's degeneration of a number of cells," Dr. Yazigi said. Dr. Nudell went a step further and said those animal trials revealed that there might be transmission of cocaine through the sperm to the female egg. "Effects of this phenomenon are not known but certainly could lead to early miscarriage."

Opiates

For clarity's sake, when discussing opiates, I mean heroin, oxycontin, vicodin, etc. Long term use of opiates can lead to issues with the reproductive system due to suppression of the hormone GnRH, which Dr. Nudell says, "is normally secreted by the hypothalamus (the organ that controls the pituitary gland.)" That means a decline in LH (luteinizing hormone) and FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) secretion from the pituitary gland—a fancier way of saying the body doesn't produce the sperm it needs to make a baby. There's also evidence that opiate addiction can lead to fragmentation of DNA within sperm and can cause shoddy fertilization rates or miscarriage.

Methamphetamines

It almost goes without saying that if you are habitually using meth, reproducing should be low on your priority list. Fixing your teeth and paying your parents back all the money you stole from their retirement fund should take precedence. Also, stop wearing that goddamn beanie. It's not 2006 anymore, and you are not Jesse Pinkman. You are a real person and you smell like a bucket full of wet pennies. Still, if you must crank out a kiddie, you can expect "direct damage to the seminiferous tubules," which is the support system for the testis. Once again, that means lowered testosterone production. Plus, the sperm themselves can be harmed by vascular constriction and blood flow issues. Dr. X claimed that the "main problem of amphetamine and amphetamine derivatives is the risk of cardiovascular alterations (heart deformity) in offspring."

LSD

What about conceiving a child... on acid!? Probably not a great plan, but no one really knows for sure. Dr. Nudell told me that "most studies of LSD do not show an effect on sperm. Many studies have been done to look for DNA changes in both non-sperm and sperm cells but have been inconclusive." Dr. X included mushrooms and ketamine in his statement on LSD's relative lack of effect on reproduction. In other words: Carry on, Blue Boy, but be wary. 

MDMA/Ecstasy

If you're lucky enough to get real MDMA and not some bunk shit from the guy behind the port-a-potty at Nocturnal Wonderland, you're still going to have some issues with your semen. There's not a ton of conclusive research done on MDMA, but Dr. Yazigi told me that it can screw up the production of testosterone, just like pretty much everything on this list. He said, "There may be sperm DNA damage, degeneration of the tissue within the testicles. Sperm motivity (the ability for the sperm to swim effectively toward the egg) is preserved, but the sperm count may be decreased." That's similar to cocaine, except, as he stated, "motivity is also decreased. Here it's just the sperm numbers, the production of sperm in essence."

That means the sperm still move around normally, but there just aren't as many, which wrecks your chances of actually impregnating someone. As with meth, MDMA can lead to heart abnormalities in children.

If you've properly processed all of that information and still can't kick your habit, but you want to give your sexual partner some quality sperm, Dr. Yazigi explained that it takes about three weeks to clear affected sperm from your system:

"So the theory was that if a man was exposed to testosterone and because of that reason, he had lost sperm, then you would expect that within three to six months, you will have normal spermatogenesis again. You'll have normal sperm. The fact of the matter is that there's a number of men for whom it may take a few years to go back to a normal sperm count."

If you want to put that molly down and wait a few years, you might be better off.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Comics: Blobby Boys in 'Dr. Slime'

The Twisted History of a Mobster and the PGA Tour

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The Twisted History of a Mobster and the PGA Tour

Comics: Nature Has a Way of Sorting Things Out

Seaside Heights, New Jersey, Is a Paradise

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Over the last couple of years, the resort town of Seaside Heights, New Jersey, has managed to survive the brunt of Hurricane Sandy and a devastating fire that consumed nearly half of its boardwalk. The same can't be said about the hordes of younger tourists that have scared off both older vacation goers and locals.

There's a lot to read into in Seaside: the destruction of the middle class, the psychological effects of climate change, what Fireball Cinnamon Whisky can do to a community. But there's a deranged, undeniable kind of humanity in this degeneration—a quality that's beautiful in the way that ruins are beautiful, the beauty of surviving. Seaside is my church, and the creatures that inhabit it are my people. Here are some photographs of both.

See more of Russ's work here.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

This Machine Manufactures Untraceable Metal Guns

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This Machine Manufactures Untraceable Metal Guns

Upload Yourself into This Fashion Shoot

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"ALIENS" Adidas x Jeremy Scott dress

PHOTOGRAPHY: FREEL & GORSE
CODING: JAMES HENNESSEY
STYLIST: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Stylist Assistant: Hannah Gooding
Makeup: Amy Conley
Hair: Rebecca C Amoroso
Models: Jessica Peel from M and P, and Nina from Profile

The fashion industry is a very discriminatory one. You've seen The Devil Wears Prada, right? Well, literally everyone in fashion—designers, photographers, models, stylists, PRs, editors, people employed to blend flaxseed smoothies for editors—behaves exactly like Meryl Streep in that film. So it's little surprise that making your way into a fashion editorial isn't exactly the easiest thing to do.

However, we've decided to democratize that process. Using some inventive coding, James Hennessey and Freel & Gorse came up with this shoot, which pulls pictures from Instagram that correspond to specific hashtags (the ones in the credits for each shot), then layers them underneath some photos they took of models wearing an array of sportswear and see-through skirts. So if you want to see your face wedged behind that girl above, for example, upload a picture with the hashtag "aliens."

Or, if you'd rather just enjoy the spectacle, you can keep refreshing the page and watch the images revolve and revolve and revolve.

Click through for the rest of the shoot.

"WEED" Adidas T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms; Reebok shoes

"CARA DELEVINGNE" ASOS top, Ashish pants

"CATS" Antipodium dress

"FOOD PORN" Urban Outfitters top, Christian Cowan-Sanluis skirt

"JAMES FRANCO". American Apparel top, Christian Cowan-Sanluis skirt

"SELFIE". Ellesse T-shirt

"TRIPPY". Nike top; Beyond Retro dungarees

A Pessimist's Guide to British Prime Minister David Cameron's Big Speech

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British Prime Minister David Cameron's big conference speech on Wednesday was as depressing as it was brilliant. A man who's spent his term in government enacting policies that have repeatedly harmed the poor, the young, and the vulnerable is now patting all of those people on the it and going, “Just kidding, mate,” to make out like he's suddenly a friend of the working man. And he did that very convincingly.

Of course, there was also plenty more empty rhetoric and bullshit we need to get our heads around if we're to understand what he was really saying. So let's go through it chunk by chunk.

THE PRE-MATCH POMP

Following a video made up of supposedly rousing Conservative Party soundbites, Cameron walked into the hall to the soundtrack of the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done." Then he crowed about winning the Scottish independence referendum and still being in charge of a load of people who voted for only one of his members of parliament (MPs). Then he did a weird impression of his First Secretary of State William Hague’s Yorkshire accent and called him “the greatest living Yorkshireman," before deciding it was time to stop clowning around and get to the point.

FOND MEMORIES OF THE COALITION

“We’ve delivered a lot these past four years, but we’ve had to do it all in a coalition government. Believe me: Coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do. And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies, based on Conservative values, leading a majority Conservative government.”

Cameron alerted the nation to the depressing possibility that, with the Liberal Democreats free-falling in opinion polls, the next election could open the floodgates of unadulterated David Cameron—Cameron plus, if you will. The kind of Cameron who can get on with things without Deputy PM Nick Clegg making sad faces at him over various civil rights abuses. If all goes to plan, he seemed to be saying, we could have austerity without intra-coalition rivals writing facetious op-eds in the Times about how his own government’s economic policy is a load of shit.

If he pulls it off, I suppose we'll be looking back to the coalition as a golden era of compromise. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that things could be worse, though it's less enjoyable to be warned of the likelihood that they soon will be.

DAVID CAMERON IS A COOL GUY WHO DOESN'T CARE ABOUT GRAPHS

He continued, “I love this country—and my goal is this: to make Britain a country that everyone is proud to call home. That doesn’t just mean having the fastest-growing economy, or climbing some international league table. I didn’t come into politics to make the lines on the graphs go in the right direction. I want to help you live a better life.”

The humblebrag about the economy would be more impressive had the government not presided over the longest period of stagnation on record. More to the point, Cameron doesn’t care about climbing league tables because Britain is near the bottom of so many good ones, like using renewable energy, and the top of so many bad ones, like children being depressed and dying young—that kind of thing.

HORRIBLE, DEPRESSING FULL EMPLOYMENT

“A Britain that everyone is proud to call home is a Britain where hard work is really rewarded,” he said, spelling out his vision. Unfortunately, hard work is rewarded less and less in Cameron’s Britain, where, since 2010, real earnings have fallen for the longest period since recordkeeping began 50 years ago.

“And by the way,” he said, “you never pull one person up by pulling another one down.” Unfortunately, this is exactly what Chancellor of the Exchequer (economic policy chief) George Osborne did yesterday in capping benefits, when he said, “The fairest way to reduce welfare bills is to make sure that benefits are not rising faster than the wages of the taxpayers who are paying for them.” In other words, Osborne was saying wages are stagnating, so we’re going to make people who can’t find a job even poorer to make up for that.

Cameron put flesh on the bones. “So here’s our commitment for the next five years: what the economists would call, 'The highest employment rate of any major economy.' What I call, 'Full employment in Britain.' Just think of what that would mean. Those who can work—able to work—standing on their own two feet, looking at their children, and thinking, I am providing for you.

If the last few years are anything to go by, the reality will be people who struggle to provide for their kids slogging through too many hours in their crappy, low-paid jobs to ever see them.

Trade unionists protesting against public sector cuts in July. Photo by Hannah Ewens

WHO NEEDS BENEFITS WHEN EVERYONE HAS SEVERAL BAD JOBS?

Meanwhile, those who can’t find work will be forced into endless hoop-jumping in unemployment centers: “With us, if you’re out of work, you will get unemployment benefits but only if you go to the job center, update your CV, attend interviews, and accept the work you’re offered.”

If the unemployed are forced into work on pain of losing the dole, I guess there’s absolutely no incentive for employers to make jobs more bearable, or pay more. Don’t worry, though, the minimum wage will soon rise to £7 ($11.30), he said—which is completely inadequate and those earning it will still be in poverty. But his speechwriters decided not to mention that.

Coupled with the removal of benefits for the under-21s, which will give them the choice of "earning or learning"—which really means poverty or student debt—Cameron is trying to turn Britain into a place where there's a badly paid job for everyone, whether they want it or not. But don’t worry: Zero-hour contracts that stop you taking other jobs will be scrapped, so people are “free to take on different jobs so they can get on."

If you want to go straight from your cleaning shift to an overnight security job, you can! Nobody will stop you taking multiple minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet. And that’s freedom.

THE POOR CAN KEEP EVERY PENNY OF THEIR POVERTY WAGES

Then Cameron gave Britain’s impoverished workers a break. Specifically, you’ll get to earn £12,000 (roughly $19,400) before you pay any tax, rather that £10,500 (just under $17,000). Cameron was pleased to announce that this will take a million poor people out of paying taxes altogether. Meanwhile, people earning twice the average salary also get a tax break. Right now, if you earn £41,900 [$67,600] you qualify for the 40 percent tax rate. That threshold will rise to £50,000 [$80,700]. “We want to cut more of your taxes. But we can only do that if we keep on cutting the deficit,” he said.

This gives the game away. He could, in fact, partly cut the deficit by raising taxes—say, on the rich and corporations—so that the government has more money coming in. Instead, he’s pretending he can only manage to cut tax if he cuts the deficit. So here, "deficit" is kind of a code word for public sector spending. He also promised to cut taxes for those poor, defenseless corporations.

This will presumably mean he’s paying for tax cuts through even bigger public service cuts—and he promised £25 billion ($40 billion) more austerity in this speech. Who’s going to feel those cuts the worst? Yup, the guys at the bottom who are supposed to be celebrating not paying tax any more. The conceit was summed up in the big rhetorical moment that he was hoping to see replayed as a highlight on the evening news:

“So with us, if you work 30 hours a week on minimum wage, you will pay no income tax at all. Nothing. Zero. Zilch.” If you work 30 hours a week on £7 an hour, that amounts to £210 [$340]. “Nothing. Zero. Zilch,” is also the amount of fun you’ll have with that much money in a world where the welfare state has been stripped away to almost nothing.

SCHOOLBOY INSULTS

Then Cameron moved onto education and decided to call the opposition Labour Party hypocritical. "Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary—like me—had one of the best educations money can buy," he said. “But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.”

It would be great if Labour was planning to ban private schools, if only to diversify the backgrounds of politicians shouting at each other in party speeches. But it's not. Basically, he used this section to bash Labour for "taking its cue from the unions," which in this case means not totally ignoring teachers' opinions about how they do their jobs.

Anti-NHS-privatization protesters last year in Manchester last year. Photo by Chris Bethell

THE NHS

He continued hating on Labour, calling out their “complete and utter lies” that the National Health Service (NHS) is not safe under the Conservatives. “I just think, 'How dare you?'” he said, with a fairly credible level of outrage—unsurprising, considering he's genuinely relied on the NHS to help his disabled son.

I just hope he got equally miffed at his own health minister after VICE’s Solomon Hughes revealed that Conservative MP George Freeman held a behind-closed-doors meeting funded by private health insurers to chat about potentially making people pay to go to the doctor. Meanwhile, the Green Party pointed out that the pledge to raise NHS spending doesn’t really mean anything, since its budget has increased every single year since 1951.

LET'S BUILD LESS THAN HALF THE NUMBER OF HOUSES WE NEED

"Young people watched Location, Location, Location not as a reality show, but as fantasy," said Cameron. “We’re going to build 100,000 new homes,” he said, “and they’ll be 20 percent cheaper than normal. But here’s the crucial part. Buy-to-let landlords won’t be able to snap them up. Wealthy foreigners won’t be able to buy them. Just first-time buyers under the age of 40.”

If it happens, this is undoubtedly a policy that will bring about some touching scenes of people sitting proudly in their first homes in a BBC retrospective about the late 2010s. A hundred thousand does sound like a lot of houses, but it’s half as many as Labour have pledged to build every year by 2020. Both pledges fall massively short of the target that housing charity Shelter has cited, which is 250,000 per year. Cameron said, “Homes built for you, homes made for you—the Conservative Party, once again, the party of home ownership in our country.” But it looks like both Labour and the Conservatives will in fact still be the parties of not nearly enough homes.

THE DEPRESSING CONCLUSION

After some anti-immigrant nods to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), it was time to wrap up. “It doesn’t matter whether Parliament is hung, drawn, or quartered, there is only one real choice,” he said. “The Conservatives or Labour. Me in Downing Street, or Ed Miliband in Downing Street.” That was probably the most honest part of the speech, and easily the most depressing.

Follow Simon Childs on Twitter.

Thanks to John Weeks, professor emeritus at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London for his assistance with this article.

Here's a First Look at the Ferguson Police Department's Internal Code of Conduct

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Here's a First Look at the Ferguson Police Department's Internal Code of Conduct

VICE News: The Fight Against Ebola - Part 1

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The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa began in Guinea in December 2013. From there, it quickly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Cases also appeared in Senegal and Nigeria, and a separate outbreak appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, Liberia lies is at the center of the epidemic, with more than 3,000 cases of infection. About half of them have been fatal. 

As President Barack Obama announced that he would be sending American military personnel to West Africa to help combat the epidemic, VICE News traveled to the Liberian capital of Monrovia to spend time with those on the front lines of the outbreak. 

In Part 1, we meet confused and distressed people trying to receive treatment in the increasingly chaotic city, and speak to an ambulance driver doing his best to aid the sick.

A Few Impressions: Jimi Hendrix, Behind the Music

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André 3000 as Jimi Hendrix. Photo courtesy of Darko Entertainment

There’s a new film out about Jimi Hendrix, written by the guy who adapted Twelve Years a Slave from the Solomon Northup memoir. But you wouldn’t know by the title, Jimi: All Is by My Side. I was a huge Hendrix fan in high school, listening to the albums on repeat at my friend Ken’s (the Monterey Pop Festival recording was our favorite), and still can’t quite figure the title out. But maybe this is supposed to be an extreme insider’s take on Jimi.

The film uses strange, superimposed titles to introduce characters in a story that otherwise stays firmly ensconced in its diegetic era of the rising flower children. The titles feel like they belong in a documentary, and the performances, especially André Benjamin (Outkast’s André 3000) as Jimi, are strong and convincing enough to be mistaken as nonfiction. But the lighting and production design are stylized to the point of purple-haze dreaminess. While the world is evoked with enough balance between realistic acting and hazed atmosphere to capture the spirit of the greatest gypsy guitar-playing mystic legend to ever live, the filmmakers fall in and out of some of the pitfalls that are present when making a biopic—especially when making a biopic about an artist when the production doesn’t have the rights to the art. That’s the elephant in this room, right? They couldn’t get the rights to Jimi’s music.

It’s a shame, because this film was certainly deserving of the music. Benjamin only plays a handful of songs that are recognizable, e.g., when Jimi played “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in London with half of the Beatles in attendance. Like the movie about Francis Bacon that didn’t use any of his actual paintings, or the same thing with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and even Jackson Pollock (in the Ed Harris take), it could be argued that the art was replicated sufficiently in their respective movies to keep the skein of the narrative intact without too many distracting omissions.

The Jimi movie works on the level of performance: All of these actors and films deliver the men behind the artists. But what does it mean to not have their art represented? Especially when the art is as recognizable as Jimi Hendrix songs? It’s one thing to replicate a Jackson Pollock drip painting (which Ed Harris does very, very well—coincidentally, there is the bottom half of one in the Hendrix movie), and it’s another thing to play at a Jimi Hendrix instrumental style. In the former we accept the drip painting as at least a representation of the original, and even if we are Pollock specialists and know that the movie version isn’t exactly right, we go with it, just like we go with the idea of talking monkeys if the world around them supports the fantasy. But when in scene after scene we hear songs that almost sound like Jimi, but never break into full-blown Jimi songs, we keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

But there is something interesting about the way this film deals with its handcuffs. Instead of the conventional artist biopic that gives us a bunch of everything that we already know, we get an approach that seemingly conjures up the secret Jimi, the authentic Jimi, the Jimi behind the music. The first third of the movie has Imogen Poots’s character (she plays Linda Keith, the woman who discovered Jimi and was also Keith Richards’s girlfriend) as the lead; Jimi hardly talks while she guides him away from playing backup in Greenwich Village to leading his own band in London. There, like Lana Del Rey four decades later, he eventually broke out. This approach allows the audience to gradually get closer to Jimi in the same way—and at the same time—that Imogen’s character gets to know him. She is the early motor for the film, and an excellent and intriguing one, as she is a woman connected to two musical geniuses but not a musician herself. (It's worth noting that Kathy Etchingham, an Australian girlfriend of Hendrix's who is depicted as enduring a brutal beating at his hands in the movie, has disputed its accuracy.)

Once in London, Jimi starts to take over as the narrative motor, dating around and establishing his stage presence. Throughout this section of the film, we hear him play but never sing. André 3000 is so good at Jimi’s mannerisms, and voice, and the psychology underneath the surface, that we believe it’s Jimi without hearing the actual songs. It’s just not the Jimi we expect. The lack of Hendrix songs actually adds to the authenticity by cutting down on the Hollywood approach of inserting obvious songs in convenient places, and instead gives the impression that we are watching things as they really happened because Jimi wasn’t playing his most well-known hits from the beginning.

The climax comes when Jimi actually sings, which is a little strange because he wasn’t known for his singing, and is said to have hated his own voice. But in this movie, because the audience has been waiting for it the entire film, his singing voice is a welcome crescendo that finally fulfills the expectation set at the beginning and deferred for so long. I see now that it was the final piece that we were waiting for, the last test for André 3000 and the film to pass: He looks and talks like Jimi, he dresses like Jimi, he understands Jimi’s mind, but will he sing like Jimi? We don’t care if he can play guitar like Jimi, because we wouldn’t know if he’s actually playing or not, but the singing is where we can actually judge, and when he does sing, and succeeds, so late in the film, we retroactively ask: Would it have been better if we had heard it earlier? No, not in this film. This film is about the man behind the music. If you want the famous songs, you can go buy the records.

We Talked to Bill Nye about the Tar Sands and the Muzzling of Canadian Scientists

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Bill Nye: still a science guy. Photo via BillNye.com
Yesterday, Bill Nye touched down in Toronto to attend the International Astronautical Congress, an annual gathering of space enthusiasts (where, as Nye says, the nerd factor is “turned up to 11”) who share research papers on the future of space exploration. Since his mega-hit show, Nye has taken the reigns of the Planetary Society, an organization founded by Carl Sagan in the 1980s that focuses on science advocacy, research, and outreach.

As the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye is clearly using his powers as a celebrity scientist for good. During a keynote speech at the University of Toronto last night, he discussed a project the Planetary Society was developing to conquer the possibility of an asteroid hitting Earth. Their solution? Laser bees. These “bees” are tiny robots that surround an offending asteroid and by using mirrors, “focus sunlight onto a spot on the asteroid” which can “gently move it.”

Anyhow, I caught up with Bill Nye before his keynote to chat about Canada, the tar sands, and the Harper government’s muzzling of scientists. While the topic was a bit of a downer, Nye was incredibly positive about Canada’s space program—gushing over the space station, which is pictured on our five-dollar bill:

“I really admire the Canadian space program, you guys do so much more with less. Somehow Canada gets involved with every mission everywhere [laughs]. And I guess the trick, if I understand it, is that Canada doesn’t build its own rockets, which is the expensive part. You specialize in specific instruments, and of course the Canadarm. That’s why [the Planetary Society] is very happy to expand our volunteer network into Canada, because the enthusiasm’s there.... It’s on your five-dollar bill!”

That said, here’s how our conversation went.

Bill Nye: I’m hip with VICE; I’m down with the VICE.
VICE: Oh, awesome, that’s good to hear. Let’s jump right into it then… Climate change has been immensely politicized. How do you respond to outside influences, like industry and government, that try to control the message of the scientific community?
The government in Canada is currently being influenced by the fossil-fuel industry. [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper is a controversial guy in the science community because [of] the policies, especially in Western Canada, with regard to the production—that’s the verb they use, "producing," but you’re taking old earth and burning it—of tar sands, oil shale… Is there tar shale? Is there sand goo? Whatever.

I used to work in the oil field, albeit much farther south, in Texas and New Mexico. Oil is noxious, but it’s not that noxious as stuff to spill on the ground. However, when you start taking this tar sand and oil shale, where you’re strip-mining many, many tonnes of earth to get to this stuff, and then you have to burn a lot of it to make it soupy enough to pump—the environmental impact is huge!  And there was some trouble with some train cars, and some explosions.

A town exploded.
Yeah. This is all stuff that could be controlled, but part of it, at least for me as an engineer, is that the extraction methods in that part of the world are so aggressive, it’s so hard to get this stuff to [a point where it’s] useful. The bad news, writ large, is that we’ll never run out of fossil fuels. There’s so much stuff, so much coal, so much tar-sand oil shale everywhere around the world that we’ll never use it up. But we will use up the really easy-to-burn gasoline and diesel fuel.

So we have to resort to tougher and tougher extraction methods.
Right, or how about this: What if we had a way to use less? Wow. Or a hundred ways to use less?

Wouldn’t that be novel?
Yeah, so the environmental community generally is pretty disappointed in how Canadian oil companies are extracting this stuff from Western Canada.

Yes, and in Canada now, as a journalist for example, if I am to reach out to a federally funded scientist, I’m put through a PR person who will vet my questions, who may never respond to me, and who will certainly monitor the scientist’s potential responses.
I know! It’s quite extreme. It’s really something.

What do you think about our government limiting the way scientists can speak to the public?
Well, it’s not in anyone’s best interests. So, speaking as a guy from the US, we have a very similar problem. Some people would say it’s the same problem… The thing that’s gone badly is that the people who want to maintain the status quo of fossil-fuel burning have managed to introduce the idea that scientific uncertainty [on climate change] is the same as doubt about the whole thing. And that [trend has] justified in many legislators’ minds, both in the US and especially in Canada, particularly Western Canada, that It’s OK, the science of climate change isn’t proven, and let’s just carry on. And that’s just not in anybody’s best interest.

Do you think the funders of scientific research are entitled to control the publication of the scientists’ results? Obviously the Harper government thinks they’re in a position to say, "No, you can’t tell people what we discovered, because we paid for it."
I think that it’s not in anyone’s best interest. It’s certainly not in the spirit of academia, and it’s this thing where you don’t trust it. That is to say, somebody thinks he or she knows better than the guy or gal doing the research. And that’s obviously wrong.

The suppression of knowledge is why things go wrong. I’m not saying you don’t want to keep secrets for military or national-security reasons, but the science of climate change is, by many reasonable estimates, more strongly proven (or the research is more robust) than the connection between cigarettes and cancer.

Really?
No, seriously. You can suppress that for a while, but it’s going to reach the tipping point. And I will say to the legislators, and the voters who might support them: It’s going to come back to bite you. You’re going to lose political power. And for us, who breathe the same atmosphere as you all, the sooner we change the better. There are going to be huge opportunities. And I appreciate that oil companies feel that they’re doing patriotic things by providing energy, economic wealth to Canada, especially Western Canada. I appreciate that. But it’s short-term thinking. 

To learn more about the Planetary Society (they’re looking for members and volunteers) visit their website.

Follow Patrick McGuire on Twitter.

Would a Curfew for Men Be Good for Society?

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Photo by Valentina Quintano

Back in the early 70s, Golda Meir, the then prime minister of Israel, was faced with a government cabinet full of men discussing how best to curb a wave of violent rapes. The idea of banning women from the streets after dark was floated. Meir made a counteroffer.

"Men are attacking women," she said. "Not the other way around. If there is going to be a curfew, let the men be locked up, not the women."

Ultimately, the idea was dismissed as unworkable. But since then it has been seriously considered by a handful of communities around the world. This time, it's Bucaramanga—a city in the Colombian state of Santander—that will be taking up Meir's metaphorical baton. Next week—on Thursday, October 9—the city of just under 600,000 will experience its first "women-only" night as part of a campaign launched by the state governor's office.

Speaking to the Colombian media, Juan Camilo Beltrán—president of the Bucaramanga Chamber of Commerce and one of the scheme's champions—said that the curfew itself, though symbolic in nature, is a drive to thwart the plague of violent attacks taking place against the city's women.

"When it comes to peaceful partying," Beltrán said, "women are always the best behaved."

Bars and clubs are being encouraged to host women-only events, while men who have to be out and about in the evening will need to carry a safe-conduct permit issued by the mayor's office, explaining why they are out during the curfew.

Any fines handed out are likely to be symbolic, however. The success of the scheme will rest on whether men choose to go along with the campaign. As Beltrán conceded, "We can only hope men accept the challenge [to stay at home]," which is far from a certainty.

Colombia is no stranger to the idea, a similar curfew having been partially successful in the country's capital at the turn of the millennium. And a less successful attempt took place in Europe back in 2003, when a Spanish town gave it a go. But when all's said and done, is the idea of a curfew for men really an effective way to deal with violence against women?

Suzanne Clisby, the director of postgraduate studies at Hull University's School of Social Sciences, doesn’t think so.

“I do not think curfews are an effective way to deal with violence against women,” she told me. “The best a formal curfew could hope to do is send a message from the state that violence against women is seen as unacceptable and will be taken seriously, but unless this were followed through in a whole range of other ways, it is fairly pointless.”

To date, it is this flaw that has limited the success of these curfews. They have all been symbolic in nature, and while they may stimulate debate, they have so far failed to make any real difference in preventing gender-based violence in society.

Perversely, they may even have a negative effect. As Clisby puts it, “It could perpetuate the myth that violence against women happens only at night by strangers.”

Creating a narrative that drunkenness on nights out is the main cause of violent attacks on women obscures the stark facts of the situation. The perpetrators of gender-based violence are usually known to the victim, and these tend to happen at home or places of work, rather than nightclubs or pubs.

Alison Phipps, the director of gender studies at the University of Sussex, argues that one of the problems with the curfew is “it sits within the rhetoric that male violence is inevitable and women have to either try to avoid it or be removed from it—which is unhelpful at best. The message we need to convey is that men need to behave differently, rather than women and men being separated—in whatever way—for women's protection.”

And it is here where we can find a positive aspect of male-only night curfews. As a pedagogical tool, it does tend to encourage a debate about gender-based violence. But perhaps the efforts and energies could be better channeled into more effective educational campaigns.

“We need to look at and challenge the ways boys can be gendered into particular forms of hegemonic masculinities that can be damaging for themselves, as well as for women and other people around them," Clisby added. "Also, we need to look at the ways girls may learn normative constructions of femininities that can leave them vulnerable to sexual exploitation."

So could we ever see a curfew happening in a country like the UK? Phipps suggested we shouldn’t hold our breath.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like that in the UK, as I can’t see how it could be enforced. Unless it had a consensual element, where men took part willingly as part of a social experiment or political statement, which might be quite effective."

We’ll see whether the men of Bucaramanga embrace this social experiment next week.

Follow Euclides Montes on Twitter


State-Sponsored Prostitution for Soldiers Was Once Routine on the Island of Kinmen

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Movie still via YouTube user Ablaze Image

Paradise in Service is a brand-new Taiwanese movie about the adventures of some Cold War-era soldiers in a state-sponsored brothel. Though it may sound like the plot of a porno or some shitty, post-Superbad teen comedy, the movie is in competition at festivals and—more to the point—the Taiwanese army really did create a military-run network of brothels on the island of Kinmen, and I went there. 

Kinmen is so close to the People’s Republic that on a clear enough day, you can easily make out mainland China. Kinmen was made the first line of defense against the Communists during the Cold War. At one point, it was the most heavily militarized spot on the planet, with over 100,000 active soldiers stationed there. It was a fortress of cramped bomb shelters, hidden land mines, and regular shelling from the mainland—not what most would call a fun place.

Original photos by the author

For some quality R&R, soldiers could visit one of the conveniently located cat houses there and rub uglies with any one of the state-sanctioned prostitutes. Unit 381, the bureau in charge of managing the brothels, oversaw 11 locations on the island. It was a policy put in place to solve a problem: The pent-up stress from living under threat of swift death was affecting discipline and military efficiency. There were incidents of soldiers raping local girls, and regular visits to the whorehouse was ostensibly a way of alleviating such issues.

Unit 381 was in operation on Kinmen up until 1990, when pressure from local feminist groups finally forced the last bordello to close.

Today, the legacy of 381 is a mixed bag. While some locals are ashamed of the brothels’ legacy, some in Kinmen believe the prostitutes were necessary. “I think they are nameless heroes,” said Hung Shu-Ting, a 23-year-old graduate student at National Quemoy University. “The soldiers needed them; it’s instinct." Locals often spoke of the women in this way, as though they were a necessary commodity, and whatever their intentions, it could be pretty off-putting.

Chen I Chieh, a 25-year-old Kinmen tour guide, had similar feelings, though her expression of said feelings was a little problematic: “Every day I see the news that somebody’s been raped. It’s sick. If [the soldiers] didn’t have 381, then they would have had a reason to rape," she said, then transitioned into familiar praise for the prostitutes themselves: "I think they are heroes because many women don’t like to do this kind of job." She also pointed out that if each of the 100,000 soldiers could have had their own girlfriends, it would have been "more simple."

Syril Hung is a local business owner who grew up on the island, and his views on Unit 381 are probably meant to sound blithely pragmatic. “The brothels were part of the military system. They existed from the needs of young adults,” he said. Syril’s cafe is on the grounds of the Military Brothel Exhibition Hall, a museum about Unit 381. 

The museum itself is a former brothel. It consists of a breezy courtyard surrounded by simple rooms, each with a bed, cabinet, mirror, and bathroom. The exhibit halls’ informational placards are peppered with information about the soldiers’ struggles. I couldn't tell if the wordings on the signs were intentional double entendres:

  • “The soldiers who had come to Kinmen from Mainland China continually ‘waited for war’” (note the oddly-placed scare quotes).
  • “On a strange island far away from their homes, they anxiously waited for war to break out. The waiting must have been unbearable."
  • “So that the men would not tire themselves out traveling down the mountain to meet their sexual needs, the tea house was opened to bring the services they needed right next door." 
  • “These women were not forced into prostitution... They came and went silently."
  • “Young daughters, devote yourself to the home country and open up your humble abode."

In the aforementioned movie, Paradise in Service, such double entendres provide the movie's comic relief. “I have two guns of varied length. One for the ladies and one for the Commies," carols a marching group of privates.

The virgin protagonist, Pao, is determined to save himself for his girlfriend back home, a goal made all the harder while surrounded by sweaty, loud, and constant copulation. The film touches on issues of national identity, filial obligation, separation, loneliness, military infighting, political propaganda, and gender roles. It is the first production of its kind to take a swing at this controversial period of Taiwanese history, and Niu pulls it off with subtlety and style. The film has been well-received and was recently chosen to open the 19th Busan International Film Festival in early October, one of Asia’s top film festivals.

Despite its weaponized past, Kinmen today is solitary and rural. Its bomb shelters are abandoned, and its military tunnels are now tourist attractions. Old tanks rust away in weedy plots of grass next to lonely barricades overgrown with moss. A seven-year demining campaign has rid the island of dangerous explosives, and clam diggers search at low tide without threat of death.

Unit 381 has, until recently, been collecting dust right alongside these archaic parts of old Kinmen. But the museum and especially Niu Chen-Zer’s film are doing some dusting. Says Chen, “People may not want to talk about 381—Chinese people don’t like to talk about sex. But it’s true." 

Follow Brent Crane on Twitter.

Lyft Drivers Are Burning Their Pink Mustaches

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All photos by the author

In normal circumstances, Lyft’s drivers congregate in a Facebook group set up by the ridesharing company in order for them to share tips with one another, ask questions, or reach out to corporate with feedback or concerns. When yet another cut in driver pay was announced on Thursday, September 25, however, the driver's lounge filled up with countless “Fuck this, I quit!” posts, calls to organize strikes, and demands that Lyft's CEO, John Zimmer, step down. On top of all this, dozens of drivers decided they’d be leaving the company in a more dramatic, and cathartic, fashion: by burning their cars' iconic fuzzy pink mustaches in a symbolic pyre.

I met one of the organizers (who, like many drivers I met, did not want her name shared) on the beach where this mustache burning party was to take place and she laid it out for me as the other drivers showed up with pizza, beer, lighter fluid, and giant mustaches. At this point, she explained, most drivers were driving for both Lyft and Uber, and everyone was really just hanging on and waiting for the moment when Uber will inevitably emerge victorious, purchases Lyft, and raises their rates back up to more reasonable levels. This particular rate cut had been another 10 percent decrease, the third of its kind in September, most likely to compete with Uber.

Lyft, unlike Uber, has aimed to make the experience more socially engaging for the passenger. Drivers are encouraged to be chatty or decorate their cars in themes. This social aspect was even a key factor in some of Lyft’s investors choosing to back the company over Uber. 

"Lyft is a real community—with both the drivers and riders being inherently social—making real friendships and saving money,” is how Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm that gave Lyft $60 million, put it in a blog post last year

The organizer told me that Uber has always been up front about its view that only the bottom line matters,  while Lyft hid behind its quirky façade and pretended the mission was “changing the world” and “building a community,” when anyone who observed its cutthroat business strategy unfold could plainly see the focus was dollars and cents. She noted that, for all its faults, Uber incentivized its drivers to get on the road with cold hard cash, while Lyft tended to show its appreciation with attaboys and mustache tchotchkes. 

Other drivers at the fire echoed her sentiments. In fact, compared to the other bonfires surrounding us on the beach, this one was pretty dour, despite the pizza and beer. The anger and frustration was palpable and nobody was chit-chatting about their lives outside of Lyft. It was all shop talk, and the shop sounded in bad shape.

Gone are the smiling, friendly, and competent Lyft drivers of last summer. As these drivers have seen their compensation go from a guaranteed minimum of $18 per hour to a fare rate of $1.10 per mile and $0.21 per minute (when they can even get a fare; one of their complaints is that there's an overabundance of cars on the road), those with better moneymaking options have moved on to other work while the holdouts and new, completely unvetted hires are left to fight over scraps. Many of these poor souls wind up making less than minimum wage at the end of a shift, which Lyft gets away with as it classify its drivers not as employees, but as “platform users.” Or is it “independent contractors?” Or “partners?” Those terms have been used in the past and the company can’t seem to nail down the language when communicating with its drivers, but one thing is certain: They are emphatically not employees.

Next, I spoke with Sarah, who's something of a celebrity in the SoCal Lyft scene. Sarah had raised the ire of the Facebook group moderators by coining the phrase “but did they tip?” See, as Lyft's fares dropped, passengers started treating the company like the 99-cent store it was positioning itself as. This sometimes took the form of condescension and rudeness towards drivers, but mostly it just meant that the once-common tips stopped almost altogether. So when a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed driver shared a story in the lounge about a friendly passenger, Sarah’s catchphrase acted as a sobering pinprick to pop that balloon.

“But did they tip?” No, they didn’t tip. Not anymore. Sarah eventually got kicked out of the lounge for posting a picture of homegrown tomatoes and asking if any other drivers would like them.

“I was kicked out of the lounge for bringing down morale.” Sarah said. “But this is an elective service and our culture is taught to tip for elective services. And yet HQ doesn’t want to offend or dissuade customers by making the ability to tip more prominently featured for fear they may end up going to Uber. And so no drivers get tipped even when a passenger would like to give one. Maybe that’s more likely what’s bringing down morale.”

When the influx of drivers showing up at the party trickled to one or two new arrivals every ten minutes, we started the official mustache burning. The organizer, donned in a shemagh and, looking more like an Arab Spring revolutionary than a pissed-off Lyft driver, dipped the pink 'stache into the fire pit where it went up in a blaze instantly.

The faces around the fire had Cheshire Cat grins from ear to ear. You could see how satisfying it was for them to symbolically cut themselves out of such an abusive employment relationship. The somber mood of the earlier chit-chat dissipated and the three dozen or so drivers started dancing around as they took turns throwing their 'staches into the flames.

Not wanting to come off as assholes, the pyro drivers noted that these mustaches were probably putting a ton of noxious chemicals into the air, so they held back on burning all their stock. We switched to pink paper mustaches, ranging in size from life-size replicas of the car 'staches down to two-inch confetti versions.

I asked the girl who made the confetti, “Were these left over from happier times with Lyft? A Lyft party or something?” No. She’d cut them all out today. That is the kind of passion and dedication that led to the non-employees decorating their cars like the Batmobile or a rave during the old salad days of Lyft. 

Confetti girl gave me a handful of mustaches to throw into the fire. I tossed them like an idiot, and the beach wind took my entire payload past the fire and scattered it on the dark sand. I spent the next five minutes searching for my litter by the light of my phone before bringing the wad of garbage back to the fire pit and carefully tucking it into the blaze to avoid a repeat of my last attempt.

I cracked a beer and chatted with a guy in an Eyes Wide Shut masquerade mask. He was very much enjoying the event and likened it to a mini Burning Man. He and the others seemed to be getting a much-needed release from this stach sacrifice. (Stachrifice? Nah.) 

With the mood now lightened, people started taking selfies flipping the bird at their mustaches, surely to post on the unofficial Lyft lounges later. They started talking more about what they do outside of ridesharing, past careers, hobbies. There was no real plan for after this burning. They’d keep driving for Uber, taking advantage of the surge times and promotional weekends. They wouldn't, however, be going back to that Facebook lounge.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Hey, Do You Want to Come to a Party and Listen to Fleetwood Mac for Eight Hours?

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Hey, Do You Want to Come to a Party and Listen to Fleetwood Mac for Eight Hours?

'Gregor' Is a Great New British Comedy About Doing Nothing

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“Millennial,” “Generation Y,” or, according to Bret Easton Ellis, “Generation Wuss.” Whatever you want to call this current crop of 18- to 30-year-olds, we're constantly getting the shit kicked out of us for the crime of being born during a period that both hangs success in front of our faces and crushes any real hope of ever attaining it.

Gregor, a new independent British film, hones in on this generational problem, following the life of a 20-something after he's fired from an internship. It’s about wanting to break out of type, but not having the impetus to go about doing it because everywhere you look there’s reconfirmation that you’re “narcissistic,” “privileged,” and “lazy.”

His solution is the film’s tagline: “Do nothing,” which is a reaction to the conflict of external pressure to achieve traditional goals (great job, hot spouse, nice house) and internal ambitions (become a world-renowned house DJ, collect Byzantine mosaics, publish a pamphlet of politically-charged poetry on rice paper).

The film was funded by £8,000 ($13,000) raised on Kickstarter and managed to become a vastly superior movie to Zach Braff’s latest, which went through the same crowdsourcing machine and raised $3 million. Eschewing angst for happiness, Gregor is as funny and uplifting as a movie about being a total fuck-up can possibly be.

I spoke to Mickey Down and Konrad Kay—the director/writer team—about the notoriety of Gen Y, their comedic influences, and quitting a finance job to become a filmmaker.

VICE: What came first—the character of Gregor or the themes you wanted to explore?
Mickey Down:
It’s the chicken and the egg—one informed the other. Konrad and I had always wanted to create something about how we interpreted the experience of being in your mid 20s.

Konrad: Fundamentally, it tells the story of a guy who chooses the path of least resistance, with his eyes on a prize that he can’t be bothered to work for. The character of Gregor aimed to sum up all those feelings of mid-20s angst, ambition, and aspiration within a character that may be slightly feckless but ultimately isn’t a bad guy. It’s not gloomy. It’s a comedy.

What drew me to Gregor originally was the tagline and the poster, both of which sum up the film pretty nicely.
Mickey: Yeah, Gregor is a guy who wants it all—even if “all’ means a carton of milk, a widescreen TV, and a box set of The Sopranos—but in return for as little effort as possible. That’s the way the Penrose stairs on the poster came about…
Konrad: He’s locked in a neve rending cycle of pleasure and punishment, getting nowhere and learning nothing.

Gregor waits around for good things to come to him, without doing any work. Do you think this is a widespread thing for young people?
Mickey: I don’t know if we would go as far as to say that it’s “a widespread thing,” but I feel that one of the characteristics of this generation—in the Western world certainly—is that its expectations far outweigh what, in many scenarios, is realistically possible. The initial tagline for the film was “a generation who feel they can do anything by right and end up doing nothing by default,” and it was always these kinds of characters who we wanted to explore.

Konrad: There’s a feeling among certain young people like Gregor that, because you’ve been privileged with a good education and all the tools needed for success, you can wait around and let that success find you, rather than going out there and achieving it yourself.



So why is this laziness particular to our generation? Why us, why now?  
Mickey: That's a difficult question. Maybe there's a tendency for millennials to feel oppressed by a lack of opportunity, the state of the economy, to play the victim: "Have you seen the state of shit out there? It's not my fault. Turn on the TV." To give a non-generic answer: Maybe one point of difference is the instant affirmation of social media—"likes" on Instagram and stuff. That whole currency gives you a weird kind of satisfaction, a momentary sense of achievement. Give yourself enough of those little fixes of social approval and you feel like you've achieved something. You don't need to get off your arse to feel that.

This is your first film—what were your influences?
Konrad: We really wanted to marry a completely natural tone of acting with absurd or heightened situations. Some early episodes of Louie, like the one where his date leaves in a helicopter, does that really nicely. The other influences are too wide to list—Lena Dunham, Peep Show, Woody Allen, Withnail and I. We're obsessed with comedy, so it's all there. That said, we’re massively influenced by Steve McQueen, especially Shame, and there are some scenes that purposefully pay homage to that film.

Mickey: A lot of the way it looked was in coordination with our director of photography, Sam Goldwater. We thought there was no reason that a comedy shouldn't look good and be nicely framed. That look doesn't have to be just for art house stuff.

Before making the film, you guys also worked in business, so a lot of your own lives echo throughout the film. Are you guys Gregor, or are you better than him?
Mickey:
No. Gregor has too much sex. That was other people. I’m sure we’ve all fucked up and made as many bad decisions as Gregor, but unlike him I’d like to think we’re slightly better at learning from our mistakes.

Gregor also satirizes big business and huge salaries. What advice would you give young people who want to work for the highest possible salary?
Mickey Do whatever makes you happy and fulfills your potential. For us, working in finance was never going to work out because we were pretty shit at it. Konrad got fired and I jumped before I was pushed.

Konrad: Then again, we have friends who work in finance who absolutely love it and who we couldn’t possibly imagine doing anything else. If you think being a banker is going to fulfil your potential and make you happy, then go for it. We’re not nihilists.

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Gregor is currently showing at Raindance Film Festival. 

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