TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010


Gulf oil spill research can’t wait


by Robert B. Gagosian and Christopher F. D’Elia


he Gulf of Mexico has been inun- dated with the equivalent of more than an Exxon Valdez-size spill each week — threatening the health of the marine environment, the public and the livelihoods of gulf resi- dents. From the first day of the Deep- water Horizon disaster, Gulf Coast residents have wanted to know how much oil was spilling; where it was coming from and where it was going; what effects the oil would have on coastal ecosystems and how fast they would recover; and how this tragic event was going to affect their health, their jobs and their communities. Un- fortunately, the government, BP and scientists were not prepared to an- swer those questions. Three months later, we still have more questions than answers. The major federal scientific re- sponse to date has been focused on the Natural Resources Damages As- sessment (NRDA) process prescribed by the Ocean Pollution Act of 1990, as the government begins to build its case against BP to ensure that the na- tion is reimbursed for the immense damage done to the environment. It has also been widely reported that BP has been engaging academic scien- tists for its NRDA defense. Billions of dollars are at stake, so litigation is likely to go on for years. Because the NRDA is an adversarial process, both sides will seek to use sci- ence in a legal context, with the ad- ministration attempting to maximize financial damages and BP trying to minimize them. Much of the informa- tion obtained from research and mon- itoring will be tied up in the courts rather than being made publicly avail- able and scrutinized. The broader sci- entific community will be unable to use much of this information to un- derstand the ongoing effects of the oil and dispersants, or to help our na- tion’s policymakers better prepare for future accidents.


T MUSADEQ SADEQ/ASSOCIATED PRESS


Afghan women listen to a female election worker, right, as they wait for voter registration cards in Kabul on Sunday.


MICHAEL GERSON ‘realism’ as defeatism Will women pay for the dealmakers’ desperation?


Early on, there was hope for devel- opment of a comprehensive science plan that would enable the nation to learn from this disaster and better un- derstand the effects of oil spills on the marine environment and coastal com- munities. The aim was to integrate the efforts of federal agencies with aca- demic research capacities. An initial effort to provide support for such a plan was spearheaded by BP, which announced in May that it would launch a 10-year, $500 million re- search initiative based on a peer- reviewed process separate from the NRDA process. Results from research funded by this initiative were to be made available to the public and sub- ject to peer review. We hoped that this research would be based in part on recommendations that resulted from a symposium convened at Louisiana State University in June, when more than 200 researchers from across the nation discussed the scientific needs for understanding the ecological im- pact — such as the spill’s toxicity and effect on the food chain — and other consequences of oil, gas and dis- persant contamination.


While $30 million was allocated, the BP research initiative is unfortu- nately on hold. More than six weeks ago, the White House requested that the company work closely with Gulf Coast governors and state and local environmental and health authorities to determine the next steps for this initiative. A decision has yet to be reached. Our nation needs a comprehensive science plan to learn from and re- spond better to this tragedy. Those working in academia, federal and state government, nongovernmental organizations, and industry need to be consulted and included. The feder- al government must also make fund- ing available, apart from the NRDA process, to enable independent, peer- reviewed science to be undertaken. We need these things now. Every


day of delay means more valuable data is not being collected, and ulti- mately lost. After the Exxon Valdez spill, it took more than three years for a research initiative to come to frui- tion, a terrible loss of scientific oppor- tunity and information critical to planning and implementing better re- sponses to future spills. President Obama signed an exec- utive order last week establishing a national policy for the stewardship of the oceans, coasts and Great Lakes. The White House needs to express similar leadership when it comes to the gulf region’s marine environment and the research necessary to under- stand it with respect to the spill. We hope this can still be a “teachable mo- ment” and not another lost opportuni- ty.


Robert B. Gagosian is president and chief executive of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership and a former director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Christopher F. D’Elia is dean of the School of the Coast and Environment at Louisiana State University. LSU has received funding from BP for research on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.


Taliban toughness—revealed little that is new. But it will intensify a popular kind of desperation. A consensus is growing among for- eign policy realists, skittish NATO allies and antiwar activists that the time has come to cut a deal with the Taliban. The Afghan government, they argue, is hopeless; recent elections were discred- iting; nation-building has failed. The only hope is to pursue not only reinte- gration of low- and mid-level Taliban fighters into Afghan society but recon- ciliation with Taliban leaders based in Pakistan. As long as these leaders end their relationship with al-Qaeda — the only firm, non-negotiable red line — the Taliban could return to effective control of southern Afghanistan in a more de- centralized system.


T


Some Afghans are preparing for this prospect — particularly those who find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. “Women are living in great fear for a peace deal with the Taliban because of what it will mean for their rights,” says the manager of an Afghan woman’s shelter. In areas controlled by the Tali- ban, schools for girls are shut down, women are terrorized for working out- side the home, and female politicians and activists are attacked and mur- dered. A typical “night letter” from the Taliban reads: “We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise we will cut the heads off your children and we shall set fire to your daughter.” An Afghan women’s rights activist recently explained to Human Rights Watch, “Every woman activist who has raised her voice in the last 10 years fears [the Taliban] will kill us.” This debate is a conflict not only of


two policy views but of two worlds. Re- cently, I attended a meeting of diplo- mats, foreign policy experts and jour- nalists at which a diplomatic settlement with the Taliban was broadly endorsed. The participants admitted that some re- grettable abuses would result. But Af- ghanistan, in the general view, had be- come a costly distraction from issues such as Iran and North Korea. Best to cut our losses and get out. Around the polished table, every participant was a well-dressed Western man, casually condemning millions of poor and pow- erless women to fear and slavery. Supporters of a settlement with the Taliban respond that they are just fac-


THE PLUM LINE


Excerpts from Greg Sargent’s blog on domestic politics and debate on the Hill: voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line


Another hearing on Black Panthers?


Senate Republicans have announced


that they’re seeking hearings into whether the Obama Justice Department engaged in racial bias in connection with the decision to narrow the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. The Justice decision angered conservatives who said the evidence had supported a broader prosecution of the case. But what some folks may not remember


is that Senate Republicans already quizzed Justice officials on this case three months ago, in a public hearing on Capitol Hill. So why do we need more hearings? I read a transcript of the April 20 Senate


Judiciary Committee hearing concerning oversight of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. During the hearing, Sen. Jeff Sessions extensively quizzed Tom Pe- rez, the head of that division, about the New Black Panther case. Sessions alleged that the Justice Depart- ment had erected a “steel barrier” against efforts to probe this matter. In response, Perez pointed out that his department had


already provided “over 4,000 pages of documents” to investigators. He also noted that two career people who made the deci- sion to narrow the case against the New Black Panthers — the decision that has riled the right — have already briefed Re- publicans on the decision. So what more is there to ask about? Re- publicans say they would focus much of the new hearings on the claims of former Jus- tice Department lawyer J. Christian Ad- ams, who told investigators that he be- lieved the case had been narrowed because his colleagues wanted to protect minor- ities. But even some conservatives have dis- missed this claim as not credible. There’s no shortage of people already looking into this. The Office of Professional Responsibility and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights are expected to release reports on the allegations of wrongdoing. It remains to be seen whether Senate Ju-


diciary Committee Chairman Patrick Lea- hy will allow the requested hearings to go forward. Either way, it appears that those who want these hearings aren’t content with the behind-the-scenes investigations that are underway. For some reason, they want yet another round of very public questioning.


he Wikileaks document down- load — illustrating Afghan cor- ruption, Pakistani duplicity and


ing reality — that protecting the rights of Afghan women is desirable; it is sim- ply not possible. In truth, they know no such thing. Those who predict defeat in Afghanistan significantly overlap with those who confidently predicted defeat in Iraq. Their military judgments merit some skepticism, particularly when American commanders are pursuing a new strategy in Afghanistan they be- lieve may succeed. We should be suspi- cious of a realism that always amounts to defeatism. The prospect of serious negotiations with the Taliban does not seem partic- ularly realistic. If America were to insist on protections for the rights of women, ethnic minorities and civil society as preconditions for power-sharing dis- cussions with the Taliban, it would probably be a deal-breaker. As it stands, the Taliban has every reason to think that it wins by enduring. A panting de- sire for a hasty deal only encourages this belief. Coming to the table at this point, the Taliban would have little mo- tivation to make concessions on the most fundamental aspects of its ideol- ogy.


If the coalition does not insist on the


protection of human rights as a precon- dition for negotiations, the whole thing gets much easier. It is always easy to end a conflict by giving in to the enemy. Reconciliation with the Taliban from a position of weakness — granting the Taliban control over portions of the country — bears a close resemblance to surrender. No paper assurances could hide the reality that America, under military pressure from Islamist radi- cals, had betrayed millions of Afghan men and women into comprehensive tyranny.


When asked last month about the possibility of an American settlement with the Taliban, CIA Director Leon Pa- netta responded: “We have seen no evi- dence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would sur- render their arms, where they would denounce al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society. We’ve seen no evidence of that and very frankly, my view is that with regards to reconciliation, unless they’re convinced that the United States is going to win and that they’re going to be defeated, I think it’s very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that’s going to be mean- ingful.” This is the realistic alternative: Win


first, then negotiate. michaelgerson@washpost.com


RICHARD COHEN


(who? what?) to one American and two European publications is that there is no news at all. We already knew that the war in Afghanistan was not going well. We already knew — or, in the words of the New York Times, “harbored strong suspicions” — that Pakistan’s military spy service was aiding the Taliban (with friends like this . . .) and we already knew that Af- ghanistan’s army and police would be reformed and able to stand up to the Taliban some time around when pigs fly or Washington balances the budg- et. No need to wait by the phone. This leak has inevitably been com- pared to the Pentagon Papers, which were provided to the Times and, a bit later, The Post in 1971. That secret history of the Vietnam War really was a secret. Not only were the docu- ments themselves so labeled, but they revealed information that had been withheld from the American people, including the stunning fact that Lyn- don Johnson’s administration was es- calating the conflict while publicly pledging to “seek no wider war.” Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, did more of the same — expanding the war in an effort to bring North Vietnam to its knees and end the con- flict. It managed to expand the war only to the streets of Washington. Nothing in what Wikileaks provid- ed approaches this sort of revelation of duplicity. It seems clear from the documents that the Taliban has used surface-to-air missiles, as the muja- heddin did against the Soviets, and while we previously did not know this, the missiles apparently have not yet materially affected the war. But even this revelation, as well as many of the others, comes from unverified ground reports and may turn out to have been produced by the renowned fog machine, usually present in com- bat. The Guardian, one of the news- papers favored by Wikileaks and a long-standing opponent of the war, cautioned that “some of the more lu- rid intelligence reports are of doubt- ful provenance.” Indeed, what would have been ma-


jor news is if these documents sup- ported any optimism. That would have been a stunning reversal of what is fast becoming conventional wis- dom: The war in Afghanistan cannot be won as winning is now defined — defeat of the Taliban, eradication of


‘Leaking’ the obvious T


he news in that massive data dump provided by the daunt- ingly mysterious Wikileaks


In Afghanistan,


KLMNO


K R


A17 EUGENE ROBINSON


what critics of the war in Afghanistan already knew or suspected: We are wading deeper into a long-running, morally ambiguous conflict that has virtually no chance of ending well. The Obama administration, our


NATO allies and the Afghan govern- ment responded to the documents — made public by a gadfly organization known as Wikileaks — by saying they tell us nothing new. Which is the problem. We already had plenty of evidence


that elements within Pakistan’s intel- ligence services were giving support and guidance to the Taliban insurgen- cy inside Afghanistan, even though Pakistan is supposed to be our ally in the fight against the terrorists. The newly released documents don’t pro- vide conclusive proof, but they do give a sense of how voluminous the evi- dence is. “American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators,” according to the New York Times, one of three news organi- zations — along with the Guardian and Der Spiegel — with which Wiki- leaks shared the documents in ad- vance. We already knew that U.S. and oth- er coalition forces were inflicting ci- vilian casualties that had the effect of enraging local villagers and often driving them into the enemy camp. The documents merely reveal epi- sodes that were previously unpub- licized — an October 2008 incident in which French troops opened fire on a bus near Kabul and wounded eight children, for example, and a tragedy two months later when a U.S. squad riddled another bus with gunfire, kill- ing four passengers and wounding 11 others. We knew that U.S. and allied Special Forces units were authorized to assassinate senior Taliban or al- Qaeda figures. The leaked documents sketch the activities of the secret “kill or capture” unit named Task Force 373 —and in the process, according to the Guardian, “raise fundamental ques- tions about the legality of the killings . . . and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.” The Guardian highlights a 2007 in- cident in which Task Force 373, oper- ating in a valley near Jalalabad, set out to apprehend or kill a Taliban commander named Qarl Ur-Rahman. As the commandos neared the target, someone pointed a flashlight at them; they called for air support, and an


Futility’s open secret T


he tens of thousands of classi- fied military documents posted on the Internet Sunday confirm


AC-130 gunship strafed the area. Lat- er, they discovered that they had killed seven Afghan National Police officers and wounded four others. A few days later, according to the


documents, members of a Task Force 373 unit fired rockets into a village where they believed a foreign jihadist fighter from Libya was hiding. They killed six Taliban fighters — but also seven civilians, all of them children. One was alive when allied medics ar- rived. “The Med TM immediately cleared debris from the mouth and performed CPR,” the incident report states, but after 20 minutes the child died. We knew that the Afghan govern- ment was spectacularly corrupt. The documents let us glimpse a bit of that corruption — how commonplace it is and how it destroys public trust. The documents do tell us some things we didn’t know — for example, that the Taliban apparently used a heat-seeking missile to shoot down a coalition helicopter in 2007, at a time when U.S. officials were publicly pooh-poohing the threat to allied air- craft from insurgent forces. Under- estimating the enemy is rarely a good idea.


And the “Afghan War Diary,” as Wikileaks calls the documents, brings into clear focus the Catch-22 absurd- ity of trying to wage counterinsur- gency warfare in a nation with a 2,000-year tradition of implacable re- sistance to foreign invaders. As the White House was quick to point out, the documents cover the period be- fore President Obama ordered an es- calation and a change of strategy. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s chosen commander, tried his best to limit ci- vilian casualties — but soldiers com- plained, with some justification, that they were not being allowed to fully engage and pursue the enemy. Gen. David Petraeus, put in charge after McChrystal’s dismissal, is under pres- sure from the ranks to relax the rules of engagement — which would surely lead to more civilians killed and more grieving relatives transformed into Taliban sympathizers. Overall, though, the most shocking thing about the “War Diary” may be that it fails to shock. The documents illustrate how futile — and tragically wasteful — it is to send more young men and women to fight and die in Af- ghanistan. But we knew this, didn’t we?


The writer will answer questions at 1 p.m. today at www.


washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.


al-Qaeda and the preservation of a functioning central government run by someone like our close friend and cherished ally, Hamid Karzai. This is not going to happen. In the July 26 Newsweek, Richard


N. Haass, a former State Department official in both Bush presidencies and currently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, outlines several possible alternatives, including what would amount to conceding a hunk of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Interest- ingly, the piece — written before Wikileaks did its leaking — mentions the Taliban-Pakistan relationship, which, given Pakistan’s preoccupa- tion with India (adequately recipro- cated, I must say) is the central con- cern of the region. Both nations are armed with nuclear weapons and am- ple amounts of enmity.


Along with the Wikileaks revela- tions, the most telling news story about Afghanistan also appeared in Monday’s newspapers. It concerned the allegation that prisoners in a north Mexican jail were armed by of- ficials and allowed out at night to commit murder. This, I emphasize, was Mexico, a Western nation, just across the Rio Grande, and yet we can hardly comprehend such levels of corruption — or, it seems, do very much about it. Yet, on the other side of the world, in an Eastern nation, tribal in character and so very, very poor, we undertake to turn its con- stabulary into some spiffy and effi- cient force and do the same with the army. The Wikileaks documents say — anecdotally but convincingly — that this is not happening. Again, this is something we already knew — anecdotally but convincingly. The Obama administration will go through the motions of hunting down the leaker and denouncing the leaks, as it should. (Government is entitled to some secrets; it needs them to protect us.) But after taking a deep breath, it may conclude that Wikileaks has done it a favor — speaking the unspeakable, and not in the allegedly forked tongue of the mainstream media but in the actual words of combat soldiers. This will make the inevitable decision easier. Barack Obama, an unemotional man, will wind down the war in Afghani- stan — not just because he wants to but because he has to. This, like the news from Wikileaks, is not news at all.


cohenr@washpost.com


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