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Outrage spread rapidly via Twitter earlier this week based on the spurious claim that President Trump intended to label Jews a separate nationalitya move denounced as encouraging anti-Semitism or as itself anti-Semitic. Although correct information about the executive order that sparked the controversy is now widely available, one need not look far to find essays and editorials condemning it in heated terms. Liel Leibovitz notes that just as our bien pensants were whipping everyone into a wild frenzy over this imagined act of anti-Semitism, an armed couple attacked a kosher grocery store in a asidic enclave in Jersey City, killing two Jews, one Gentile, and a police officer. The couple had brought with them multiple pipe bombs, and could easily have achieved far bloodier results. Leibovitz writes:

The shooting, we now know, was a premeditated attack, and one of the suspects was a black nationalist [a member of an anti-Semitic group styling themselves Black Hebrew Israelites] who had a long and proven track record of posting anti-Semitic screeds online.

Jews make up about 2 percent of the American population, yet were the victims of a whopping 57.8 percent of all religious-bias crimes last year, according to the FBI. Rather than vocally and unequivocally demanding that their Jewish constituents be protected, the politicians representing those targetedfrom New York Citys Mayor Bill de Blasio to Senator Chuck Schumerhave been largely silent on this issue, while at the same time loudly and vigorously accusing the right of racism. Videos like [the] one shot at the scene shortly after the Jersey City attack and featuring local neighbors blaming the Jews for Jews being murdered are not likely to make any politician on the left take action, especially not someone like de Blasio, who has for years been kissing the ring of Al Sharpton, an anti-Semite best remembered for inciting an actual pogrom against the Jews of Brooklyn.

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More about: Al Sharpton, Anti-Semitism, Bill de Blasio, U.S. Politics

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From Jersey City, a Bloody Lesson on the Real, and the Imagined, Dangers Facing American Jews - Mosaic

By California Black Media Staff

Keeping up with the high cost of pensions in California is hurting public sector employers, city budgets and leading to the firing of some minority money managers at CalPERS, the California Public Employee Retirement System, which is valued at $387 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

In its annual report, released in November, CalPERS confirmed that it risks falling into low funding levels. If this happens, the agency responsible for managing the health and pension benefits of more than a million public employees in California may not able to pay its bills or pay out its commitments.

The League of California Cities, which represents more than 400 municipalities across the state, is alarmed by the growing mandatory payments they have to cough up to CalPERS for employee pensions and benefits, too, according to CalMatters. Between fiscal years 2016 and 2017, that number skyrocketed by more 8 billion.

In an effort to streamline its own costs, CalPERS announced last week that it is scaling back on its Emerging equity fund program. Launched in 1991 to increase diversity among its portfolio managers, the program contracts external money mangers, mostly women and minority-owned firms managing assets worth less than $2 billion who are charged with investing on behalf of the largest public pension system in the United States.

The returns those emerging managers were bringing in fell below the agencys targets by 126 basis points, according to an agency spokesperson.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, President and Founder of the National Action Network, said CalPERS decision to cut the minority money mangers is unacceptable and comes as a surprise to him.

Last year, the National Action Network and I met with Marci Frost and Ted Eliopoulis from CalPERS in Sacramento, both of whom committed to increasing the utilization of diverse asset managers across all asset classes by creating a level playing field, Sharpton told California Black Media. It is clear that Ted is gone and the board has inoculated the new CIO, Ben Meng, from finding and utilizing high performing talented diverse managers that reflect the diversity of the pensioners.

In an October memo, CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost said the agency is restructuring its emerging manager program, reducing the number of managers, and cutting the assets those investors manage from $3.6 billion to $500 million.

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The Soaring Cost of California Pensions Is Hurting Employers and Taking Away Minority Contracts - San Diego Voice and Viewpoint

Afghan security forces take position at the site of an attack in a U.S. military air base in Bagram, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 11, 2019. MOHAMMAD ISMAIL/REUTERS

Kabul, Afghanistan A powerful suicide bombing targeted an under-construction medical facility on Wednesday near Bagram Air Base, the main American base north of the Afghan capital, the U.S. military said. Two civilians were killed and more than 70 people wounded.

The Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack and Afghan officials said all the insurgents were killed. The Bagram airfield was not in danger, said Colonel Sonny Leggett. The facility is being rebuilt to help the Afghan people who live in the area, the U.S. military said.

The Taliban statement denied any civilian casualties and claimed the attackers had managed to enter the Bagram base, even penetrating barracks used by coalition forces.

Outside the sprawling base, several homes, mostly belonging to poor Afghans, were destroyed. A large mosque in the area was also badly damaged.

Shortly after the bombing, Afghan troops, special forces and intelligence officers cordoned off the perimeter of the base with armored personnel carriers. Heavily armed soldiers kept residents far from the gates to Bagram Air Base.

Within minutes of the suicide bombing, U.S. fighter aircraft bombed the area, according to witnesses

Dr. Abdul Qasim Sangin, a physician who heads the main hospital in the province, said the hospital near the perimeter of the base was on fire. It wasn't immediately clear if any foreigners were inside the hospital.

Sangin said his hospital received six wounded, all Afghans. Five were in stable condition and one was critical, he said. Scores more were treated and released by medics at the scene. Most were suffering cuts and bruises from flying glass and debris.

The Taliban control or hold sway over nearly half of Afghanistan, staging regular attacks that target foreign and Afghan forces, as well as Kabul government officials, but also kill scores of civilians.

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Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan fends off Taliban attack but ...

The interviews published by the Post provide a starker version of SIGARs previous analysis, but in many ways, they tell the same story. In its reports and testimony before Congress, SIGAR has revealed waste, abuse, and questionable judgment in a host of Afghanistan programs and projects. The interviews are stripped of the dry inspector-general verbiage and also of the strategic context within which judgments were made; senior officials frankly assess their failures to produce security, stability, or transparent and effective governance in Afghanistan. Those failures are documented in SIGARs reports.

But the extensive oversight mechanisms created for this massive project were not enough to force a rethink in the face of inertia, sunk costs, and short-term political calculations. SIGARs extant analysis of failures and missteps should have prompted a greater reckoning some time agoif not within the executive branch, then within Congress, which regularly authorized and appropriated funds for the ongoing campaign.

This attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan was embarked on by one president and embraced, at least for a time, by two more. Each one, when faced with the decision, chose to continue down this doomed road, believing it less risky and more palatable than his available alternatives. What the Post reporting reveals is that, while this path may have been easier, it was a road that would never reach its stated destination.

The U.S. effort in Afghanistan was an undertaking of breathtaking ambition: to oust a Taliban regime that gave haven to international terrorists; to defeat those terrorists and their allies and supporters in a counterinsurgency campaign; to set up and sustain a democratic government in a society riven by years of factional war; and to promote human development, human security, and basic human rights in a country where religious extremists, drug lords, and tribal chiefs had long ruled over (and fought for control of) a beleaguered populace. The overarching result seems to be a sort of D-minussome degree of visible achievement, but still a failing grade.

The Posts reporting is unsparing in its depiction of second-guessing and back-biting among U.S. government officials about their work in Afghanistan. Field staff argued that higher-ups didnt understand the realities they faced on the ground, didnt give them enough leeway to be effective, or cut off resources at the wrong time. Senior staff questioned strategies chosen by their superiors or determined in internal debates in which they participated. These concerns, voiced mostly in confidential interviews with SIGAR, were no doubt honestly felt, and had real foundations.

The existence of such doubts and concerns, however, does not necessarily reveal the roots of the Afghanistan failure. This kind of second-guessing is endemic in any large organization undertaking a long-term, complex project. Field staff close to on-the-ground implementation often question how their work is valued or prioritized by central decision makers, or question how their contribution fits into the wider strategy; central decision makers often fail to see the reality of implementation on the ground, and focus their energies on the policy battles theyve won and lost around the interagency table.

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The Lessons of the Afghanistan Papers - The Atlantic

The is the second of two columns about some of the lessons learned, or not, in America's longest war. The firstTrump, Afghanistan, and The Tweet of Damocles can be read here.

PARISUnless President Donald Trump decides to end the Afghan war with a bangwith tens of millions killed, as he has threatened more than onceit is going to end with a whimper, if it ends at all.

Its not victory, says counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen. It isnt ticker-tape and Broadway.

It should be said that what Kilcullen and others consider the best option looks like the one Trump is pursuing just now: a reduction of U.S. forces on the ground to an easily sustainable level of about 9,000, while negotiating to get the Taliban into direct talks, eventually, with the U.S.-backed Afghan government. But after 18 years of a war that has cost $2 trillion and the lives of more than 2,400 U.S. soldiers, such an inconclusive conclusion may not satisfy even an exhausted American publicmuch less the egotistical Mr. Trump.

As he runs for re-election touting his promises kept, the president is going to want something that looks like the definitive end that he's vowed he'll deliver to this endless war. Perhaps there will be some bit of political theater like Trump's incredibly ill-conceived and eventually rescinded invitation to Taliban leaders to come to the United States only days before the anniversary of 9/11 so he could claim his own Camp David Accords. Or, more likely, hell just pull the plug.

Thus Kilcullens memorable phrase, picked up from a U.S. Special Forces operator with rueful experience in Syria, This whole operation is sitting under the tweet of Damocles. Or, putting it another way, Trump wakes up, he sees something on Fox and Friends, gets out of the wrong side of the bed, doesnt like it, says, Fuck it, were pulling out. And I think thats a problem.

In any case, the Taliban know how badly Trump wants out, and they can play with that.

But if by some miracle the current policy of minimal U.S. presence, tough talks, and supposedly unlimited patience does hold, what are some of the strategies and tactics that should be employed going forward? What needs to be done to help Afghanistan become a stable country free of terrorists who might threaten the United States or its citizens? What lessons learned from the past?

For this and the previous column, I called up both Kilcullen, a well-known Australian soldier-scholar who worked with the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who served as the Americans top diplomat in Afghanistan in 2002 and again in 2011 and 2012.

"Have you ever seen the movie I Am Legend with Will Smith?" Kilcullen asked me. I said I had, vaguely recalling a post-apocalyptic thriller and wondering where this was going.

Theres that scene, said Kilcullen, where the sun goes down and hes checking his watch because the vampires are going to come out and eat him. Well, I wish I had a dollar for every time I have been out in an Afghan district in the late afternoon with an Afghan government official, and the guy starts checking his watch. And the reason is, they dont live there. They dont live in the districts that they govern, because they know if they try to spend one single night in the area that they are officially in charge of the vampires are going to come out and eat them.

Finding a way to reconnect the Afghan government with people at the local level is essential to stabilizing the country, Kilcullen suggested, and corruption made that almost impossible when the U.S. was pumping more money into the place than anyone knew how to handle:

Vast amounts of gringo cash come into Afghanistan, that fuels an economy of corruption, Kilcullen told me. Instability leads to money coming in which leads to corruption which leads to abuse which leads to more people supporting the insurgents which leads to more instability, and you get this sort of self-licking ice cream cone.

If you wanted to be an Afghan police chief you would have to buy that position and it would cost you about 250,000 American dollars.

David Kilcullen

Ambassador Crocker, for his part, is quoted extensively in the U.S. governments lessons learned documents recently published by The Washington Post under the damning headline, At War With The Truth: Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption, Crocker said in 2015 when interviewed by a team from the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, its somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.

Over the phone last week, Crocker added,There were no controls except our own, which obviously didnt go far enough. And there was plenty of corruption and waste among Americans as well. He said many thought, Hey, U.S. rules no longer apply. Lets get rich.

In about 2010, Kilcullen looked at bribery among Afghan police in the south of the country. If you wanted to be an Afghan police chief you would have to buy that position and it would cost you about 250,000 American dollars, Kilcullen said. And then you would have to pay every month up the chain of command all the way to Kabul about 50 grand in kickbacks... Imagine how much money you are making from bribes and shakedowns and targeting the population just to make your payment and also make a profit.

The U.S. is still spending taxpayer billions in Afghanistan, a country of 30 million people whose entire gross domestic product is only some $21 billion. This year military aid amounts to about $5 billion, while foreign assistance to civilian projects is about $633 millionstill big numbers, but less than half of what they were a decade ago.

Looking back, Kilcullen said that of $133 billion in reconstruction funds all told, Id say conservatively 20 to 30 percent went directly to the enemy. It was bad. But were not doing that anymore. Its a historical lessons learned, but its not relevant to now.

The investment we have in Afghanistan now is perfectly tuned, said Crocker.

But what of the local corruption? The shakedowns, the intimidationthe kind of thing that Kilcullen witnessed with the police and with regional officials looking at their watches in the late afternoon? His answer is surprising.

Until local government people are capable, respected, effective, Kilcullen said, the disconnect from the local population is not going to be solved. And frankly the only way I can see that happening in much of the country is for those local government people to effectively be Taliban. Thats a side effect of a successful political process, whereby you integrate Taliban into the structure.

The common rap on the Afghan National Army is that its soldiers dont want to serve, and they dont fight. There, too, corruption has been a huge problem with officers pocketing the salaries of troops who arent required to report for duty, so-called ghost soldiers. But the real problem is the casualty rate among those who do fight and do die: some 45,000 killed since 2015 as opposed to fewer than 60 American troops.

The problem is not that we cant sustain it, said Kilcullen. The problem is that the Afghans as they are currently fighting cannot sustain itthey cant sustain their own loss rate. Among the reasons: We did not put enough effort soon enough into the Afghan Air Force, so we started that very late in the game. And they are still very reliant on air power for things like medical evacuation, reconnaissance, battlefield transport, that kind of stuff, and they find it really hard to fight without those assets.

To make matters worse, says Kilcullen, the campaign against the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq diverted many of those resources.

There are ways to lower the loss rates among the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, says Kilcullen. But again, its all moot, because if the president wakes up and says, Fuck it, we are leaving, youve got to struggle to execute that strategy.

Afghanistan has become the worlds biggest producer of opium. It produces some 80 percent of the worlds illicit supply, despite $10 billion spent trying to eradicate or replace the poppy crops. The Taliban make a lot of money in the narcotics business, but they are not the only players.

What can be done better? Kilcullen proposes some unconventional solutions since the conventional ones have been such stunning failures.

I think it was a mistake to send our ground troops in a counterinsurgency role, including the Afghan troops, out to support counter-narcotics, says Kilcullen. If you are doing a counterinsurgency campaign and you are told you need to be eradicating poppy crops you will eradicate the crops that you can get to, which by definition will be the crops that are in accessible areas, which by definition means they are more likely to be crops owned by people who are broadly pro-government. So you are actually creating an incentive for people not to back the government and to back the insurgents, because that keeps the [Afghan National Army] out of their area and their crops arent going to be destroyed.

The other thing is I think we blame the farmer too much, he said, offering a little paean to what he called the amazing poppy. Its a medicine that is traditional in Afghanistan that people use to treat their kids. Its a product that keeps forever, it requires no refrigeration and never goes bad. Its tradable for currency and is the closest thing to hard cash in large parts of Afghanistan. And more importantly it grows on any piece of broken ground. It doesnt require a lot of water. It doesnt require any fertilizer, unlike virtually any other crop in Afghanistan, and the customer will pay you for it up front and pick it up from the farm gate. Its basically a perfect crop.

By targeting the farmer, says Kilcullen, you are pissing a guy off for just being logical and trying to follow his own interests. A much better way to think about dealing with it is interdiction, orthere was even an NGO in Afghanistan for years that put forward the entirely sensible policy that we should just buy all the opium, and pay the farmer a fair wage for it, and send it into a government-controlled monopoly. Then we can always just burn it out at sea if we wanted or we could feed it into the [legitimate] international economy. But we should take over and control the economy of opium rather than let the Taliban turn it into support for the insurgency.

If there is general agreement that negotiations with the Taliban are desirable, the question of who should do the talking is not so clear. Several sessions of U.S.-Taliban negotiations in Qatar over the last year were conducted without any participation by the Afghan government at all. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad hammered out an agreement that would have included the staged withdrawal of all U.S. troops (an "evacuation," as the Taliban put it) and only then were they going to consent to talk with the government of President Ashraf Ghani. The result was the Camp David fiasco. Now talks have resumed, but theyre on again and off again.

The Taliban conceded early on that they would not be harboring terrorists like al Qaeda or the South Asian version of the Islamic State, but that's a matter of self interest. Such groups now compete with the Taliban for radical Islamic cred and help to divide its already fractious organization. Trump may eventually hold up such a promise as a mission-accomplished momentonce again he has defeated terrorist. But how can Taliban promises be verified if there are no more Americans on the ground?

The Afghan government could complicate such a deal by demanding something more solid than the flimsy exit pass being discussed thus far. So, Crocker said hes not against negotiations. I just profoundly believe that negotiating without the Afghan government is surrender.

What Kilcullen calls a theoretically viable strategy is to make clear to the Taliban in no uncertain terms that there is no timeline, that we are not leaving, and that they cant wait us out. At the same time, concentrate on developing the intelligence and aviation abilities of the Afghan forces, with less emphasis on U.S. airpower. Weve been trying to bomb the Taliban to the negotiating table, said Kilcullen. Thats killing a lot of civilians.

The better strategy, he suggests, is to say convincingly, You want us to leave? Until you guys are willing to negotiate a deal we are not leaving. I think there is a way to wait them out as opposed to bombing them to the negotiating table.

But all this is theoretical because we have a chief executive problem, said Kilcullen. Around the world, Trump's threats of fire and fury are not taken seriously at this point, and neither are his promises of patient, persistent commitment, especially in Afghanistan.

I think absent President Trump you could make the case, and I think you could probably make it in a way that the American people would understand. U.S. casualties are very low, spending is way down, life has improved for many Afghans living in the cities, and especially for Afghan women.

Lets be clear, Crocker wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last Friday. We came to Afghanistan and remain there now for one essential reason: the United States national security. But what serves that interest? I have argued that a better life for people in a misgoverned country is an essential part of that effort. It is also about American values. What is it, exactly, about nation-building that we must avoid at all costs? Does it extend to looking in the eyes of a hopeful Afghan girl of kindergarten age and saying, Sorry, kid. Youre on your own?

In the mercenary age of MAGA, sadly, talk about defending American values abroad has come to sound almost nave, but that is one thing Crocker, after service as a top diplomat in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, is not.

What scares me about Trump, Crocker told me over the phone, is when he gets something in his mind, he can get beaten back, but it will come at you again. He doesnt drop it. And we saw that in Syria. Trump wanted to get all the U.S. troops out of thereonly a few thousandand he reconsidered after Defense Secretary James Mattis and Special Envoy Brett McGurk resigned a year ago. The military meanwhile were telling him the move was dog-ass dumb, as Crocker put it. But then boom, 10 months later he is back at it again. Thats where he is on Afghanistan, and I am really afraid he is going to pull the plug.

Crocker pointed to the recent prisoner swap with the Taliban. An American and an Australian hostage were traded for three Taliban prisoners. Trump tweeted: Lets hope this leads to more good things on the peace front like a ceasefire that will help end this long war. Proud of my team! But one of the released Taliban, Hajji Mali Khan, is reputed to be among their best field commanders.

So we let this guy loose with no ceasefire, said Crocker, and our guys are going to die. I think it speaks to the fact this White House just wants to get the hell out.

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Trump's Afghanistan Policy? Talk Tough, Then Just Pull the Plug - The Daily Beast