Archive for Afghanistan
How is the Aid money Haiti spent
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s a storm brewing in Haiti.
Not a storm from the rainy season bearing down, but a storm over why so many are still in dire straits a full four months after the earthquake.
Why so many are facing the ravages of the rainy season without safe shelter to protect them?A storm over how that could be the case when so much international aid has been committed to help the people of Haiti.
A CBS News investigation examines the total aid committed to Haiti and explores how much has been spent so far.
Critics such as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy and Research say more money should have been spent up front making sure the population’s emergency needs were met. He argues that many donors who dug deep during their own tough times to give, thought they were putting immediate food in people’s mouths, giving immediate medical help, and putting a roof over victims’ heads now.
Just how much money has been collected so far? Within days of the earthquake, the United States and the
World Bank each made commitments of $100 million in aid. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans sent private donations worth another $150 million — more than they gave after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. A recent international telethon raised another $57 million.
To put these amounts in perspective, consider that the annual value of all the goods and services produced by Haiti’s economy is about $7 billion. Pledges of aid from around the world already total about 10 percent of that figure, if not more. And so far, aid has been collected based on people’s willingness to give, not on the size of the need. There has been a tacit assumption that the amount donated cannot possibly be excessive.
That may indeed be true, but it does not mean that so much money can be put to immediate use. As aid groups on the ground in Haiti have found, the country’s infrastructure — roads, the power grid, etc. — are not very well developed, and it has few businesses capable of taking on big logistics and construction projects. In this environment, it is not easy to spend a lot of money productively in a short period of time.
This problem is similar to the “resource curse” facing poor countries that discover major reserves of fuels and minerals. When they begin extracting those natural riches (or selling the rights to do so), their economies receive sudden inflows of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. But they can’t always use all of that money right away; even if you have good intentions, you can’t double the size of an education or public health system overnight. Nor can you simply distribute the money to your people; if the economy doesn’t produce more goods and services, all that extra cash sloshing around will just raise prices. Left to sit, the money has a way of disappearing; for decades in Nigeria, billions in oil money were siphoned away annually by elites and corrupt bureaucrats.
Even saving the money for the future, as East Timor has done with its newfound oil wealth, can be dangerous. Several years ago, the Timorese knew that their government was starting to build up billions of dollars in saved funds — the process was actually quite transparent — but they wanted to see the money spent sooner, to create jobs and improve their quality of life. Riots and a change of government ensued.
If Haiti wants to spend its aid money now, it will clearly need help from overseas. But doing so will create an additional danger: that given Haiti’s lack of infrastructure and capacity, it will be dominated by foreign contractors in the same way as Iraq or Afghanistan. Foreign donors will undoubtedly employ their compatriots for big rebuilding projects — doing so makes giving aid that much easier — and they’ll risk falling into the same old traps of cronyism and unaccountability, as evidenced by no-bid contracts, shoddy work, and lack of buy-in from local people.
Fort Hood Crisis: mental health and how to help
Posted by: | CommentsThe Fort Hood shooting is one of the largest shooting incidents to take place on a U.S. military installation. As of press time, 13 are dead and dozens are wounded after an Army psychiatrist opened fire on fellow soldiers.
When tragedies like this happen, the mental state of those involved is always of concern. Mental problems can occur for days, months or even years after such an event. Here are some key points to consider if you were or know someone related to the Fort Hood tragedy
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. PTSD can happen if you are in a dire situation of helplessness or inability to help where severe trauma or imminent death can take place. This shooting took place in a processing center where soldiers prepare for deployment. A vast majority was not armed, and many had probably been on combat tours before. To witness a massacre at home and feel helpless despite all the training and combat experience can be traumatic. Many who died were also fellow soldiers and comrades of the witnesses. These experiences and feelings can lead to PTSD symptoms such as restlessness, recurring nightmares, hypervigilance and even substance abuse as a form of self-medication.
Anxiety. The surrounding community members to include military family and civilians working on base might feel a smaller sense of security on base. The reality is that this attack was a very isolated incident and that military installations are generally safe and secure. However, the Fort Hood community could still experience anxiety and fear. This leads to hyper-vigilance and anxiety over anticipating the next attack. These feelings are normal after a tragedy and are warranted. If anxiety symptoms such as extreme worry or panic attacks persist for several weeks after, counseling may be needed to help alleviate symptoms.
How To Help. If you know someone who was related to the Fort Hood tragedy, offer support where possible to help restore a sense of normalcy. However, do not try to force them to talk about what happened; if they are suffering from PTSD, recalling the moment could seem very real in their minds. Encourage them to seek counseling and offer to be an ear for them to express their feelings. Sometimes listening is the best support you can give. If they had children, offer child care to help them get some time alone and away from “crisis mode”. Prepare dinner meals to give them more time to reconnect with their remaining family members. You may noThe new survey on Afghanistan found instances of depression, anxiety and other psychological problems are about the same as they were in 2007. But it also said there is a shortage of mental health workers to help soldiers who need it, partly because of the buildup Obama already started this year with the dispatch of more than 20,000 extra troops.
Efforts already under way to get more health workers to the Afghan war could be hampered somewhat by last week’s shooting. The psychiatrist charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder was slated to go to Afghanistan. Some of the dead and wounded also were to deploy there to bolster psychological services for soldiers.
The new Afghanistan survey found that individual soldier morale was about the same as previous studies, but that “unit morale rates … were significantly lower than in 2005 or 2007,” said an executive summary of the report that was to be explained in a news conference Friday. The units referred to were mostly platoons of roughly a couple dozen people each.
t have been part of the tragedy, but you can help those who were recover from it.
Why kill other people PTSD
Posted by: | Comments1 in 8 returning soldiers suffers from PTSD
The Army’s first study of the mental health of troops who fought in Iraq found that about one in eight reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The survey also showed that less than half of those with problems sought help, mostly out of fear of being stigmatized or hurting their careers.
The survey of Army and Marine combat units was conducted a few months after their return from Iraq or Afghanistan last year. Most studies of past wars’ effects on mental health were done years later, making it difficult to compare the latest results with those from the Vietnam or Persian Gulf wars, said Dr. Charles W. Hoge, one of the researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
He was not surprised: “I would expect people to have nightmares for a while when they came back.” But as he kept track of his unit in the U.S., he saw troops greeted by both a larger culture and a medical culture especially in the Veterans Administration (VA) that seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD.
“Clinicians aren’t separating the few who really have PTSD from those who are experiencing things like depression or anxiety or social and reintegration problems or who are just taking some time getting over it,” Stevens says. He worries that many of these men and women are being pulled into a treatment and disability regime that will mire them in a self-fulfilling vision of a brain rewired, a psyche permanently haunted.
Stevens, now a major and still on reserve duty while he works as a physician’s assistant, is far from alone in worrying about the reach of PTSD. Over the past five years or so, a long-simmering academic debate over PTSD’s conceptual basis and incidence has begun to boil over. It is now splitting the practice of trauma psychology and roiling military culture. Critiques originally raised by military historians and a few psychologists are now advanced by a broad array of experts indeed, giants of psychology, psychiatry and epidemiology.
The significant political interference of the Vietnam War generated little to no tangible objectives for our soldiers solidifying and branding their levels of anxiety and forever troubling their minds. Guerrilla warfare, an inherently cognitively damaging military action compounded the neuropathic damage experienced by our troops in Vietnam. Even with the troops having regular downtime in between engagements the cognitive fractures of these veterans were enhanced by more intense combat and the rejection of our returning soldiers. Now that being said, I know a guy that did 5 tours in Vietnam which was uncommon, most soldiers did their two years and the ones that survived went home.
The soldiers in the Iraqi war have been sent on multiple deployments with an average of two or three tours of duty with little time in between. While in Iraq, there are no friendly countries or areas to spend leave time to relieve stress. They are on constant alert and most, even non-combat soldiers, see combat or threats on a daily basis. Now combine this with the most intensive warfare possible, guerrilla warfare in an urban environment. We get troops that are overextended and overexposed to life threatening situations within unprecedented levels of combat.
Was Gillette a rogue deputy or a good cop?
Posted by: | CommentsJohn Gillette was either a rogue deputy or a “squared away” cop whose way of doing business was a model for others in the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.
Department brass have said Gillette was the latter, even after he had accumulated dozens of internal-affairs complaints. But 42 people — including accused criminals, people with no criminal records and law-enforcement officers — say in those complaints that, during more than 13 years as a sheriff’s deputy, Gillette acted as a law unto himself. His detractors say Gillette was a man with a penchant for profanity and roughness who crossed the line into criminal behavior
‘One of the worst cases’
By himself, Gillette racked up more complaints during his 13 years on patrol than the entire department generated in 2005, 2006 and 2007 combined. More than 70 deputies work for the Sangamon County sheriff’s department.
Based on the volume, seriousness and number of sustained complaints, Gillette should have been fired long ago, according to Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminologist who is considered an expert on police misconduct.
Complaints can be a tool
Meyer and Walker said departments should use internal affairs complaints to help identify officers who need help.
Walker said the volume of complaints can be a tool to help figure out which officers need coaching, additional training or re-assignment. Meyer said departments can’t always go by complaint volumes — an officer assigned to DUI patrol, for example, is bound to get a fairly high number of complaints — but he blames himself for not doing more to help Gillette.
Williamson said he believes the department provides adequate help to employees with marital problems, psychological issues, alcohol-abuse problems or other issues that affect their work. The lack of psychological screening for new employees is due in part to the expense, Williamson said.
Williamson, who started the department’s internal-affairs division in 1997, has the final say on who gets hired. He said he requires prospective deputies to have a college diploma, and he interviews extensively before making a decision.
“This is one of the worst cases I’ve heard, just hearing his record,” Walker said. “This sounds, really, pretty shocking. This officer should have been long gone. There’s a really serious failure here.”
That view is shared by Stephen Meyer, former head of internal affairs for the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, who said he would have fired Gillette if he’d had the authority.
“Given the frequency and severity (of complaints), there comes a time when the agency has to say ‘enough,’” said Meyer, who retired in 2001 but remains a sheriff’s chaplain. “I deemed law enforcement a profession. And you need to remove those who are not professional.”
Gillette, who is now working for a private entity (he declined to be more specific) in Afghanistan, called Meyer a “religious fanatic” who was out to get him and generated complaints by contacting people who had been arrested. While he admitted violating some rules, Gillette denied doing anything seriously wrong.
“The only thing I’ve been found guilty of is minor department infractions,” Gillette said in a telephone interview. “I’m not saying I’m an angel. It’s obvious that I’m not. I did a good job for the sheriff’s department, and we took a lot of bad guys off the street.”
Meyer said he never solicited complaints — when Williamson made him the department’s first head of internal affairs in 1997, the sheriff made it clear that he was to let complaints come to him, not go looking for them, Meyer said.
“My job would have been in jeopardy,” Meyer said. “The sheriff had said, ‘You will not solicit.’”
42 complaints
By October 2001, the number of complaints against Gillette stood at 28, with six of them sustained. He’d been a deputy for six years. Then the pace slowed. He was the target of 14 more complaints for the last eight years of his career with the county, with two of those — the complaint filed by Barr and the allegation of profanity by Anderson — sustained by the department.
A few things changed. Gillette was deployed to Iraq for a year in 2003 and won the Bronze Star, so he was off local streets. Meyer, who Gillette says was out to get him, retired in October 2001. And in September 2001, Lt. Patrick Davlin moved from the bureau of professional standards, which includes the department’s internal affairs division, and became supervisor of the midnight shift that included Gillette.
Halloween Complaint
Posted by: | CommentsCash for Candy
The buckets of candy that trick-or-treaters bring home every year isn’t so sweet if it lands your child in his or her dentist’s chair.
So the Carpathian Dental Associates in Johnson City came up with a sweet deal to encourage kids to keep the cavities away.
Sunday, they offered a dollar per pound of candy turned in at their offices.
The candy that was collected will be sent to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan along with thank you notes from the children.
“We’re always hearing complaints from the parents ‘we pay all the money to have the kids’ teeth fixed and now they’re going to eat all this candy for Halloween.’ So it’s kind of a win-win situation: they keep some of the candy, they give some of it to the troops, and they’re getting some dollars,” said Dr. Hayes Aronson.
Along with the cash, each child took home a glowing toothbrush and some healthy snacks.
Next steps after Afghanistan’s run-off vote is scrapped
Posted by: | CommentsNews that Afghanistan’s planned Nov. 7 run-off presidential election has been canceled after the withdrawal of Abdullah Abdullah, main rival to incumbent President Hamid Karzai, casts a new light on a story in this week’s Maclean’s about Grant Kippen, the Canadian who heads the country’s Electoral Complaints Commission.
The story tells about how Kippen, under intense pressure and world scrutiny, patiently investigated the Aug. 20 election, which Karzai initially appeared to have won. His ECC doesn’t run elections, but acts as a referee after the balloting when the inevitable complaints about cheating arise.
It was Kippen’s work that forced the Nov. 7 run-off by documenting extensive fraudulent voting, largely by Karzai’s backers. Now, with Abdullah’s exit, Karzai appears poised to cling to power without going through any process that lends his continued rule full democratic legitimacy.
Abdullah complained that Karzai refused to takes steps that would have made the Nov. 7 run-off fair. That would have included rapidly reforming Afghanistan’s so-called Independent Election Commission, the body that was in charge of the Aug. 20 fiasco. The IEC is headed by Azizullah Ludin, a Karzai appointee criticized by Human Rights Watch for, among other things, his obvious pro-Karzai bias.
Naturally, international attention is now fixed on the immediate steps needed to make Karzai’s win minimally acceptable. Some sort of power-sharing with Abduallah might help. But a longer view is also demanded to make sure the same dangerous farce isn’t acted out next time Afghans are called to the polls.
So here’s a suggestion, one that perhaps the Canadian government could promote: the untrustworthy Independent Election Commission that administers Afghanistan’s voting should be reformed along the lines of the trustworthy Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates after the fact.
The ECC is headed by two Afghans and three internationals. The foreign commissioners, including Kippen, are appointed by the UN. The numerical dominance of outsiders inevitably causes some resentment. (In fact, one of the Afghan commissioners quit last month, late in the ECC’s investigation of the Aug. 20 voting, when it became clear Kippen and the other internationals were serious aboKippen told me his ECC has been training many Afghans in the delicate work of looking into complaints after elections. The commission employs about 300, and just 18 of them are foreigners. Thus, the ECC might prove to be a training ground for impartial Afghans who could staff a full electoral apparatus in the future. As Canada looks for a practical role in Afghanistan beyond combat, this might be one promising place to focus aid aimed at building the Afghan government’s capacity to run its own show.
Military commission blasts feds for withholding info
Posted by: | CommentsA lawyer with the Canadian Military Complaints Commission says the truth about allegations of prisoner torture in Afghanistan will only surface if the government is forthcoming with documents.
Freya Kristjanson told Canada AM on Thursday that while the government has said it’s cooperating with the commission, it has not turned in any documents since March, 2008.
“This commission has not received a single new document (sic) despite repeated assurances that the government would be producing the documents both in the House and by their lawyers directly to the commission,” she said in an interview from Ottawa. “The government has simply failed to deliver any documents.”
“If the government cooperates with a body established by parliament within its mandate and gives the commission documents and access to witnesses then Canadians will know what happened,” she added.
The controversy being explored in the inquiry surrounds whether or not the Canadian government knew that Afghan prisoners were at risk of being tortured when the Canadian military transfered custody to the local authorities.
The content of the first report is still covered by national security. Colvin said the second report gave specific findings that “dealt with two issues, one of which concerned the risk of torture and/or actual torture of Afghan detainees.”
The reports were widely distributed to the Foreign Affairs and Defence departments as well as senior military commanders in both Ottawa and Kandahar.
His statement contradicts earlier assurances by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other high-ranking officials that they had not received any credible reports from Canadian officials about prisoner abuse.
Ousted UN official stands by election complaint
Posted by: | CommentsAn American ousted as the No. 2 official at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan said Monday he has no second-thoughts about assertions that the organization failed to aggressively probe vote fraud charges in the August presidential election.
“The flaw that took place in Afghanistan was preventable,” the dismissed diplomat, Peter Galbraith, said Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Galbraith said the United Nations “did not exercise its responsibility.” In dismissing Galbraith, the deputy envoy at the U.N. mission there, Secretary-General Ki-moon did not specify the nature of their differences.
Preliminary results from the Aug. 20 election show President Hamid Karzai won a majority, with former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah in second place. But proclamation of a winner has been delayed pending a partial recount by the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC).
A U.N. spokesman in Afghanistan said that the mission did not want to detract from the election process by commenting on Galbraith’s allegations.
“Enough is enough. We will deal with these accusations at the appropriate time. Now is not that time,” Dan McNorton said.
“Our work is and must be focused on the electoral process. To do otherThe Obama administration is weighing whether to send thousands of additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan, as commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal reportedly has urged.
Galbraith also said that unless U.S. and coalition troops can secure significant population centers in Afghanistan, “we’re going to be there as an occupying force for a long time … and that doesn’t make any sense.”
wise would be totally irresponsible,” he added.
First results in provincial Afghan elections released
Posted by: | CommentsAfghanistan’s election organisers on Saturday released preliminary results for 30 of the country’s 34 provinces, more than a month after nationwide voting.
At least four candidates were killed during the campaign. The Taliban, which is fighting a reinvigorated insurgency against US and NATO troops in the country, had called for a boycott of the polls.
“These results are preliminary and may change based on ECC (Electoral Complaints Commission) decisions,” said an IEC statement.
“The IEC will announce the final results as soon as they have received and implemented the final decisions of the ECC.”
The statement added that results from the remaining four provinces would be announced “soon”.
The August polls have been mired in controversy, with complaints of irregularities from Afghan and foreign observers.
The ECC is currently investigating thousands of fraud claims in the presidential election, only the second in Afghanistan’s turbulent history.