Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)

Perhaps you’ve heard: not only is Moscow about to maraud its way through Ukraine, not only is Tsar Vladimir I seeking a new Eurasian empire, but – as if to add insult to injury – Russia is “returning” to Africa in a big way, intent on “displacing” the influence of the continent’s apparently rightful influencers (interesting language, that – no?). Anyway, at least that’s the hyper-panicked Russophobic narrative emanating from America’s top think tanks, papers of record, and bipartisan but paltry politicians. Naturally it’s almost all brazenly bunk – but hey, what else is […]

Let’s be honest: Americans don’t care about Africa – by and large, at least. Despite the lies we tell ourselves – and the raging debates we have – about PC-culture, critical race theory, and so on, this remains a salient fact. Sure, the delusion is soothing. It tends to bring virtue-signaled solace to many a liberal mainly concerned with showing off the latest in proper buzzwords. It offers the satisfaction of righteous rage to those conservatives mainly concerned with smearing snowflakes. But much of this – despite the genuine importance of the debates at hand […]

In the rather prescient 1998 film The Siege, CIA agent Elise Craft (Annette Benning) – speaking about counter-terrorism – lectures her FBI colleague Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) that: “In this game, the most committed wins.” Well, that truism couldn’t apply better to the current situation in Ukraine, and the very real – if generally misunderstood – possibility of armed conflict between Russia and the US/NATO. To wit, there is an enormous and decisive gap – Biden and media rhetoric aside – between Moscow’s intensive, and Washington’s/Brussel’s minimal, commitment regarding Ukraine and the east end of […]

Just over two months before the military mission in Kabul – along with broader American delusions – collapsed, the Center for International Policy released a report on America’s failed and futile Afghanistan adventure. It was a war that took four lives and five limbs from soldiers I commanded. Two bled to death, one died at a base hospital, another – shot through the jaw – later overdosed, and one more lives as a triple amputee. The oldest was 28 – on his third tour – the youngest couldn’t legally buy a […]

Yesterday I found myself dry-heaving and hyper-ventilating in broad daylight, crouched behind the corner of an unused outdoor patio bar in Kansas. I hadn’t had but two beers, but I’d had more than enough of American obtuseness. On a smoke break from wielding my geek-stick (highlighter) with a fatalist fury – brushing-up for today’s Afghanistan column – I made the admittedly willful mistake of trying to explain why the Taliban capture of Kabul was affecting my mood. “I mean, it’s just, like, what was it all for – how do I and my generation […]

To say that the mainstream press’s recent coverage of America’s ostensible Afghan War withdrawal – and Iraq-Syria mission muddle-throughs – has been atrocious could be a competitive candidate for understatement of the year. Nearly everyday is the same, when I open my email newsletters from publications like the Washington Post and New York Times – minimal war reporting, nearly no analysis or commentary, and a load of overt or not-so-subtle alarmism about the supposed perils of US withdrawal from decades-long fiascoes. Then there are the semi-regular editorials to the same effect, from the who’s […]

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” ~ Michael Corleone, The Godfather III (1990) Kandahar Airfield (“KAF”) was as bizarre as it was dusty. You sort of tasted it before you smelled it – and smelled before you saw it. It’s been a full decade since I first did. When the cavalry troop I’d commanded touched down as a final top-off to President Obama’s Afghan surge, we gazed upon this weird way station of America’s war effort with exhausted eyes. Fatigue breeds a certain stripped-down simplicity – “Just show me to […]

It is by now a near cliché in defense-watcher circles to talk about the common peril of “mission creep” in military interventions. Naturally, that’s not translated to America avoiding this tendency – of gradually shifting objectives during the course military missions, until stuck in unplanned long-term quagmires – very much at all. Nevertheless, as if it wasn’t ridiculously obvious enough, the Biden Administration’s Sunday night bombings of allegedly Iranian-backed militia sites in Syria and Iraq illustrate that what’s been unfolding on those adventures is more mission-manufacture than creep. Almost all mainstream media […]

This past September, Turkey and Israel encouraged Azerbaijan’s “mini-Stalin” of a strongman to forcefully seize the disputed mountainous patch of Armenian-inhabited Caucasus-earth known as Nagorno-Karabakh. These treaty or decisively de-facto allies, respectively, armed and backed Baku’s decision to take what’s been called a “frozen conflict” out of the freezer for good – thereby committing the “supreme crime” of aggression, according to the postwar Nuremberg Principles. Some 6,000 soldiers and civilians were killed; tens of thousands were displaced. Washington stood aside, and mostly mute. Moscow brokered a truce in its own backyard, […]

If the US Government was trying to destroy Burkina Faso, it could hardly have done it any better. But this already impoverished, landlocked West African country is simply symptomatic of Franco-America’s Sahel-wide exercise in absurdity. It goes like this: in the years following the 9/11 attacks there was no Islamist militant threat to speak of in this region. Nevertheless, on account of its hallucinatory fear, racialized mental-mapping, and neocon-neo-imperial reflexes, the Bush administration imagined and then induced not just a genuine jihadi rebellion, but an inter-communal implosion clear across the Sahel. And […]

He hasn’t gone anywhere, actually. He’s been here all along – poking small holes of decency in sick system, for five-plus decades. At 90, Dan Ellsberg is with us still, and still calling bullshit on a government that couldn’t act right if it tried, to a citizenry that couldn’t care less. Most of it, anyway; reminding me, at least – here at the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ publication, and just a month after Dan just dared the Justice Department to indict him for dropping yet another classified truth bomb about US […]

The latest Israeli bombardment of its internally – and seemingly eternally – occupied open air prison of Gaza followed a familiar pattern. First, there was the disturbingly drastic casualty disparity: a 21-to-one overall, and 33-to-one for children, Palestinian-to-Israeli death ratio (in the three previous Gaza bombings since 2008, the overall statistic was 35-to-one). Next, there was the Biden administration’s simultaneous approval of a US arms sale of $735 million worth of precision-guided munitions to Israel. True, this time around there was slightly stronger reporting on the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) violations of the discrimination […]

Once upon a time, the United States of America – the world’s self-styled “beacon of democracy” – nearly nuked China’s then 600 millions worth of innocents. This, before Beijing even had any A-Bombs of its own. Well, that much we’ve known, in broad strokes – though, I fear, without the requisite resultant soul-searching – since historian Gordon Chang’s 1988 journal article (which I was assigned in graduate school en-route to West Point’s faculty): “JFK, China, and the Bomb.” Chang’s peer-reviewed scholarly submission made waves – at least in academia – by disclosing the […]

There hadn’t been much talk of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Nor had there been serious attempts at diplomacy, of Washington brokering a settlement. The reasons were manifold: part apathy, part outrage-exhaustion, part Donald Trump’s intentionally ditching the illusion of America-the-honest-broker and decisively swinging support to one side (Israel), and part Joe Biden’s desire to avoid the controversy of getting embroiled in seemingly hopeless Mideast conflict third-rails. Yet despite increasingly right-wing Israeli intransigence, and American apathy or antagonism, the Palestinian people – not their divided and corrupt Fatah or Hamas “leaders” – refused to […]

Originally appeared at ScheerPost A New York Times report about Russia paying Taliban militants to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan turned many heads in the summer of 2020 when it was first published. It solidified many Democrats’ views that Russia is a dangerous enemy that is consistently acting to not only undermine the U.S., but actually murder its citizens. As NBC News points out, Joe Biden treated the story as factual as a presidential candidate and has continued to repeat the allegations as president. Yet, as many on the left pointed out countless […]

Joe Biden uttered the word “Africa” exactly once in his first address to a joint session of congress, marking the vaunted presidential cliché of his first “100 Days” in office. It was a tangential reference, but its context, implications – and what Biden didn’t say – were somewhat instructive: After 20 years of American valor and sacrifice, it’s time to bring our troops home…But make no mistake – the terrorist threat has evolved beyond Afghanistan since 2001 and we will remain vigilant against threats to the United States, wherever they come from. Al Qaeda […]

Joseph Biden has now been president just two shy of the vaunted “100 days.” However arbitrary the designation, that’s a perhaps more fitting benchmark than most for Biden, since he and his biggest fans have not-so-subtly styled this commander-in-chief as a new FDR – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after all, being the first to use the phrase. For the most part, such glowing analogies refer to domestic agendas – infrastructure, healthcare, and jobs – plus both presidents’ presumably paradigmatic pivot from unseemly predecessors, be they a Herbert Hoover or Donald Trump. But what of […]

The tributes to the late President Idriss Deby just poured in last week – especially from Western leaders. And boy were the condolences nauseating – at least to anyone vaguely familiar with Chad and its longtime strongman, or those even faintly fond of decency. The worst of it came – unsurprisingly and unapologetically – from the country’s former (officially) and persistent (de facto) colonial masters in Paris. Coming right on the heels of Deby’s – still hazy on its exact details – death on the battlefield against a rebel rebellion, President Emmanuel Macron’s […]

Make no mistake: much policy indecency is permitted and enabled by vacuously vague bureaucratic reports peddling in platitudes. For further evidence bolstering this increasingly open-and-shut case, see Exhibit number 3,472, or so: last week’s release of the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community – the latest contribution from that politest of polite militarists, President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), The Honorable Avril Haines. At root, the 2021 “annual report of worldwide threats to the national security of the US” warns of a frightfully “diverse array” of undead – and […]

Washington’s hypocrisy and the frontiers of its New Cold War (of choice) appear to know no bounds. Eastern Europe is the classic theater of course, but you’ll hear the Pentagon’s new buzzword-acronym priority purpose, “great power competition” (GPC) – etched in senseless stone with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) – peddled to justify military missions in the Middle East, Central and East Asia, across Africa, and now at the very “roof of the world:” the frigid Arctic. Hey, it’s hard to think of a better setting for a Cold War, am […]

White faces in fatigues – I’m sure that’s just what most Mozambicans were hoping to see upon their shores. After all, it certainly isn’t the first time. Ever since the Portuguese started planting trading posts and forts on what was known as the Swahili Coast around the year 1500, an arrival of armed whites has never really ended well for the locals. Now, if half a millennium late to the party, America recently shipped an army special forces detachment to the country. The 12-man team hit the ground in mid-March, as part of a program that […]

Counterinsurgency snake oil was sold to soldiers and civilians alike as a “new” brand of urbane and civilized warfare. The absurdly over-the-top euphemistic buzzwords and mantras applied to such strategies – “stability-” and “information” “operations,” “handshakes&hand grenades,” or “nation builders as well as warriors” – should’ve tipped us off that something severely dark was concealed beneath the seemingly sophisticate rhetoric. Because it’s turned out, time and again, that war is war – despite human beings’ best efforts at linguistic concealment – and the counterinsurgent, counter-guerilla, or counter-terror sorts tend to be the […]

Let the record show that the almighty American military machine was soundly defeated by an enemy that didn’t like fighting either in the dark or cold. Talk about bad medicine that’s good for a society (somehow still) desperately in need of a decisive case study in the limits of its own power and martial prowess. Enter the tested teachers of the Taliban and Afghanistan (though, ironically, Talib vaguely translates as “student.”. Seriously though, when I commanded a sandbagged shit-hole (in 2011-12) just miles from Talib-ground zero in Kandahar province at the very crest of […]

When does neo-imperialist subtext tip over to overt imperialism? Well, when it comes to America’s Africa policy, apparently it’s when Foreign Affairs indulges the published fantasies of a multigenerational military trio of facsimile David Petraeuses peddling un-ironic Rudyard Kipling reprises. In the piece in question, retired Air Force Major General Marcus Hicks, and U.S. Army Majors Kyle Atwell and Dan Collini don’t pull punches – and are just a bit too on the neocolonial nose – off-handedly asserting: “Like it or not, a twenty-first century “scramble for Africa” is underway.” Allow […]

After some hints to the contrary, it turns out French troops in the Sahel aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So said President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on February 16, even before his virtual summit with France’s former-colonial “partners” – Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Chad – comprising the G5 Sahel Joint Force. Formed in 2014, it’s described in bureaucratic Paris-speak as “an intergovernmental cooperation framework, in order to put forward a regional response to the various challenges.” In reality, the G5 are little more than a misfit crew of problematic proxies doing […]

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken might have been “outraged” by a rocket attack on a U.S. base in northern Iraq – that killed a foreign contractor and wounded an American service member and several other contractors – but he shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, it’s the muddled US military mission and ongoing troop presence itself creates nearly all the conditions for current crisis. That this is particular truth tablet might be rather uncomfortable to swallow doesn’t make it any less so. If Blinken’s boss needs proof, he might consider applying what we could […]

February 9th marked the first time in nearly two decades that the U.S. military went one full year without a trooper killed in Afghanistan action. Now, with newly minted President Biden weighing his Afghan options – and under immense bipartisan insider pressure to stay-put or even ramp-up – a simple question leaps forth: Does Amtrak Joe really wish to be the guy to needlessly bury the streak along with some poor kid from Wilmington or Scranton? Look, despite his 40-plus years of experience – spent more engaged than most – on foreign affairs, […]

Real talk: Joe Biden hasn’t had too many finest hours in his 47 years plus years on the national scene. To be fair, he’s had his moments – like a powerful, earthy, and impassioned 1986 speech he delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opposing the Reagan administration’s apologism for the “repulsive, repugnant” Afrikaner apartheid “regime” in South Africa. Sure, he later – during the 2020 campaign – repeatedly peddled a bizarre lie that he once got arrested attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. Nor does Biden sport such clean record […]

The Intercept labeled it a “dramatic policy shift.” And here’s hoping it’s that. Still, President Joe Biden’s announcement – during his first major foreign policy address – that he would end American support for Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led “offensive operations” in Yemen, needs more nuance. In the second month of 2021, it seems all but fated that the specter of Donald Trump – and tribal, loyalty oath-like partisan divides over his contested legacy – shall haunt and poison all discussions of each and every Biden foreign policy move for at least next 47 months […]

In Africa, Islamic State, and other Islamists, are just the tip of an underlying conflicts iceberg. Still, for decades, French Titanics – fueled by America – have rammed the symptomatic spire whilst ignoring the subsurface bulk of problems Paris largely caused or catalyzed. As for those running that nuance-free Emerald City of Washington – they’ve generally been all in for the latest round of the Quixote show. Only our modern knight-errant Don Emmanuel [Macron], and his recruited squire Sancho Joe [Biden], may have less noble motives than the literary man from La Mancha. Like […]

Originally posted at TomDispatch. More than 19 years ago, the U.S. launched the air war that would become the ground invasion and “liberation” of Afghanistan. More than 17 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared “major combat” over in that country with just 8,000 US troops still stationed there. Approximately nine years after that, at the end of an Obama-era “surge,” US troop levels would reach around 100,000 (not counting contingents of NATO allies, as well as private contractors, CIA agents, and those involved in the American air war in that country). […]

Long before he played various roles in the Obama administration, Robert Berschinski was described as among the “rarest of creatures.” For starters, he was an R.O.T.C. cadet at an Ivy League school – Yale – on September 11, 2001, at a time when graduates of elite universities have been conspicuously absent from the military’s ranks. Berschinski then served as Air Force intelligence officer from 2002-06, including a stint in Kigali, Rwanda, and a combat tour in Iraq’s then real-life Wild West – Ramadi, in Anbar Province – attached to Joint Special Operations Command. There, […]

This past August, a U.S. military-trained African army officer staged a coup in an impoverished country – Mali – wracked by violence that’s long been folded under the opportunist umbrella of a global war on terror. Washington subsequently feigned surprise, pretended chagrin, suspended some aid – and quietly continued to back the new regime and its former French colonialist patrons. So what else is knew, right? AFRICOM’s Coup Factory After all, especially since the 9/11 attacks, a slew of Uncle Sam School of Security alum have subverted democracy back home in Africa and elsewhere. […]

Recently on Twitter, a someone graciously dubbed me a “prophet” after rereading my April article arguing that “American Exceptionalism Scars Both Victim and Victimizer” – and which pivoted around actual philosophical prophet, Ms. Simone Weil. This social media follower, “TheAyatollaOfRocknRolla,” is clearly a man of cinematic allusion – to 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior – after my own heart. Still, my anecdote transcends any possible proclivity for the ole backdoor brag. Because what prompted the Ayatolla’s comment was, as he noted, perusing the piece “as we watch the tragic comedy of […]

Ethiopia has pursued “legitimate” military action in its Tigray province since early November, according Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union (AU) Commission. Maybe. It does seem that the northern state’s regional forces – the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – attacked federal military bases on November 4 and may even have executed some surrendering soldiers. Still, one suspects something a bit more complicated afoot inside America’s “strategic linchpin” partner on Africa’s Horn. In fact, that Ethiopia – particularly its Western-favorite of a prime minister, Abiy Ahmed – is a […]

There’s a whole mess of bloody messes around the world that few Americans care about. In fact, they could form a whole category of conflict labeled: “Top Ten Violent Hot Spots You’ve Never Heard Of (But Should Have).” The list might include, for starters, Nigeria’s resource war between herders and farmers (six times deadlier than the country’s well-publicized Boko Haram conflict in 2018); South Sudan’s dormant – for now – civil war (400,000 killed from 2013-18); and the Indo-Pakistani contest for Kashmir (70,000 dead in just the internal conflict over 30 years). Recently, […]

Originally appeared at ScheerPost America’s first black presumptive secretary of defense grew up in the same town – Thomasville, GA – as the first black West Point graduate, Henry O. Flipper. I actually took select cadets from my civil rights history class to visit the southwest Georgia city on an academic trip in the summer of 2016. In fact, I vaguely remember the owner and namesake of the local Jack Hadley Black History Museum mentioning that President-elect Biden’s somewhat surprising nominee for Pentagon chief, retired General Lloyd Austin, also hailed from Thomasville. […]

Eric Garris and Scott Horton let me write pretty much anything I want. Maybe it shows. OK, we all know it does. That’s rarer than it might seem. Outside of the occasional tease about my vague left-leanings from that Antiwar.com CEO-editorial director combo, they’ve a knack for finding, guiding, and then trusting folks like me – and those better than me. Over the last 25 years – it’s quarter-century anniversary season – the site has served as home station, salon, and sanctuary for a range of tough thinkers and fascinating personalities. Diverse in interests, […]

Originally appeared at ScheerPost Harry Truman. That’s who Jake Sullivan listed as his “political hero/inspiration,” in a Time Magazine “40 Under 40” profile. Fed a question so vague that he could’ve chosen anyone from Cleopatra to Clinton, that Sullivan selected a consummate product of Kansas City’s backroom “machine” politics, and liberal hawk exemplar, is more than instructive – it’s downright disturbing. “Give ‘em Hell” Harry unnecessarily dropped two atomic bombs on babies, and bombastically blundered into a Cold War that nearly ended the world on more than one occasion. So what will […]

Predictions are tricky matters in world affairs – and as it turns out, prescience produces little in the way of public or personal vindication. There’s scant satisfaction when one’s subjects tend towards the tragic. Take the (for now) paused 44-day war in the South Caucasus. Back in an October interview, I offered this (then) seemingly provocative prognosis: “If this thing gets solved, or put back in the freezer, which is about the best we can hope for right now, it will be Putin playing King Solomon and cutting the Nagorno-Karabakh baby in half.” Think Moscow […]

In this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as “Ding dong! The witch is dead!” or “We got robbed!” Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or ethically equivalent, but because each jingle is laden with a dubious assumption: that President Donald Trump’s demise would provide either decisive deliverance or prove an utter disaster. While there were indeed areas where his ability to cause disastrous harm lent truth to such a belief – race relations, climate change, and the courts come to mind […]

This originally appeared at The Baraza. “Well, we like war. We’re a war-like people,” the comedian George Carlin, whom I’ve been missing of late, pronounced way back in 1992, on the heels of America’s triumphalist First Persian Gulf War “victory.” The cheers from his dedicated fanbase crowd aside, George’s wasn’t a popular view at the time. Neither was this extended follow-on treatise: [This country] can’t build a decent car, can’t make a TV set or a VCR worth a f*#k, got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get health care […]

Beware savvy, sophisticate liberals bearing gifts of evasive and ethically empty prose. Having, for my sins, spent a few weeks reading just about everything on offer from what unrepentant neocon zealot – and born-again Washington Post columnist – Max Boot dubbed Joe Biden’s foreign policy “A-Team,” I can vouch for the new transition team’s vapidity and verisimilitude. Put another way, Boot’s favored Biden Posse – the Iran nuke channeling, P4 (Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, Jake Sullivan, and Nicholas Burns) +1 (Michèle Flournoy) – have a rare gift for typing tons but saying little. […]

It’s one hell of an inversion. The colonels and generals who commanded at high levels during my 2011-12 Afghan surge tour may have lost the war, but they sure won the personal prosperity battle. The military campaign – strategically, at least – wasn’t even close this time around. Whereas the first surge I had the distinct displeasure to join, in Iraq, produced – or at least coincided – with enough short-term security “progress” to feed a success mythology, the Afghan reprise never really caught on. For the most part, that bloody jaunt passed […]

I had a horror of the Mexican War … only I had not the moral courage enough to resign. ~ Ulysses S. Grant (1879) The phrase “regime change wars” has, of late, taken on profound meaning and stoked massive controversy. When either Donald Trump, or the current long-shot hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) calls for an end to such wars, the establishment Left and Right both attack the term as a “Russian,” or “Putin,” talking point. The contemporary polarization of the term is peculiar, given that historically regime-change wars are as American as apple pie. Still, one can understand […]

“Global Thunder: Bombers practice for nuclear war.” – Air Force Times, five days ago. The headline itself, its casual yet confident language – and that it barely raises a collective eyebrow – desperately deserves deconstruction. But in practice, this madness involves the definitionally a-strategic U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) – in conjunction with British and Australian personnel – sending big bombers like B-52 Stratofortresses, out on an annual nuclear command and control exercise known, therefore, as Global Thunder 21. STRATCOM’s, news release said Global Thunder 21 provides “realistic training activities against simulated targets” to […]

Who needs dystopian novelists or absurd satirists when otherwise banal bureaucrats of the U.S. national security state do the job for them? It’s an old story with a new tech-savvy twist. The late great Joseph Heller knew a thing or two about war’s foundational farce. He joined the army air corps at age 19 and flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier on World War II’s Italian front. In his classic 1961 novel Catch-22, his wounded protagonist lamented that “outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded […]