Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Multiple Brain Injuries and Concussions Linked to More Suicidal Thoughts

June 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
concussions-illo

People who have sustained multiple brain injuries throughout their life were more likely to report suicidal thoughts than people with one or no concussions, according to a new study of deployed U.S. military personnel. "Personnel who had sustained more than one concussion in their lives were significantly more likely to be suicidal in their past—as well as in the past year," said Craig Bryan, the study's lead author from the University of Utah National Center for Veterans' Studies in Salt Lake City. Suicide is currently the second leading cause of death among military members, and ... Read More

More like this: Health
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Is America’s ‘Strategic Pivot’ Towards China Premature?

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In the cover story of our inaugural issue back in April, we took note of the Obama administration's strategic pivot towards Asia and the commensurate shift away from our entanglements in the Middle East and South Asia. In a new essay in the Journal Society, the communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni takes a dim view of this strategic move: The shift reminds one of the old parable about a child who was looking for his lost dime next to the lamp post, not because it was there that the dime went missing—but because it was there that the light made searching easy. In Etzioni's view, ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101, Uncategorized
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U.S. Planting Seeds of Peace in Afghanistan

January 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Samuel Rance speaks with a twang and his favorite band is Tool. One morning last spring, he was sitting at a picnic table on Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, seven months into his deployment. His team had just finished Operation Thrasher, a training class in composting for farmers in the nearby city of Khost. Behind him were several acres of wheat and fruit trees, and a greenhouse. He and his team members — the Indiana National Guard’s 3-19th Agribusiness Development Team — had planted the grain and the trees, and built the greenhouse. Beyond the farm were the ... Read More

More like this: Environment, January-February 2012, News and Options
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PBS to Show ‘Where Soldiers Come From’

November 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The upper peninsula of Michigan is a sparsely populated place with its own sense of identity — something it has in common with Afghanistan. The young men at the center of the moving documentary Where Soldiers Come From — all proud UP natives — never discuss this duality, but it helps explain the perceptiveness and compassion they display when their National Guard unit is deployed to fight in America’s longest-running war. When Dominic Fredianelli’s team finds weapons on an Afghan landowner’s property, and the man is taken away in handcuffs, Dom, a promising artist from Hancock, ... Read More

More like this: Media, November-December 2011, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Ultimate Weapon: Knowing a War Zone’s Culture

November 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

When U.S. soldiers first went into Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago, the military gave little thought to how an understanding of regional language, values, and norms could ease the interaction between troops and the locals they encountered. “There was this early period there when we invaded Iraq, in particular, where we just thought that this was a military endeavor,” said Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “If you go back and look at how we talked about it and the things we did, culture just ... Read More

More like this: Culture, The Idea Lobby
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No Way Out: Exiting Afghanistan and Iraq

October 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. forces launched an offensive in Afghanistan with the aim of dismantling the al-Qaeda terror network and driving the radical Islamist Taliban government from power. That was a decade ago, and the war goes on. Today, the U.S. finds itself facing a clear but intractable question: How do we end wars? As the “long wars” of Afghanistan and Iraq rumble on, the answer becomes more elusive and more vague. In an August 2010 speech, President Obama described how the world had entered a new era, “an age without surrender ceremonies.” Perhaps Obama remembered that ... Read More

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War on Terror Promises Era of Persistent Conflict

April 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

This is the last of a three-part series looking at how the ... Read More

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A Professional Military and the Privatization of Warfare

April 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

This is the second of a three-part series looking at how the ... Read More

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America in the Hands of a Professional Military

April 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

This is the first of a three-part series looking at how the professionalization of the military has led to the privatization of warfare and an era of persistent conflict. Americans observe two anniversaries this year, neither one of them wanted. March marked eight years of combat in Iraq, and October, 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan. These are America's "long wars," a seemingly endless grind of combat. These long wars invite comparison, and some recall the eight years of U.S. war in Vietnam, but there is a more compelling distinction. It was a conscript Army that flew its Hueys over ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Contending With Afghan Heroin (And How Not To)

March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One open secret about the war in Afghanistan is that it has led to a flood of pure, cheap heroin in the world’s cities since 2001. “Despite reported decreases in white heroin production in most source countries,” the U.S. Justice Department admitted in 2006, “increased production in Afghanistan has resulted in an overall increase in worldwide white heroin production.” The production of white (or pure) heroin, in other words, had generally receded around the world — but supplies from war-torn Afghanistan more than picked up the slack. Now, according to some estimates, Afghanistan ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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