Hello welcome to the Donahue Group. We have every reason to expect with the passage of the cable bill that we'll need to sell naming rights for this show, so folks at home be thinking about how you would like to rename the show. We're thinking we don't want to call it the AT&T group necessarily, but we'll see what happens as time goes on. Joining me for the current Donahue Group show today, Cal Potter former state senator Tom Pineski, the University of Wisconsin Sheboygan math professor Joining him with a sweater vest Ken Risto who is the Curriculum and Assessment Coordinator for the social studies area of the Sheboygan area school district me. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue I'm a lawyer here in town, and we're here to talk about state issues Lots going on should we all just stand up and cheer for the fact that we finally have a budget We would if we were not hooked up to microphones What do you think? Man, what a process. Well, it's nice they got it done, but it was late and it was a cost I mean if you look at the news media every day there's various units of government trying to figure out what they got and what they didn't get and they shouldn't be in that position and A lot of them are scrambling now to try to find money So to make up for what they thought they were gonna get and not gonna get and it's really sad for those folks because Some politicians in Madison didn't get their act together I mean they should have played politics for a month or two and then did their job But they screwed around until well till the governor signed it at the end of October before we go into any of the particulars about the budget Which I think is probably not all that remarkable given the amount of time it took to pass The process was interesting Governor Doyle had promised to call the legislature into special session to talk about campaign Finance reform and and so forth and that promise has apparently been withdrawn There was great discussion much discussion during the budget process of this being used as really a primary fundraiser Or fundraising time for members of the legislature, so they were in no rush To pass a budget I've asked this question. I know more than once on on our program here, but what will it take? if anything for legislators Well, let me rephrase that what will it take for the people of Wisconsin to get so Mad about this. You remember I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore All of us leaning out of our windows and yelling that What's it going to take? I mean this is This is just crazy. We have to pay 50 or 60 percent out of our pocket in taxes Then we'll get mad until then. I don't think we'll get mad. We'll just say that's the cost of doing business Either that or we have a replication of maybe what happened on the federal level When you look at what Congress, you know people say well Democrats haven't done a heck of a lot in Congress But in the area of Lobby reform and ethics reform. They've done some very substantial Changes and they've done it because of the number of people who were caught In with their indiscretions and I think what has happened on the state level the koala and the Jensen in the 40 And ladwig were just sort of poster children of two years ago And people have sort of with a passage of time probably can't even recall those names All the names and so I think you need a resurrection of corruption And then people I think people's attention span due to the complexity of society and the number of things that they have to Deal with in their lives or family jobs and so on have a very short attention span to politics and unless there's something of a major Fiasco where the news media comes out and says throw the bums out The people are not being led in that that direction and I think politicians generally I see that and they very very Stealthfully have raised all kinds of money during this budget their coffers are full ready for 19 or 2008 And people think what hell we want to change the finance system It's this call is giving good milk now a lot of cream We got a fresh one here, let's go and there's no there's no urgency to do the people's will and I think that's what it's gonna take Yeah, I hate to say the thing has to break before people fix it But it seems that that's what happens in our society, but even when it's broken. I mean the koala Jensen Fodee I mean that was a scandal I Know it could get worse, but I'm not sure how much worse I think the governor you know governor is being chastised by common cause and I'm a member of common cause and G heck is the name of governor really going at it about having a special session I have not spoken to the governor as to why he has not But I would I'd be willing to think that some of his aides are saying you're not going to get this thing's past because there isn't a Motivation in the in particularly in a conservative assembly Why do you want to throw a bill out there that goes down in flames? And you're the governor who then has lost all her chips all his chips I think I can't help but think of Hillary Clinton in there and her efforts in initial days of the Clinton administration To get health care I mean all kinds of studies and volumes of documents put together about the need and the cost and how it should be structured and what happened is that The stage was not set for primetime the past a dog on thing She went down in flames and the damn thing now has been Inactive for what ten years at least and that's sad and I think the same thing could happen here You know it goes down and defeat and then people say well, why should we? Revisit this a year ago it went down You know two-thirds to let such a didn't vote for it or some scenario of that nature. Yeah Or just take an incremental an incremental step and look at Supreme Court the Supreme Court race Justices you know having to to raise insane amounts of money in order to get elected to a non-partisan Office that should be that should be Exempt from from political influence Silly me to think that you know we should have you know our justices Actually deciding things on the law and and not on you know who's that paying them and truly I think they do decide things on the law, but You know the pressure the pressure when you're running in these barely hotly contested races And I I can't help but think that the next Supreme Court race court race Justice Butler is going to be up and what's that coming up in November next November. It's it's an April 2008 great. Okay. Okay. Is there a Republican who's already declared there was a Republic? I've lost track of this because I'm not seeing anything about it for the last month and a half There was a Republican kind of I I can't tell you his name Who has sort of a perennial who runs a great deal for a variety of things? describes himself as being very very conservative, but Perceived as being rather unelectable to the point where the Chamber of Commerce and other Groups that would typically support a conservative Republican judges was really pretty much running fleeing from him Okay, and they were trying to find someone else to To step up and declare their nomination so they could support that individual rather than you know hug this This is a very bearer that they don't want to do it Let's get back to the Harry bearer of the of the budget What happened to the I know your boy on budget, but what happened to the Senate majority leader? Why did she get canned? Oh, how interesting Just at the stage State Senator Judy Robison from Beloit was elected Senate majority leader ten months ago not so long ago and Now it's shepherded the budget and now it's about a week after she was Russ Decker from I'm trying to walk off from wasa. All right It was no surprise because I think if you look at the winners and losers in the budget battle It was the conservatives in the assembly who got the most and the ones who lost the most were the liberal Democrats and the liberals in in the the Senate were the ones who wanted things such as financing for Healthcare plan a healthcare plan the hospital tax a number of things were put in which were Revenue razors to do creative things and do good things those were the things that were Compromised out and who was sitting at the table during the negotiations, but Judy Robson And so there's always an axe that falls on somebody when it doesn't come out to be at the liking of the caucus But Cal I think he would point it out on a previous show that the Senate Democrats really put together a very very liberal budget. I mean they knew they were going to lose stuff There I mean it was a it was a budget that was pretty far to one side and so you set The Senate liberals up against the assembly conservatives. I mean I It was not a middle of the road proposal from the Senate No, but I think it was good, but it did it did involve raising additional money and and so forth So but I think people on the left and right always think a little middle of the road is a little bit over the center Anyhow and so I think they're there and the caucus analysis of what they gave up was more substantial than they think and of Course, who do you take it out on you people who were at the table and that's what I think happened I wasn't there.  You know you go into a situation where you find blame and I think some of that was was here It only takes just a switch of two or three unhappy people to make that have the caucus switch around I mean the Senate's not it was a close vote. Yeah, it was a very close. So I would think imagine maybe three people swing and You're you find yourself no longer they could have been the author of the health care plan or the hospital tax or a number of things that were Would drop? Yeah, well it's it was interesting in the the article that I read just basically indicated that there was the thought that She just was not aggressive enough Well, it seems to me there was plenty of aggression in this budget process and I mean aggression to the point of stalemate that was Not what legislators do maybe what politicians do but legislators should be about the people's business of putting together a budget and Understanding not everybody gets what he or she wants, but well, I'll climb off my soapbox and Talk a little bit about what? Winners and losers in the budget process Substantively, I mean we know that We're going to be paying more for to register cars And Driver's licenses and so forth. Tom's got a list. No, I don't have a list Yeah, I heard on the radio Cause I just gave birth to a child and I send in my money and I get a note from the state Oops, you owe more for birth certificates and everything else. So as you give birth Expect to pay more. Well, if that's I assume this is true of dying Yeah, somebody's got to pay right my checks in the coffin and I don't smoke but You know a dollar or a dollar increase on the tax I mean, I'm interesting though is that I think that still puts that as number 17 or whatever. I know double digit So other states have really passed us up on this I thought that was a very high increase and I thought we'd be three or four But when I saw what we really were I thought well, God, they had there's more wiggle room here I thought exactly that's on a pack of cigarettes, right? Yes, right. So how many packs are as 24? You know, so that's about $48 by a carton. It's $48 in tax just about that's why I hear a talk like there's gonna be Groups traveling to Illinois buying cigarettes and coming back to you Make no mistake when we talk about drug abuse As far as I can tell in the vast panoply of Drugs that are abused in this country that caused the greatest amount of personal pain and Fiscal strain it is tobacco. Why don't we outlaw far we don't far Well, yeah Well, and you'd be as successful at outlining cigarettes as you were as getting rid of alcohol and so forth But yeah, I think that Anyone who thinks that you know tobacco addiction is some benign I always I always supported Increases in the gas and in the cigarette tax and smokers would come back. Well, this is victimless I was my choice. I said you realize that just in their medical assistance alone It costs the state something like 500 million dollars a year to take care of people who are dying of cancer or emphysema or heart disease or Whatever malady they got from their smoking habit.  So I have no sympathy for people who think this is a sort of targeting them You're right. They shouldn't we shouldn't have cigarettes, but how far does government go and telling people to prohibit things? We went through this with prohibition that didn't work I think the same thing would happen with this So the best thing to do is just a tax it keep taxing until nobody buys it and then then we have a revenue source Exactly wiped out. Well, the the budget did include money for an expansion of our Beloved Highway 23 From Plymouth to Fond du Lac, which is only 19 miles according to the newspaper As Plymouth that is true and it often that's good It often I never actually mind the drive even when I'm behind a semi because it's so beautiful, but it is a trick it can be it can be a tricky drive and Of course you in the legislature must have driven that millions of times and According to the DOT there is no need for this four-lane highway from Plymouth to Fond du Lac until about 2020 Cal you were talking about the first rumblings of the expansion of highway 23 Back in the 80s. Well, it goes back further than that The road was built to Plymouth under Pat Lucy's administration and Pat Lucy was in the 1970s and when Pat Lucy left to become the ambassador to Mexico Then it was Martin tribe or is lieutenant governor who became the governor Served the body year then ran against Lee Dreyfus and Lee Dreyfus with his red vest in school bus and his charisma Just threw the bomb out or literally just wiped them off off out of the Executive mansion and that was the end of the Termination of the project the project was to continue after that Carl Adi and I were both in the assembly at that time and we had talked to Martin Shriver and said it's logical We're at Plymouth Let's go all the way the last was more than 19 miles at that time But it was okay He said he agreed to it and we were going ahead going ahead and so politics intervened different administration Different legislators and were involved and as a result the pie and the money went elsewhere there's always been interesting enough and I get a kick out of the Local politicians here to who who cry about the fact that there's No money there. There's not there's not enough money for all the projects that are promised throughout this state It's always been that way the legislature has got every district has got a four-lane road someplace practically and That's one of the reasons the legislature put in that indexing of the gas tax Is because it was the only way that you could somewhat keep up with the maintenance and the construction costs is if Periodically due to construction cost increases in inflation. You would tweak the gas tax every few months Well last session the legislature and her holiness said all its tax Tax without representation and they they put it down the toilet and as a result You had no way of ever keeping up with highway 23 or any other road Well in this budget, we have as we're seeing an increase what the 75 dollars for the registration of a car But I've been willing to bet that is going to be far short of what the need is and so this politics Continues whose district is going to get their project funded before others. There is a project's Review Commission that does prioritize and highway 23 was Somewhat lower and the local legislators moved it up on the list and now it's back down on the list It went from oh nine. I guess it's from the legislative action to two to 13 2013 backward was under the project's commission. So it's going to be built It's just a matter of when but I can tell you there's there's a lack of revenue To fund these type of project. They're extremely expensive They're insanely expensive and you know and it's getting worse because not only with the cost of oil blacktop If you want to even use blacktop is becoming very closely close to cement in cost and cement has gone through the roof Because a lot is going over to China and other developing nations So it's big. It's just becoming almost more difficult to try to even keep up with this list or no into the list projects that are out there and and Those of us who drove a lot to Madison back and forth Of course I remember in the old days where you'd go through shboygan Falls and you'd go through Plymouth and you went through Glen Greenbush, and you know it really did take some amount of time because we Mean it really is you know and 151 bypass will be opened completed this fall That's there you go takes a lot of time off the trip. It really does but it takes an Ordinary length of time to do one mile. I remember the from Fond du Lac to to Madison to complete that four-lane or when did the The the basic the new construction it was years and years So about 10 miles a year or so and when you oh and I think that's actually fairly quick and Because I remember driving to Madison two three years Through construction and and it really is amazingly expensive amazingly time-consuming and it's nice when it's done, but it really is a It's a it's and it's difficult for a state You know one of the things that some European countries and some Germans have come over here and it's common It's how sometimes our roads are kind of bumpy and so on well We have a state that's about the size of Germany, but what did I have 80 million people and we have 5.2 million so you're trying to finance a system of roads in this big massive geography With about five million people that's very it's very difficult over in Europe where they even rely on on Trains and other means of transportation even more they build roads to last the Germans You hear stories of how much gravel and stone they put under the concrete and how thick the concrete is on the the Autobahn, but it's a it's a large populated country in a rather small geographic area So we really do have to not only because a number of projects and the maintenance there of all these roads But you it's a it's a difficult thing to finance is what it is a point well taken and that leads to the fact that Highway 23 is dead because of Governor Doyle's veto In my day we called it the van a white veto when you take a letter and Tommy Thompson was in there. We're kind of You're the kind of because van a white and now of course poor Governor Doyle is guilty of the Frankenstein I Have always thought the Democrats did challenge in court to all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court the van a white veto that expression coined by one of my colleagues in legal services Bobby Anderson who is a lobbyist at that time and Chief Justice Nathan Heffernan from Sheboygan upheld the the veto as constitutional and Of course Tommy Thompson was a master at the van a white veto. It has been changed to some extent In the early 90s the There was a I think a constitutional amendment as I remember to but there are now some new creative ways of doing this I think it stinks just in general. I think it's a usurpation of the of the legislative Function by the executive I don't have problems with vetoes But to be able to go through line by line and reverse intent and reverse intent and effect And even increased dollars in some cases, right? They you know cross out no more than or but they could that goes and then Add some zero somewhere later on down the and I know that Republicans I just read with one of our state senators who just Live it about this, but I just you know want to remind him and and readers that and listeners that this was What Tommy Thompson honed it to a fine art. Oh, he was well You look back at the budgets that that I served I began serving under Pat Lucy and Marty Schreiber and even Lee Dreyfus And eventually Tony Earl none of them used the veto pen to this extent That's now being used today under the Doyle and Thompson Thompson broke ground it went to the court and the court said well let's say if you don't like a change to Well, they don't want to change it because if their governor was in power They want them to they want their governor to be able to use this tool So that's the court really simply said you don't like it don't come to us screaming good do it fix it yourself fix it legislate I think there was a good constitutional argument that essentially the executive branch Was was taking over legislative function by these tiny tiny little vetoes and I know they talk about it at the national leveling Goodness gracious. No. Hi. I don't know Professorista, what do you think in terms of? Constitutional issues or just a separation of powers you're our social studies guy Well, yeah, I the state of Wisconsin like some governors Well, like a lot like a lot of states give governors that kind of discretion and I'm very uncomfortable with having governors have that kind of that Kind of authority. I think one of the hallmarks as we all learn in civics class was the power of the person And it belongs in the hands of elected legislators and and this really makes it Two things first of all, it's a user like you said a usurpation of legislative power that in America is always blowing the legislators But also it makes I would think as I look at legislation I would think it makes legislation just awfully wordy because you have to as you craft legislation Think about how the governor is going to be creative in the way He moves words and letters or phrases around so I would think would make laws even more obscure difficult to understand I know as I read Wisconsin statutes compared to some other states it sure seems a awful wordy and awfully awfully obscure So I don't think it serves anybody Now that being said it looks like There is some body of evidence and it's really tough because comparing states as apples and oranges There seems to be a pattern that states that have this sort of power for governors Tends to reduce state expenditures the size of government So there that's why there are people who want to give the president that sort of authority because it's a way of really honing in on reducing government spending The problem of course you could yeah Well the problem of course is when the Framers nationally wrote the Constitution they envisioned that the president would get separate appropriations bills sure and so now of course Congress is Taken in both parties have taken that to a new level and they've created these omnibus You know expenditure bills where everything and anything is in there and then the president stuck with you know Signing the whole thing or vetoing the whole thing and so it's it's moved beyond the intention of the Framers There's no question about that It'll be interesting to see The word is that it's it's the veto is on rocky ground and The Frankenstein veto so we'll just have to we'll just have to see how it goes But I think I think it is an interesting You know balance between them and both Democrats and Republicans need to remember that if they enact something that helps them when they're out of power, it's gonna help the other party as well and and They should just be more philosophical Purely legislated I mean the governor doesn't have a veto in this they is that correct if the legislature says we want to Make a constitutional amendment. We propose it. We pass it and the governor can't veto it It goes to the electorate and has to be passed again or at least twice two sessions So that choice is out of the governor's veto Now there seems to be at least in certain areas of dialogue during the budgetary process where the governor at least Makes promises that he isn't going to monkey around with certain sections So there is sort of a Discussion of what areas are our inbounds and what areas out of bounds for the governor to play this game Because I know that was going on this last time around was that going on with with you as well when you were there It sometimes occurs, but we did not have the stalemate like we had here most of the years that I was in we were able to Resolve our budget differences earlier. Well, just think about how little your campaigns cost. Yeah, my first campaign was $3,000 Wow 276 dollars to get elected to the school board. What are we? No? That yeah, I mean that's that really is pretty remarkable We have a lot to talk about in just a couple of minutes left The human tiff plan in fact we only have one minute left so there are other There are lots of things that we'll just have to tune into including ways of Prospering the state through interesting funding for universities the Wisconsin Covenant, but this human tiff district Concept that we were talking about I continue to be very interested in in Lake Michigan water levels and intergovernment Cooperation to address just this catastrophic in my view event and so forth, but we've got 15 seconds So I just want to say thanks to Brett farve Michigan water What a class act that guy is you know It's good PR, but this is a man who in spite of being attacked and revered and Really seems to happen, you know just on depending on what the score is is Unfailingly polite in his public discourse, and I think he is a wonderful example of just a plain old class act We're wrapping it up for number four go pack go badgers And we'll see you all again sometime soon


Yeah, we on boss talk one-on-one. Yeah, we gonna. Yeah, let me ask you this Do you think like cuz I go back to the rap music a lot? You know Do you think that the JZ's and these guys that are in these big positions are the billionaires? Do they do you think that that help is there for the youth or any of those people helping like the JZ? Listen, why should they why should a billionaire come help? Why should he come from all the way up there to down here when there's so much money down here? Why are we looking up there to them? When we's blowing when we don't do for our own kids Why are we looking for JZ them to help us with our cousins and our homeboys and our homegirls them kids?  So why should they help us? When you get your money, who do you look back in your family and say man, let me go help my niece over there? She got all them goddamn kids over there and she got a sire as nigga Yeah, so why would JZ them come help these people when you help them when you already see what they do with their stimulus money? You already see what the people who run the the people who run the Little League sports team you already see what they do with the money. They steal it So who would give us money? We've already been proven what we'll do with our money. We'll go buy Cadillac We go go buy the soul clothes So why would those so I learned that running a 501 C3 they say Charleston Why would anybody give you money and they see you can't go get money from your own people? so Why would they give us money and the people around us ain't giving us money? Yeah, yeah, I Always I've always talked about a lack of education where stuff like that's concerned because it always hurts me when People get their income tax money and the first thing they go do is you know Shopping and do all instead of investing instead of saving that money putting it up doing different things and help that money grow for you No, uh-uh Don't do that Y'all just said that's what the billionaires is doing But we want to billionaires to stop doing what you just said do and come help the people that won't do that You won't Jay. We won't Jay Z. We won't Tyler Perry.  You go come create a program only for their kid to go to prison Programs don't prevent children from going to prison Home life does that's true.   I wouldn't give a damn.   Nobody cares about rappers, but poor people


Hi everyone. Delighted to welcome you to the Future Security Forum, which is the premiere annual event of New America and Arizona State University's Future Security Project. I am Sarah Holowinsky. I'm the Washington Director of Human Rights Watch, also an adjunct professor or professor of practice at ASU. And I'm here with the amazing Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal. And I think, I mean, I think you are going to have their bios. And I think everyone pretty much knows about their amazing work, particularly on civilian casualties. So what I want to do is just get right into this discussion, especially because in fact, we are having this discussion around the time of so many civilians in harm's way in Afghanistan. I think all of us are probably involved in some sort of evacuation efforts. And I think with those evacuation efforts, with the anniversary of 9-11 coming up, and certainly with what we're seeing in Afghanistan, I think it's giving us all a time to reflect when we are not frantically trying to get Afghan out of Afghanistan on U.S. policy on civilian casualties over the past 20 years. And I was recently asked about what I saw, if I saw any progress on U.S. policy in this way. And I have to say that I was, I was sad to say that I had not seen a ton of progress. But I'm wondering just in this big picture, I mean, this is a hard question. But can I just open it up to you two to say, do you see progress on U.S. policy on civilian casualties? Azmat, do you want to take this first? Sure. So right now, I would actually say that if we're looking at civilian casualties from U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, the last week or since the Taliban takeover, you're probably seeing the lowest numbers, civilian casualties from U.S. combat operations than we've seen in the last 20 years of this war. So if that is a result of a policy to withdraw, then yes, we are seeing progress when it comes to civilian casualties. But if we're to look at, even in recent years, what's been happening in Afghanistan, which is that Afghan forces have basically been fighting and their lifeline has been air support from the U.S. And that air support, which has been essential to that tenuous hold that the Afghan government has on the country, has been exacting incredible human losses. So even though the entire world is really watching what's happening in Kabul right now, this is pretty unique. We haven't seen world attention on this war in many years. And even though it's receded from the spotlight until just now, this war was continuing at record pace. During the negotiations, the United States in 2019 dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. And those bombings as well as years before that have been exacting incredible human tolls in rural areas. So rural populations make up nearly three quarters of the country. And even though most media coverage centers, primarily on some of the stories of those in Kabul, when we think about civilian casualties, we're less likely to hear from some of these Afghans in rural areas who don't necessarily have cell phone access, who don't necessarily, you know, they can't DM me. They can't write me letters like so many in Kabul have been able to. They don't speak English. You're unlikely to see them on your TV screens. But there is a generation of women and girls who've grown up and boys, youth in rural areas, who've grown up without really knowing any peace. And I don't just mean suffering civilian casualties from U.S. bombings. I mean from Taliban attacks, Afghan forced night raids, kidnappings, the kinds of violence that has plagued this war and yet has not generated the level of attention that it should have by the American public. Yeah. Anand, what do you think? Yeah, just to add to that, I recently did a survey in a place in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in an area called Sangin. Some of you may know Sangin was one of the most dangerous places in all of Afghanistan for foreign troops, for the British and for the U.S. Marines. And so I was able to do something like a house-to-house survey and to try to estimate how many people, how many civilians have died in the last 20 years. On an average, each family lost between 10 to 12 people, 10 to 12 civilians. And most of these incidents actually weren't in mass casualty events. So there were airstrikes were important, of course, but there's a lot of just somebody being caught in a crossfire, snipers, roadside bombs, mortars. That's got to be multiple events for each family. That's not like one traumatizing event that is traumatizing over and over. I mean, a woman that's the subject of my article on southern Afghanistan, she lost 16 members of her family in 16 different events. So over the course of 20 years, and this is the case again and again. And what's extraordinary about these events is almost none of them have been recorded, partly because they're just in the ones and twos. So they don't like, if it's a big airstrike that kills 50 or 100 people, then we'll hear about it. But a lot of these deaths that are in the ones and twos are not recorded at all. So when you see, for example, the UN giving estimates of civilian casualties, those are grossly underestimating the number of civilians who are dying in the countryside and heavily over-representing those that are dying in mass casualty events. I just want to jump into to reinforce what he's saying, which is that there has been so much work looking at, you know, what has been happening in a lot of these rural inaccessible areas by particular kinds of journalists. You know, I would call out Andrew Quilty at the Intercept who recently did a study in Wurlap Province and looked at 10 different night raids that killed more than 50 people, most of them young boys. And in each one of those incidents, and many of those incidents, by the way, were mass casualties, none of them, all 10 of them, none of them had ever been reported publicly. I found the same thing with one exception for most of the cases where, you know, in 2019, I spent a lot of time on the ground in Kandahar, Nangarhar, meeting people from Helmand. I wasn't able to because the pace of the bombing, to be quite honest with you, I couldn't go to the sites of the airstrikes in Helmand in 2019 because the bombing was so intense and the intelligence so faulty, that I was terrified I would die in an airstrike. I felt very, very scared and wasn't able to do the Helmand reporting in 2019 on the ground in Helmand. But I met families from Helmand. I met many people in Kandahar and Nangarhar, and they were telling me stories of even just innovations in war that I have not heard. And in the beginning, the first time a family told me that, you know, you're used to hearing stories that there might be airstrikes and then ground forces come in. But in 2019, I was hearing something I had never heard before, which was that there were night raids. People would come in, Afghan forces with, you know, these these individuals on the ground couldn't identify, you know, what foreign forces were with these Afghan forces. And they would extra judiciously kill people, they would conduct these night raids, shoot people, leave, and then the airstrike would happen. And that kind of reversal was something a tactic I had never seen. And, you know, we can talk about this war and different portions and time periods when it comes to civilian death. You know, there are many who say that 2011 was one of the years in which the United States perhaps made the most progress. And, you know, what I want to center on is that, you know, there's a certain number of things that distinguish 2011 from 2019. I think we've seen large-scale civilian deaths throughout this war. But some of the differences, you know, if we were to look at when has progress happened, or even, you know, when has there been more space to make changes? You know, there are really three things that have driven that. The first is when a foreign leader or foreign forces calls that out. So, you know, President Karzai, who's who really developed a reputation among Americans for being quite unhinged, that was the association he had among many Americans in his waning years, actually in those years was advocating for restrictions on civilian casualties to some success. I think that, you know, many Americans didn't like that he was holding up certain status of forces agreements, particular things to extract some of these changes. But foreign leaders pushing back has often been one reason when the U.S. military will take greater measures. It's a small one, but it exists. There is that space. And, you know, President Honey did not enable that same kind of pushback. In fact, certain members of his government, and I'm really in particular really advocated for some very aggressive tactics. You know, we know that women I remember in 2019 there was the arrests or at least the reports of arrests of women in Helmand province.  So the kinds of tactics we've seen in recent years have escalated and a large part of that is pushback from the Afghan government. A second thing that you might find that really restricts or encourages military, probably even larger, the U.S. military to take more action on civilian casualties are U.S. deaths. So when more U.S. service members are dying in wars, you see far more accountability, far more criticism of where we're going, where the United States is operating, what is happening as a result of that. And you can look at this historically in terms of how the United States even began counting in civilian deaths in the first place, going from an era of carpet bombing to, you know, precise counting or attempts to count. You know, a lot of that has come out of large American losses. But the way that the United States fights wars today is that we put the minimal number of U.S. troops on the ground as possible, rely on partner forces and provide them air support. A lot of that air support can come via contractors. So we're really not losing U.S. service member lives in the way that we used to. So from the start of Operation Resolute Support in 2015 in Freedom Sentinel to now we've actually had 64 U.S. deaths in hostile combat. Compare this to the tens of thousands of Afghan forces who have died in recent years, despite having massive air support. And you kind of understand how this war was lost. At the same time, that air support was exacting incredible civilian casualties that really created space for the Taliban. To pull back up for a minute, there seems like a lot of these sort of bigger issues like transparency. Like nobody really knows what's going on in these rural areas, including because the United States is not reporting it out. Foreign leaders may not be seeing it. Maybe the new, maybe new governments in particular places where the U.S. is operating are not actually being all that hard or tough on the U.S. or perhaps being perhaps being complicit in some way. I'm wondering what's going to happen now that the U.S. is out of Afghanistan, which of course was one of the, where everyone was focused on civilian casualties for so long. But the United States is in all of these other places. And Americans don't even know where U.S. troops necessarily are and certainly aren't going to be hearing about civilian casualties. So for those of us who care about U.S. policy on civilian casualties, I think there's going to be not as much of a hook. There's not going to be as much leverage to push. Anand, what do you see here? Well, the U.S. is involved in Syria, in Iraq, Somalia, parts of Northern and Western Africa as well. However, as Azmat said, these are mostly special operations or they are largely partnered with local actors. So it's a different dynamic than what we saw in the last 20 years in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan now, however terrible the Taliban rule will be for people, at the very least we'll say that people in the countryside will not be will not be dying. So that will be a positive thing that's come out of all of this. But just more broadly, I think, I guess I'm skeptical about the idea that a military force can really do a lot to mitigate civilian casualties. I mean, the U.S. isn't breaking, isn't committing war crimes for the most part. It isn't, there's all sorts of checks and balances within the targeting system. There's a lot of people there that are vetting targets. It's just that the reality is you can't fight a war without killing people. You can't fight a war without killing lots of civilians. And there's two different approaches people of states have taken.   And then the war is over in two or three years. Or we have our approach, which is to try to adhere to the laws of war very meticulously, in which case a lot of these killings are in the ones and twos partly for that reason. But then the U.S. actually can't win these wars, because when Hamid Karzai was pushing back against the civilian casualties, a lot of people in the U.S. military were grumbling about this because it actually did impede their ability to fight an effective war. They're correct about that. But what that meant was it just dragged out the war for 10, 15, 20 years and we got to this point where they're lost anyway. So I mean, to what extent can any military actually get to a point where there's zero civilian casualties? It's impossible. Can they ever get to a point where large numbers of people are not dying in wars? I think it's impossible. So the U.S. militaries are around the world in different conflicts and we're so enured from the reality of warfare that I think us in the American public think that there can be such a thing as a clean war. There's no such thing as a clean war.  And so we don't see that partly because most of these wars are being done by special operations forces and the CIA and third-party actors. So what about the transparency argument then? It does it feel like, I mean, it's a very tactical thing instead of saying we're going to focus, we as advocates are going to focus all of our attention on making sure that the American public knows that if you go into a war, there will be civilian casualties. Making sure that the State Department, for example, is working on diplomatic solutions, et cetera, so that the DOD isn't going into war and causing civilian casualties.  So what is the solution to that? The Department of Defense has been creating a what they call a Department of Defense Instruction for some time now, which would be the first ever, I think, US policy on civilian protection and civilian casualties. And it seems to include a couple of, you know, at least hat tips to transparency. Sorry, there's a fly that is really annoying me right now. But what can we do? Is it really for investigative journalists like yourself and researchers to go out and try to find these stories or is there something more that we could be doing to understand the human cost of these wars? I think that the American public and the US military, it just depends on the war zone you're looking at. But in Iraq and Syria, you saw a really deliberate and sustained effort to report out what at least the civilian casual team was finding. Now, you saw a lot of lingo or you saw a lot of language around the idea that like, this is the most precise air war in the history of warfare. We've never seen anything like it. And while that may be more precise than historically, you know, there are still very large numbers dying and they were severely underestimating them. But you saw a level of transparency that frankly, really is just, you know, I think in the uncounted when Anand and I were writing the story into civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria, we called it one of the least transparent wars in recent US history because of that gap in civilian deaths. But I would actually change that now, you know, having spent enough time in Afghanistan to see the ways in which there has been an extreme lack of transparency there, like just the aggressiveness with which they have met very credible allegations of civilian harm is unlike anything I've seen. There is no team counting these things, putting out numbers. And so the idea that you might expect or see it as reasonable for the US military or certainly in a place like Afghanistan, if you have that kind of mindset where there's been such a reluctance to answer questions about it, like I can't, I've been so frustrated in my inability to get answers from US forces in Afghanistan. And I've been lied to directly, like I cannot underscore enough the lack of transparency in the abject failure around transparency that US forces in Afghanistan have had. So if you have that kind of a mindset, what is the likelihood that any of these forces are ever going to be really candid? For example, that look, that's just a fact of war, this happens, they're going to happen in large numbers. Based on some of the attitudes that I've seen, at least out in country, it might be different if you're speaking to a senior sent com official, or you're talking to somebody at the office of the Department of Defense. You know, it's a different story, but those on the ground who are actually taking some of this data, they're not, they're not actually looking at the data, they're not collecting it, there's no aggregate analysis. I would say there's not just little will, but there's little, it might be even built to function that way. I think transparency is super important, investigator journalism is super important, but I think there's an even deeper problem, which is that most of these wars aren't really decided by the American public in any democratic fashion, right? We have authorization for the use of military force, we have a couple of them that have been around for 20 years, one of them was finally just canceled, another one's still extant, but how many Americans in any kind of public forum discussed the fact that the US is doing operations in Somalia? Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't, but this is not part of the democratic discourse. So war making has kind of moved into kind of a technocratic sphere, where lawyers and targetiers and generals and others are kind of deciding the direction of it, whereas it should be a public and civic activity that everybody collectively tries to decide on, I think that's the major problem. And one of the reasons why there is such little transparency I think is because there's a real recognition, maybe not explicitly, but implicitly within those engaged in war fighting that, you know, as soon as this stuff comes out into the public, it gets very messy and people can critique it, etc., other such things. So right now we have a situation where our government can go to war and most of us have no say in it, and I think that's really the problem. Or when you do see the public talking about it, it usually is after US death. So let's take a look at the example of Niger, right? The United States had been flying drones in different capacities in that region for several years, but it wasn't until a special operations forces raid in I believe 2017, in which at least I think four US service members died, that all of a sudden Congress said, what are we doing in these parts of Africa? How has this war really creeped? How has Mission Creep brought us to these different kinds of places? It was never a question when foreign civilians were dying. It only became a question when US service members did. And when you remove those deaths from the equation, you know, fewer American service members are dying in wars today than in our history. So when you remove that as well, you're unlikely to see public debate or public conversations around war. So how do we build in? I mean, you both know so well that civilian cost of wars and it is not just deaths and injuries. It is property and livelihood and trauma and infrastructure and that goes on for that will go on for generations. And so many of these, you know, if we are pulling out of Afghanistan, if we're not going to have a combat role in Iraq, I worry very much that these investigations that you were talking about, will they continue? Will we ever get fidelity on who has actually been harmed? Will the families ever receive dignity, some sort of amend, condolence payments, whatever it may be? So we know the cost of this. We know how weighty it is on these populations. How do we then take that and build it into the next decision that the United States makes about going to war? How do we take that cost and make it known? It's not a budget line item. Anand, do you have an idea? Do I? Yes. It's not my idea. He does. He's advocated before. I've heard him talk about bringing back the draft. Oh, the draft. Well, that was only partly in jest, I think. But I think there's a problem actually when most of us are completely sort of separated from warfighting that it is only going to be when body bags come back here that we're going to have a sense of where the war is. But I think here there's a role to be played, for example, by politicians and journalists. Others are trying to draw the connections between the consequences of these wars and the ways in which they'll affect us as well. For example, the war on terror, which was billed as a way to try to make the world and America safer. I think one could argue it's actually made the world and America less safe. For example, the invasion of Iraq caused all sorts of disasters, contributed in part to the rise of ISIS, contributed to a massive refugee crisis. It was not unrelated to what happened in Syria. You look at what happened in Afghanistan as well. I think what we're seeing today, these people are leaving or fleeing Afghanistan. Many people in Afghanistan welcomed the U.S. in 2001. Even people who today are opposed to the U.S., they welcomed the U.S. in 2001. But all of my friends I talked to now, they're desperate to get out of the country because of the failures of the last two decades. All of these policies indirectly but very importantly affect American citizens. I think maybe that's part of the way we need to approach this. That makes a lot of sense. Ananda, I know you're also doing a lot of comparative work with other countries and how they are focused on international law. The United States has always said that it abides by international law. It is the gold standard for civilian protection. Can you tell us how other countries, particularly in, for example, Syria, where the U.S. is operating alongside other countries, can you tell us about this comparative work that you're doing and how the U.S. stacks up against other countries? The U.S. does abide by international law, but in part that's because it's designed, it's had a major role in formulating what counts as international law. There are human rights organizations that take a very different perspective of what counts as international humanitarian law. A perspective that's much more restrictive and the types of activities you can undertake in war zones. But the ultimate arbiter of whether the U.S. has committed a war crime is essentially the U.S. itself. It's not like a third-party court. That's almost never going to happen that the U.S. is going to be dragged to an international court to answer for certain crimes. A lot of international humanitarian law depends on the intent, for example, behind the attack, which ultimately is up to the targeters themselves to be able to say, so there's a kind of a black box in the targeting world where you don't really know the process of what's happening. But more importantly than that, I mean, there's an example in Syria where Aleppo, people may know, half of Aleppo was completely destroyed by the Russians and by the Syrian regime. And if you went to Aleppo, it would look like Dresden. It would just look like it's a horrific sight. And then Raqqa, which was the capital of ISIS. The U.S. is the one who led the war against ISIS in Raqqa. And if you go to Raqqa, it looks identical to Eastern Aleppo, completely destroyed like Dresden. People are living in ruins. And the U.S. actually, for the most part, adhered to their own standards of international humanitarian law and doing so. Whereas the Russians and the Syrians completely rejected it. They were targeting hospitals, et cetera. So one has to question if you have two armies operating under totally different norms and you get the same result at the end, it makes one question how valuable those norms are for fighting war. Now, this doesn't mean that we should just throw out international humanitarian law, but rather that it's sometimes a limited tool to be able to make sense of whether a war is just or whether people are being harmed or not. We have to leave people with some hope, because this is a really depressing conversation. And in fact, it's a really depressing time in the world, especially with regard to civilian protection. I'll ask for your recommendations to the Biden administration before we leave. But I want to know if you're seeing any progress. Are there any things in the world in U.S. policy that are giving you hope, new technologies, new norms, anything? I think the execution of the withdrawal was a disaster, obviously. And all three of us are involved in trying to help people deal with that disaster. But the fact that the war has ended is a very positive thing. And if we can somehow look past the immediate disaster and the administration needs to be harshly critiqued for their handling of this. But the fact that the war actually ended and that for millions of Afghans living in the countryside, life today is better than it was six months ago, just as a fact. It doesn't mean that they support the Taliban. But now they don't have to worry about somebody breaking to their house in the middle of the night and taking away one of their loved ones.  That's a positive thing. And I think the turn in the last couple of years to questioning using the military to solve political problems, I mean, I think it's a small turn in that direction, but that's a positive thing. And that's something we should emphasize and try to try to foreground. And I would just emphasize that civilians can be impacted by US policy through combat operations. We can have casualties, but there's so many other kinds of US policies that can really negatively harm civilians, economic warfare, the kinds of sanctions that are currently being discussed, the withdrawal of certain kinds of money that would do little perhaps to actually affect the Taliban leadership and more to affect local populations, civilians who are really going to be struggling. There are going to be humanitarian crises. And I think that that's just on the forefront of my mind right now is that even if there are these, you know, these sort of pop, there is some kind of a positive sign of progress with the withdrawal in terms of civilian loss of life, that we would also be thinking about some of the humanitarian concerns of civilians as a result of some of these economic and other kinds of, you know, war by other means. Okay, so we have this very acute crisis right now with the evacuations and getting Afghans out. To your point, Anand, I think, you know, some Afghans in the countryside are probably feeling some relief. I think many tens of thousands of others are feeling real fear for their lives. In this acute moment, what are your recommendations to the U.S., to the UN, to the international community, or to the Taliban about civilian protection, about this thing that we are talking about? Well, right now, I think the U.S. should do a much better job letting Afghans into the airport. It's primarily been the U.S. that has blocked Afghans from getting into the airport. The Taliban, the main Taliban checkpoint in the south of the airport, will not allow people to pass unless they get the green light from the U.S. inside. So we bear responsibility to everybody who's trying to get into the airport to facilitate that. Asma, I assume you're in agreement. I mean, it's true. It's actually very heartbreaking, literally, Anand was following a convoy two nights ago. I was following one last night this morning, and at each turn, they were rejected in the exact scenario that he described, where they were counting on senior officials from the United States to give that go-ahead, and they didn't do it. And the kinds of people that these are people whose lives are at risk or who frankly, you know, oftentimes, it's impossible to deny how many people worked with Americans simply because they hoped that one day it would lead to some kind of asylum or some kind of path. And I think you're seeing how fraudulent that really was, that sort of luring of that idea, the dangling of this idea that people would be able to come at some point.  So that's the acute crisis that we're facing right now. Now, in the long term, we haven't seen, at least from my perspective, we haven't seen a lot of progress on U.S. policy on civilian protection over the past 20 years. We've seen it ebb and flow. We've seen different kinds of changes. I think if you take it holistically, I'm not sure that you would say that we are so different now than we were during the invasion of Iraq, for example. Please feel free to disagree with that or to agree in your answer. But I want to know what is your, if you could sit down with President Biden today or General Austin and say, here is my recommendation on civilian casualties on the human cost of war that is civilian casualties. What is the thing that you want them to either know or do? Well, for me, as I said, I don't, I'm pessimistic at the possibility of tweaking warfighting in such a way as to save a few civilians here or there, because war means death and for soldiers and for civilians. And it's not like the U.S. is not trying to do various things to have these mechanisms in place. In my perspective, that doesn't matter because at the end of the day, so extraordinary numbers of people are dying. So the most important thing I'll tell President Biden is don't fight wars unless you really, really have to. Take, you know, the way we've gone into dozens of countries in the last two decades has been disastrous. And we need to, that's what we need to look at. That's the policy that we need to to be consider. And I'm sorry, as much just a quick look, presumably that means counterterrorism operations that are outside that are not really considered armed conflicts or wars, all of the military operations that we have going on around the world. Exactly.  And so we need to really, we look at it, look at the root causes of some of these phenomena, not look at just trying to kill people. I think it's also important to, you know, keep in mind that I'm an investigative journalist. I don't advise governments, but it's undeniable from my reporting not to acknowledge the ways in which American, the way that America has really primarily started to use this air war as a means to involve itself, to not see how that that how that has really been adopted by other countries, you know, whether that's Saudi Arabia, whether that's the UAE, other countries who are now using US weapons with no means to track or follow how they're using them, that we've essentially rendered this in this post 9 11 age in which the United States has the ability to and claim somebody as a quote unquote terrorist when there is no evidence of that, you know, we put people in this position where they're guilty unless they've proved their innocence and the threshold of the intelligence, it's really the intelligence that I'm finding so flawed so often is maybe right here, but the threshold for how much they would have to prove to show their innocence is up here. You know, what we're looking at are scenarios in which when the United States has invoked those kinds of arguments, you've seen other countries around the world borrow them and there's nothing the United States can say about it, right, because this is something that they've really engineered, I mean, it was always the case that national security would be invoked, you know, to cover transparency, but after 9 11, you know, we've seen that really escalated and we've seen the ability to treat everybody as guilty before ever providing any evidence to the public that that's the case and you can look even at, you know, for example, the recent war in Gaza and civilian deaths there and trying to understand, you know, why were particular places targeted? What was the intelligence underpinning this? They can ignore those questions because the United States has. We did end on a depressing note. I think I put that question way too far in the middle of the conversation, but thank you so much. So Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, you've got new work coming out. You're constantly working on these issues and you're such a wealth of knowledge for everyone so please do keep a lookout for their new work and thank you for attending.


For years, everybody was afraid of fire. You have to respect fire, but you don't have to be afraid of it. That really kind of leads into the ecology of the prairie. The prairie of the grasslands, why do we have the grasslands? It's a function of three things. It's climate, and the grazing animal, and it's fire. Well, since settlement, we still have grazing animals, and with the cow, climate has not changed significantly. But the thing that's absent from that equation is fire. Fire can be beneficial if it's used correctly. And for the farmers and ranchers along the rivers here, they're going to have to use that, because you can't go down there with a chainsaw or a weed eater and get rid of the trees. There are just too many. In Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, they've been using prescribed fire to keep the eastern red cedar under control, which would help with healthy rangeland. Up here in South Dakota, the element of fire has been taken out of rangeland management. Really, ever since this area was homesteaded, that has allowed these cedar trees to really start to take over this part of the state up and down the Missouri River. It used to be when somebody hollered fire, you go put it out. But now they've learned how to kind of control it and do what you want it to do. And some people haven't grasped that yet. So I think fear is probably the biggest thing with a lot of it. Prescribed burning is definitely new in South Dakota. And it still can be a naughty word in a lot of parts of the state and even in certain areas around here yet.  If you write a prescribed burn plan and then follow that plan, you're going to reduce your risk a lot. And that's what I said before. I think it's time we take a calculated risk at it, do everything we can to mitigate the danger of it getting away, and then go ahead and do it.