The Great Debate

Are we deluding ourselves about Afghanistan?

Daniel L. Davis

Apr 25, 2012 12:53 EDT

Over the past month, a veritable who’s who of American opinion makers have been on the major television networks and in the most prestigious print media strongly reinforcing the notion that America’s mission in Afghanistan is “on track.” To be sure, they admit, there are “challenges” and “rough patches,” but the overall trajectory of the war is going according to the timelines laid out in the 2010 Lisbon Agreement. With so much star power locked virtually arm in arm, there are few who would publicly contend with such a group; most accept their stance without challenge.

But regardless of the titles, positions and resumes they cumulatively possess, if the evidence on the ground does not support their theory, it must be challenged. I contend the evidence overwhelmingly argues that our Afghan strategy has failed, continues to fail, and, absent a major course correction, will end in failure.

When the fundamentals of this war are examined, it doesn’t take long for common sense to kick in. With it comes the recognition that absent major change, we are very likely to suffer a strategic defeat by the end of 2014. Here are a few pertinent facts and hard questions:

• It strains credulity to suggest that what we were unable to accomplish in the first 11 years of war (creating a self-sufficient Afghan National Security Force, or ANSF) we will do over the next two years, with tens of thousands fewer troops and less than half the training budget, which has dropped from $11 billion to $5 billion in a single year. Further, who will provide the logistics for the Afghan troops we’re leaving behind? Who will provide the trucks and repair their vehicles, who will supply the fuel and provide spare parts, as well as ammunition, water, food, intelligence support, artillery support, attack jet support, helicopter gunship support, medical evacuation, and medical support – all of which ISAF currently provides, at least in part?

• Pakistan’s borders remain an ungoverned conduit for support of the insurgency, and evidence suggests they will remain so.

• There is no functioning economy in Afghanistan – much less one that could attain self-sufficiency in just the next few years.

• The Afghan government at virtually every level remains corrupt and barely lacks the capacity to provide basic services.

Who’s to blame when an injured soldier kills civilians?

Mac McClelland

Mar 23, 2012 17:10 EDT

“It would probably be best for the military if they could execute Bales right now and send his pieces to Afghanistan.” That’s what National Veterans Foundation founder Floyd Meshad told me this week while we were talking about Staff Sergeant Robert Bales and the insanity or diminished-capacity defense Bales’s attorney apparently intends to use. Bales was formally charged today with slaughtering 17 Afghan civilians earlier this month in Kandahar.

With the politics, with the foreign relations involved, with the exceptionally high bar for proving lack of mental responsibility in military courts, it’s likely Bales is going to end up taking sole responsibility for his actions in the upcoming trial. Which is too bad. Does this case involve war crimes of the highest and most horrific order? Absolutely. But was it all Bales’s fault? Probably not so much. Not given the chain of command that put him in a position to suffer such extreme levels of post-traumatic stress.

There’s something of a frenzy of PTSD-research stories in the media this week. Did Bales have PTSD? Can PTSD make you act “insane”? What is the link between PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI)? How strong is the link between PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and violence? Is it strong enough?

Of course, there’s no totally definitive extent to which any of these tricky neurological and psychological queries can be “proved.” What we do know: that Bales served four tours of duty; that Bales was treated for TBI; and that traumatically injured brains do not operate like regular brains — because of altered cognitive functions, inconsistent memories, and the ease with which they’re overwhelmed, irritated and angered.

A lot of service members overcome their injuries and disorders, and reintegrate into their lives — bless their outstanding resilience. And very, very few have ever done something so abhorrent. But “as far as soldiers with PTSD going off the deep end, there’s no doubt that there’s a correlation,” says Meshad, who was a mental health officer with experience extracting soldiers who’d “snapped” in Vietnam. After decades of treating, and being consulted for criminal trials involving, veterans with PTSD, he literally wrote the book on defending them. Obviously, most veterans with PTSD don’t commit a crime. But attorney Brockton Hunter, who specializes in PTSD defense and co-wrote the Attorney’s Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court with Meshad, says that “historical research confirms waves of veteran-committed crimes after every major conflict.” The U.S. Army’s own 2009 study of a rash of violent crimes at Ft. Carson, Colorado, found a correlation between the number and intensity of soldiers’ deployments and “negative behavioral outcomes.” Hunter says: “In other words, the more you see, and do, in combat, the more likely you are to be affected by it and to act out in bad ways.”

Any doubts that many soldiers of the recent wars are suffering psychological disorders and that those disorders can profoundly affect behavior are based on too narrow a definition of  “violence.” Kyndra Rotunda, an associate professor of military and international law and executive director of the Military Law and Policy Institute and AMVETS Legal Clinic at Chapman University, bristles at the debate over whether PTSD might be unrelated to violence. Eighteen vets commits suicide every day, according to the Center for New American Security, one every hour and 20 minutes. “That’s violence!” Rotunda says.

But whatever specific evidence about his breakdown, or about breakdowns in general, is unearthed and displayed at Bales’s trial, it might not matter. In general, Rotunda says, “the military is not always willing to accept that PTSD was the reason someone acted.” The defense will have to demonstrate that PTSD made Bales’s brain so defective that he couldn’t understand the wrongness of what he was doing. And while, legally, “lack of mental responsibility,” which PTSD (as well as other mental diseases or defects) could precipitate, is an allowable defense in military court, “the politics are another question.” President Obama publicly ordered prosecutors in Bales’s case to be aggressive. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the death penalty was a possibility — before Bales had even been charged.

Obama’s first foreign policy blunder

David Unger

Mar 20, 2012 11:30 EDT

This is an excerpt from The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs, published recently by Penguin Press.

The defining mistake of Obama’s first-term foreign policy was his decision to escalate American military operations in Afghanistan. There were 35,000 American troops in Afghanistan when Obama was inaugurated. By the summer of 2011 there were roughly 100,000. The main national security rationale for their presence was to prevent the Taliban from regaining sufficient strength to invite Al Qaeda back to the Afghan training camps and sanctuaries they had operated from before 9/11. But since early 2002, seven years before Obama became president, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden himself — until he was tracked down and killed by U.S. commandos in May 2011 — had been based in Pakistan, under the protection of a Pakistani army that continues to receive billions of dollars in American military aid.

Long before his presidential bid, Obama had called for an increased American military effort in Afghanistan. He repeated that position frequently during the 2008 campaign. Obama’s strong opposition to the Iraq War led many supporters to imagine that he rejected the idea of defending America against terrorism by waging conventional military conflicts in distant Islamic lands. Some of the more philosophical passages in Obama’s autobiographical books, writings, and speeches elaborating on his opposition to the Iraq War fed that misimpression.

In a widely noted November 2006 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he emphasized his belief that the war had been not just a “failure of implementation” but “also a failure of conception,” going on to argue that “the rationale behind the war,” including an excessive faith that “we can impose democracy on a country through military force,” was “misguided.”

Some thought they heard echoes of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous 1967 speech declaring opposition not just to the war in Vietnam but to “a far deeper malady of the American spirit” that, if not confronted then, could lead to other misguided wars in other countries also waged in the name of guaranteeing liberty.

But Obama had long made a clear distinction between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unnecessary war of choice and a diversion from the main battle against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He supported the war in Afghanistan as a justified response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and necessary to America’s future security. On that basis Obama had harshly criticized the Bush administration for diverting military resources from Afghanistan to Iraq after 2003. And during his presidential campaign Obama had talked about sending three to five more brigades to Afghanistan as he drew down U.S. combat forces in Iraq.

Within a month of taking office, Obama approved a 17,000-troop increase for Afghanistan. That was less than the top U.S. commander there, General David McKiernan, had requested. But it was within the range Obama had called for during the campaign. It amounted to a roughly 50 percent rise in troop strength.

Awlaki and the Arab autumn

David Rohde

Sep 30, 2011 17:33 EDT

By David Rohde The opinions expressed are his own.

The death of Anwar al-Awlaki this morning is welcome news, but Washington policymakers should not delude themselves into thinking the drone that killed him is a supernatural antidote to militancy. Yes, drone strikes should continue, but the real playing field continues to be the aftermath of the Arab spring; namely vital elections scheduled for October in Tunisia and November in Egypt.

A series of outstanding stories by reporters from Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, have aptly laid out the stakes. Islamists are on the rise in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, but an extraordinary battle is unfolding over the nature of Islam itself.

“At the center of the debates is a new breed of politician who has risen from an Islamist milieu but accepts an essentially secular state,” Anthony Shadid and David Kirkpatrick wrote in today’s New York Times. Common values, in other words, are emerging between the West and the Islamic world. These “post-Islamist” politicians argue that individual rights, democracy and economic prosperity are elements of an “Islamic state.”

Whether these politicians represent the most potent weapon ever fielded against militant Islam or a Trojan horse will emerge in the months and years ahead. More than any other figure, the new breed’s standard-bearer is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Pledging that conservative Islam is compatible with individual liberties, Erdogan holds the rise of his culturally conservative but economically liberal political party as a beacon for a new Middle East. Turkish critics, though, accuse Erdogan of a creeping authoritarianism masked by rapid economic growth.

For now, the “post-Islamists” should be taken at their word. The false Pax Americana of dictatorial regimes that once dominated the region is no longer viable. And the “post-Islamists” are a vast improvement over Awlaki and his ilk. For Awlaki and hard line Salafists, the only true “Islamic state” is one led by self-appointed clerics who rule by force and brutally regulate the minutia of everyday life.

At an astonishing rate across the Middle East, an internet-fueled communications revolution has implanted the ideals that the United States publicly espoused for decades, but privately failed to back. Washington is reaping a cultural amalgam that its rhetoric has slowly sown.

Don’t overestimate Afghanistan pessimism

James Dobbins

Sep 29, 2011 12:20 EDT

This is a response to Rory Stewart’s book excerpt “My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention.” David Rohde’s response can be read here and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s response can be read here.

By James Dobbins The views expressed are his own.

Rory Stewart maintains that it is “not simply difficult, but impossible” to build an Afghan state. Presumably, this is meant hyperbolically, since Afghanistan has been recognized as an independent state far longer than any of its northern or southern neighbors.

It is true that the Afghan state had almost no capacity a decade ago, after twenty years of civil war, and that it still struggles to deliver basic public services. Nevertheless, nothing in Stewart’s pessimistic assessment would lead one to realize that since 2001 Afghanistan’s licit GDP has risen by 300 percent, that tax collection as a percentage of GDP now exceeds that of Pakistan, that school attendance has risen eightfold, that the country’s literacy rate will triple in 10 years if these children are permitted to stay in school, that 80 percent of the population has access to basic health care faculties (albeit often distant and intermittent), that child mortality has dropped by one third as a result, and that despite the ongoing conflict longevity is increasing. Yet another striking statistic is that today almost half of Afghan households have telephones.

Multiple polls commissioned by independent news and other organizations consistently reveal an Afghan population that sees improvement in its well-being, has a favorable view of its government and is optimistic about its future. Indeed for the past couple of years the Afghans have rated their government and its leadership higher than Americans do theirs.

Stewart seems surprised at his failure to convince American and European officials, academic colleagues and even his own students of the fruitlessness of international efforts to help modernize and develop Afghanistan. His deeply pessimistic view rests on his own very considerable personal experience and that of others he knows. This is important information, to be taken seriously coming from someone as well traveled and perceptive as Stewart. Yet when anecdotal and empirical data diverge so widely, as they do in this instance, most observers will conclude that the truth lies somewhere in between.

Where the Afghanistan effort broke down

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Sep 26, 2011 11:24 EDT

This is a response to Rory Stewart’s book excerpt “My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention.” David Rohde’s response can be read here.

By Anne-Marie Slaughter The views expressed are her own.

This fall I am teaching a big introductory course to the first-year Masters of Public Affairs students at the Woodrow Wilson School called Politics and Public Policy. The focus of the first lecture, delivered by one of my colleagues, as the necessary intersection of good policy, good politics, and good practice. In other words, the best policy in the world doesn’t make any difference if it is not politically feasible; conversely, what is politically feasible may not be worth doing if it is not at least better policy than the status quo. And even where good policy is politically feasible, it must also be implementable – not just in theory, but in practice.

The intersection of these three circles came to mind as I read Rory Stewart’s achingly honest and thoughtful account of his experience in Afghanistan. For a long time I was convinced that the NATO intervention in Afghanistan could be successful at building a functioning Afghan government that would provide basic services to its citizens. My views were largely shaped by my regular conversations with my long-time friend Sarah Chayes, who lived in Kandahar for much of past decade running first a dairy cooperative and then a soap and fragrance business with Afghans. We were failing, in her view, because of the high NATO tolerance for the cancerous corruption that was sucking the life out of the country, starting at the top. Her book Punishment of Virtue tells the tale, describing how Afghans genuinely committed to rebuilding their country have been systematically driven out or killed by their compatriots who are profiting from the enormous in-flux of money and opportunity that inevitably accompanies large-scale Western intervention in a poor country. She thought, and I agreed, that the U.S. had had an opportunity to help rebuild a very different Afghanistan immediately after the invasion, and that it was still possible to empower the good guys if we were really willing to take on the bad guys profiting at the local, regional, and national level.

Over the past two years, I have reluctantly changed my mind. I have come to believe that where the problem is a predatory state, which the very presence of massive Western resources tends to fuel, it is essentially impossible for outsiders to spur or even effectively support a process of reform from within when we are a big part of the problem by being there in the first place. Stewart makes the argument succinctly and effectively: “the international community necessarily [lacks] the knowledge, the power, and the legitimacy to engage with politics at a local provincial level.”

I would add a much more personal dimension, one that is consistent with a 21st century focus on social actors and social relations as well as on governments and inter-governmental relations. The “international community” does not engage with Afghans. Individual men and women (mostly men) do. Those individuals — diplomats, soldiers, development professionals – develop personal relationships with Afghan officials at the national, provincial, and local level. They have to work together on common programs; moreover, the Americans or Europeans are doing their best to cultivate personal relationship in part to garner exactly the knowledge they know they lack. But once those relationships are established, how exactly is a general or a captain, an ambassador or a political counselor, a USAID Mission Director or a field development expert supposed to turn to his or her Afghan counterparts and interlocutors and explain that they should really stop taking bribes and looting the funds intended for their fellow Afghans? And once the denial is issued, as of course it must be, then what?  Accuse him or her of lying? The problems that are most central cannot even be talked about honestly. They are always someone else’s fault. But if they cannot be acknowledged, they cannot be resolved.

It is at this micro-level that policies must actually be implemented. And it is at this level that I conclude state-building military interventions are much more likely to fail than to succeed. The interventions that I count as successes – albeit highly qualified ones – are East Timor, Kosovo, and now Libya. All were launched in the face of crimes against humanity on a scale sufficient to shock the global conscience. All were relatively short. And all were marked by a relatively light military footprint on the part of the interveners – only air power in the cases of Kosovo and Libya, limited Australian troops on the ground in the case of East Timor – aimed primarily at stopping the superior force and creating a safe space for a process of national self-determination to take place (albeit under close international supervision). Foreign combat forces deployed over years rather than months tend to generate their own antibodies.

Creating a “light, long term footprint” in Afghanistan

David Rohde

Sep 22, 2011 16:08 EDT

By David Rohde The views expressed are his own.

This is a response to Rory Stewart’s book excerpt, “My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention.”

The most important phrase in Stewart’s essay is his statement that a “light, long-term footprint” should be adopted in Afghanistan. I agree but he paints a dark picture of all Western efforts in the country.

While Stewart is correct in many of his arguments, he presents a seductively simplistic picture of abject failure. Unquestionably, Washington has focused too much on the military effort. And Stewart is right to argue against a policy of simply pouring in more foreign troops. Yet his portrait of foreigners achieving nothing in a decade stokes a dangerous isolationism gaining credence in both liberal and conservative circles in the West.

It is presented in subtle terms, but Stewart’s argument of cultural differences plays into an ugly, colonial-era view that Afghanistan and the greater Middle East are inherently backward. The region’s people, culture and faith, an extreme interpretation of the argument goes, have nothing in common with the West.

The region is not inherently backward, nor anti-Western. It is enduring a long and bloody conflict between religious conservatives and urban liberals. Instead of walking away, the United States and Europe must find a more effective way to back those liberals over the long-term.

The notion that the west can simply walk away from Afghanistan is an appealing fantasy.  A hasty American withdrawal and rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will strengthen the Pakistani Taliban’s effort to seize control of Pakistan and its nuclear weapons. A nuclear-armed Taliban state will destabilize the greater Middle East, a region the world economy still depends on for oil. Unless Washington adopts radically new energy policies and stances toward Israel, the U.S. will need stability in the Greater Middle East for decades to come.

My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention

Rory Stewart

Sep 21, 2011 10:28 EDT

By Rory Stewart The views expressed are his own.

I returned to Afghanistan (after spending a short time at Harvard) in 2005. And when I heard that the British government was about to send three thousand soldiers into Helmand, I was confident that there would soon be a widespread insurgency. I also predicted that the military would demand more troops, and would get dragged ever deeper.

It wasn’t that I had any particular skill in predicting the future. I failed to predict that Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak would fall. I was wrong about Iraq. And my prediction for Helmand wasn’t based on any knowledge of Helmand. It was simply that I recognized the mindset and the actions of the NATO governments from Iraq. And I wasn’t alone in warning against the deployment. Many others predicted the same thing in Helmand. A military friend of mine had returned from a reconnaissance trip saying, “There isn’t an insurgency, but you can have one if you want one.” The Helmand surge continued regardless. The British government seemed to have a momentum, quite distinct from any individual politician or policy-maker. Troops were increased from two hundred U.S. Special Forces in 2005 to three thousand British soldiers in 2006.

At the time, senior officials reassured me that they understood the danger of being dragged in too deep. Two offered to sign a document saying that if the three thousand troops didn’t “establish governance, economic development, and security” within six months, they would admit the policy was a mistake, rather than claim that the problem had simply been strategy and resources. But I did not force them to sign. And when six months passed and the situation had worsened, the same officials supported the call to increase the number of troops to five thousand, and a few months later to seven thousand. I began writing and speaking publicly against the policy. I argued that what was needed was not a surge but a reduction to a light long-term footprint.

This put me in a difficult position because the policy-makers were my friends and I lived in Kabul, where I had just started an NGO, restoring part of the historic city and establishing an institute for traditional crafts. My personal life and work indebted me to many of the people whose policies and governments I was criticizing. I found myself writing op-eds against generals who had been my hosts; giving academic lectures mocking the books and theories written by friends; and publicly debating an ambassador whom I admired. I was calling on the governments that were giving money to my NGO to send less money to Afghanistan. I was arguing against fighting the Taliban while many of the philanthropists who supported my work did so out of hatred of the Taliban. Many of my upper-class Afghan friends who had returned from the West to Kabul and were relying on the international community to build a state were particularly confused and hurt by my arguments. In retrospect and in the circumstances, I am astonished how forgiving they all were. Only one ambassador gently asked whether I could stop criticizing his country, in return for the millions his nation’s taxpayers were giving to our NGO. But when I wouldn’t make the commitment, the money still came.

Most of the internationals I knew in Kabul disagreed with me strongly. They said that I didn’t know what I was talking about. And in many ways they were right. I was certainly not an expert on Afghanistan. Academics such as Tom Barfield and Barnett Rubin are truly scholars of Afghanistan. Afghan statesman such as Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad have a much more detailed sense and understanding of Afghan history and politics. Journalists such as Ahmed Rashid have a much better sense of the language, the recent past, and the regional context. People who have run projects on the ground, from Andrew Wilder and Antony Fitzherbert to Michael Semple and Martine van Biljert, have a much more detailed sense of the reality of international assistance in Afghanistan. Generals and ambassadors and development directors know far more about military tactics, practical diplomacy, and development theory. There are, most importantly, thirty million Afghans who intuitively understand far more about Afghanistan than any foreigner. And, as the British pointed out gleefully, I had traveled only in the north and center of Afghanistan—I had been to Helmand only once.

Nevertheless, I was confident that I was right. I tried to explain that this was not based on any special insights about Afghanistan, but instead on a sense of ourselves: the international community. I felt I had learned in the Balkans and particularly in Iraq that we—the foreign government organizations and their partners—know much less and can do much less than we pretend. I knew the international community underestimated the reality of Afghan rural life: they did not grasp just how poor, fragile, and traumatized Afghanistan was; just how conservative and resistant to foreigners, villages could be. Our institutions were too inherently optimistic, too ad hoc, too isolated from the concerns and realities of Afghan life, too caught up in metaphysical abstractions of “governance” and “the rule of law” ever to succeed—or to notice that we were not succeeding.

9/11 in history: chapter or footnote?

Historians like to break up human progress into bite-sized pieces. It’s a useful technique: segregated and labelled, historical eras offer prisms through which to view the past, making it easier to comprehend. Typically, they’re bookmarked by inventions: the wheel, the steam engine, the atom bomb. Intellectual movements fit nicely, too: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Modernism. Each innovation provides a paradigm shift, ushering in a way of thinking previously inconceivable but, after its emergence, unignorable.

Occasionally, waypoints are provided by momentous events. A happening of sufficient magnitude (the argument goes) jars the historical process decisively, severing the connection between past and future, sweeping away the old and paving the way for the new. The Flood in Genesis, the birth of Christ, the attack on Pearl Harbor – all “watershed” moments. Bookmarking such events not only provides useful academic waypoints, it also offers another important service: reassurance. With the sweeping away of the old comes trepidation. The birth of a “new era” provides a link to the past: there have been epochal events before. Things have changed rapidly, and not always for the better. We have survived them. We will again.

The impact of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46 a.m. on 11 September 2001 was immediately labelled a watershed event. Seventy-six minutes later, after both the South Tower and the Pentagon had been hit, United Airlines Flight 93’s calamitous descent into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania,marked the end of the attacks – and the start of a still-ongoing attempt to define what, exactly, they meant.

Certainly, the strikes were unprecedented. For George W. Bush, they marked a change of political eras ‘as sharp and clear as Pearl Harbor’. Secretary of State Colin Powell agreed. ‘Not only is the Cold War over,’ he explained, ‘the post-Cold War period is also over.’

Around the world the media reiterated the global significance of the event, most famously Le Monde. “Today,” stated the French newspaper, “we are all Americans.” Perhaps Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department, put it most pithily: “History starts today.” Intuitively, all of these statements made perfect sense. The magnitude – and audacity – of the 9/11 attacks were staggering. All, however, was not as it seemed.

For politicians, as for historians, predictively labeling eras is a hazardous procedure: history is littered with declarations of new eras that have somehow failed to materialize. In the aftermath of the attacks it seemed reasonable to assume that 11 September would trigger a new way of thinking.

Did it?

The 9/11 generation

David Rohde

Sep 8, 2011 12:16 EDT

By David Rohde The opinions expressed are his own.

In a speech last week at the American Legion convention in Minneapolis, President Obama rightly hailed what he called “the 9/11 generation,” the five million Americans who served in the military over the last decade.

“They’re a generation of innovators,” he declared. “And they’ve changed the way America fights and wins at wars.”

The following day, at a ceremony marking his retirement from the military, Gen. David Petraeus affirmed Tom Brokaw’s similar praise as the two men toured Iraq in 2003.

“He shouted to me over the noise of a helicopter before heading back to Baghdad: ‘Surely, General, this is America’s new greatest generation’,” Petraeus recalled. “I agreed with him then, and I agree with him now.”

I agree as well. There is a kernel of truth – and hope – in both statements. There is a 9/11 generation, one that extends beyond the valiant military members both men correctly hailed. Instead, it includes all Americans who experienced the attacks and responded to them over the last decade.

Its members include the tens of thousands of civilians who worked as diplomats, aid workers and contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq; the millions of police, firemen and teachers who stabilized American society in the fall of 2001 and subsequent years; and the tens of millions of innovative businesspeople and workers who brought the American economy roaring back after the attacks.