Just to supplement Sabrina Haake’s post currently on the Rec list:
Juliette Kayyem was Massachusetts’ Undersecretary for Homeland Security and served as Undersecretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at DHS in the Obama administration. She is also a Senior security analyst for CNN.
Writing for The Atlantic, Kayyem dispenses with the administration’s response to Wednesday’s murder of Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and wounding of Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, in Washington D.C.:
Before an Afghan refugee, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, yesterday shot and seriously injured two National Guard members who had been deployed by President Donald Trump to Washington, D.C., military commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t.
Her point is that it didn’t have to be an “Afghan refugee” wielding the weapon. It could have been any run-of-the mill person with a grievance, provoked in their unbalanced mind at the unprecedented sight of the military patrolling U.S. streets.
It really doesn’t matter what city this happened in, who let the shooter into the country, or who vetted and approved his entry after the fact. Some of those things the administration and Fox News might like to focus on, but they don’t matter. I suppose it doesn’t really even matter to the families of the victims, at this point, whether the Guard’s deployment was “legal” or “illegal.” A federal judge has ruled it was likely not legal, and in fact it was at a hearing on that issue that the DOJ’s attorney dismissed these Guard commanders’ concerns as “speculative.” Well, many things can be “speculative” until they actually happen.
The bare fact is that the Guard was there, and they didn’t have to be. As Kayyem points out, “There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.”
As reported this week in the New York Times:
“I knew this would happen,” a member of the California National Guard texted The New York Times as news spread, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not have authority to comment publicly.
As part of the force sent to Los Angeles this summer to assist in the president’s immigration crackdown, the soldier, who has served in the Guard for six years, said he and his commanders worried that the assignment “increased our risk of us shooting civilians or civilians taking shots at us.”
That concern, which was echoed by at least two other California Guard members, was well known, including in the U.S. capital, where the two members of the West Virginia National Guard were critically wounded around 2:15 p.m. by a lone gunman near the White House, according to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.
Like hundreds of thousands of others I was in DC over the summer, visiting the Lincoln Memorial among other places. The National Guard troops “guarding” the memorial were mostly posing for pictures with curious tourists. There was no “threat” requiring a military presence there. None. You didn't need to be a military analyst to reach that conclusion. You just had to walk around.
As Kayyem writes:
Trump’s use of the military began as a so-called public-safety emergency, though crime was already down in D.C. before the deployment. The D.C. National Guard falls under the command of the federal government—unlike a state’s National Guard—so the district was an easy choice for Trump’s first target. Governors from red states gladly volunteered their troops for the mission, although the Pentagon was struggling to find one. It began to publish information regarding the troops’ trash-cleanup and landscaping successes, calling the initiative Task Force Beautification. Uniformed troops patrolled streets in “high visibility” efforts, fully decked out, though any visitor to D.C. could see they were just waiting around.
Again, the who or why of this shootings matters a lot less than the fact that it occurred in the first place. As the Guard’s own memo suggested, this was simply the tragic and predictable outcome of an exercise in performative saber-rattling by an administration seemingly “all in” on intimidation tactics to enforce its xenophobic anti-immigrant policies.
Kayyem concludes by noting the administration’s response to the shooting — by ordering more Guard troops to patrol the city — is also likely to be counterproductive:
Even if the deployments to D.C. were legal, they lack a clear mandate and metrics of success, and have vague rules of engagement and ill-defined operating procedures. And morale is low among part-time volunteer soldiers, who have had to leave home to patrol the streets of an American city that Trump doesn’t like.
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Ironically, deploying more National Guardsmen to increase the force protection for National Guardsmen is a very Afghanistan-style military error. The sunk-cost fallacy describes a phenomenon whereby individuals irrationally decide to continue investing in a flawed decision as a way to try to justify the original bad decision. We sent more and more troops to Afghanistan because we had already lost troops there, instead of pausing to reassess the war itself.
Forgive me if it starts to sound like a broken record: This is not normal. None of this is normal. But most of all, it should never have happened.
