3 American Doctors Killed by Guard at Afghan Hospital - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/world/asia/foreign-doctors-killed-by-guard-at-afghan-hospital.html?hp&_r=0

3 American Doctors Killed by Guard at Afghan Hospital

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Afghan security officials outside of Cure International Hospital in Kabul on Thursday. Credit S. Sabawoon/European Pressphoto Agency

KABUL, Afghanistan — Three American doctors were killed Thursday morning when an Afghan police officer turned his gun on them at a private hospital in Kabul, an attack that underscored the growing frustration with the Western presence here a decade after the war began.

The shooting took place at Cure International Hospital, a 100-bed facility that specializes in the treatment of disabled children and women's health issues, including fistula and premature birth. One of the physicians who worked at the facility was hosting three visiting doctors from the United States, said Gen. Mohammad Zahir, the Kabul police chief. The three had taken a picture in front of the hospital's sign before entering, witnesses said.

A government official said the police officer, Ainuddin, a two-year veteran of the department, had only recently been assigned to the unit guarding the hospital. Witnesses and officials said he fired on the doctors when they entered a security vestibule at the entrance of the building, killing three of the male doctors and wounding a female doctor. The attacker then entered the interior courtyard, where he continued to fire at foreigners.

Other officers were reported to have wounded the gunman before he could kill anyone else, although one security official said the guard had shot himself.

The Taliban did not claim responsibility for the attack, raising the possibility that the gunman was part of a growing class of Afghans disenchanted with the presence of Americans in the country. Bitterness has spilled into the narrative about the American presence here, as fears about the military withdrawal and its attendant uncertainty grow.

Less than three weeks ago, an award-winning photographer for The Associated Press, Anja Niedringhaus, was killed by a police officer at a checkpoint in eastern Afghanistan. Her colleague, the reporter Kathy Gannon, was also wounded in the attack. A month before that, a Swedish journalist was shot and killed in a heavily guarded area of Kabul.

The attacks are reminiscent of the so-called green-on-blue shootings by Afghan soldiers against their allies in the coalition. Two years ago, a sharp increase in the number of insider attacks threatened to derail the training mission that is central to the American military withdrawal scheduled for this year.

But even as fewer coalition soldiers leave their heavily fortified bases, and as new strategies are put in place to safeguard against insider attacks, such episodes have all but subsided. Foreign workers in Afghanistan have been singled out for attacks, although the number of civilians targeted is still small compared with military deaths.

Beyond the recent killing of journalists, a concerted effort by the Taliban to target locations that are popular with expatriates was evident in the run-up to the presidential elections in early April. An assault in January on the Taverna Restaurant in central Kabul left 21 dead, most of them foreigners, and fatal shootings at the luxury Serena Hotel last month left nine dead. Such events have put the thousands of foreigners living in Kabul on high alert.

The unpredictable nature of the violence has prompted some embassies to redouble their security efforts, and has led those living outside secure areas to limit their exposure.

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The scene of the attack Thursday presented a somewhat troubling case study in the waning patience of most Afghans for the continued Western presence here. Amid the two-dozen police officers clustered around the entrance to the hospital, a group of men whose female relatives were patients at the hospital gathered.

Some expressed fears that the facility might shut down after the killings, leaving Afghans with the prospect of having to turn to poorly funded public hospitals.

Others spoke of the attacks with little sympathy. "The foreigners have been here too long," said a man who gave his name as Fawad, whose female relative was in the hospital undergoing surgery. "People are tired of them."

A car pulled up a short while later, and the driver was told by the police to leave the area. When the police explained that an officer had shot and killed three foreigners, the driver replied, "Good for him that he killed the infidels."

Several Afghans at the hospital responded with expressions of shame in their countryman, and worried about the consequences of the attack.

"This is so bad," said Ahmad Shekib, a Kabul resident whose aunt had just delivered a baby. "We will lose this source of health services. These were good people who had left their families and had come all the way from U.S. to help Afghans. It is so shameful."

Others added that the attack would harm the very people the foreigners were trying to help.

"We will lose this source of proper health service," said Mohammed Safar, from Ghazni Province, who idled by the entrance. "Who bears the brunt? Poor Afghans. Rich Afghans can afford taking their patients to Dubai and Europe. Where will we go?"

Cure International started in 1998 in Kenya and now operates hospitals and programs in 29 countries. The organization focuses on health issues for which treatment is more difficult to obtain in the developing world, including club foot, cleft palate and untreated burns, according to its website.

The organization began operating in Afghanistan in 2005, setting up a hospital in West Kabul that now treats around 37,000 patients a year. On Thursday, the gunman himself was admitted as a patient after the attack.

Stuart Don Levy

Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch— Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families - WSJ.com

This is the truth that is politically incorrect.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579493612156024266?mod=hp_opinion&mg=reno64-wsj

Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families

Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer's 1997 book "What Money Can't Buy" to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.

"Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children," Ms. Mayer wrote. "The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much."

In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called "Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters," University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don't fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein's 2011 book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline." The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today's family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report "Creating an Opportunity Society" from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty reported that communities with a high percentage of single-parent families are less likely to experience upward mobility. The researchers' report—"Where Is the Land of Opportunity?"—received considerable media attention. Yet mainstream news outlets tended to ignore the study's message about family structure, focusing instead on variables with far less statistical impact, such as residential segregation.

In the past four years, our two academic professional organizations—the American Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association—have each dedicated annual meetings to inequality, with numerous papers and speeches denouncing free markets, the decline of unions, and "neoliberalism" generally as exacerbating economic inequality. Yet our searches of the groups' conference websites fail to turn up a single paper or panel addressing the effects of family change on inequality.

Why isn't this matter at the center of policy discussions? There are at least three reasons. First, much of politics is less about what you are for than who you are against, as Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, noted in his popular 2012 book "The Righteous Mind." And intellectual and cultural elites lean to the left. So, quite simply, very few professors or journalists, and fewer still who want foundation grants, want to be seen as siding with social conservatives, even if the evidence leads that way.

Second, family breakup has hit minority communities the hardest. So even bringing up the issue risks being charged with racism, a potential career-killer. The experience of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a cautionary tale: Moynihan, who had a doctorate in sociology, served in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration as an assistant secretary of labor and in 1965 published a paper titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," warning about the long-term risk that single-parent households pose for black communities. He was attacked bitterly, and his academic reputation was tarnished for decades.

Finally, there is no quick fix. Welfare reform beginning in the mid-1990s offered only modest marriage incentives and has been insufficient to change entrenched cultural practices. The change must come from long-term societal transformation on this subject, led by political, educational and entertainment elites, similar to the decades-long movements against racism, sexism—and smoking.

But the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

Mr. Maranto is a professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Mr. Crouch is a researcher.

Stuart Don Levy

In Cold War Echo, Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin - NYTimes.com

A sea change in international relations.  We need to change the way that we think of the Russian leader without jeperdising important ways that we cooperate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/world/europe/in-cold-war-echo-obama-strategy-writes-off-putin.html?hp&_r=0

In Cold War Echo, Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin

WASHINGTON — Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.

Just as the United States resolved in the aftermath of World War II to counter the Soviet Union and its global ambitions, Mr. Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir V. Putin's Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state.

Mr. Obama has concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin, aides said. As a result, Mr. Obama will spend his final two and a half years in office trying to minimize the disruption Mr. Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign policy areas where progress remains possible.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met Saturday with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Credit Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti Kremlin, via Associated Press

"That is the strategy we ought to be pursuing," said Ivo H. Daalder, formerly Mr. Obama's ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "If you just stand there, be confident and raise the cost gradually and increasingly to Russia, that doesn't solve your Crimea problem and it probably doesn't solve your eastern Ukraine problem. But it may solve your Russia problem."

The manifestation of this thinking can be seen in Mr. Obama's pending choice for the next ambassador to Moscow. While not officially final, the White House is preparing to nominate John F. Tefft, a career diplomat who previously served as ambassador to Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania.

When the search began months ago, administration officials were leery of sending Mr. Tefft because of concern that his experience in former Soviet republics that have flouted Moscow's influence would irritate Russia. Now, officials said, there is no reluctance to offend the Kremlin.

In effect, Mr. Obama is retrofitting for a new age the approach to Moscow that was first set out by the diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947 and that dominated American strategy through the fall of the Soviet Union. The administration's priority is to hold together an international consensus against Russia, including even China, its longtime supporter on the United Nations Security Council.

While Mr. Obama's long-term approach takes shape, though, a quiet debate has roiled his administration over how far to go in the short term. So far, economic advisers and White House aides urging a measured approach have won out, prevailing upon a cautious president to take one incremental step at a time out of fear of getting too far ahead of skittish Europeans and risking damage to still-fragile economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The White House has prepared another list of Russian figures and institutions to sanction in the next few days if Moscow does not follow through on an agreement sealed in Geneva on Thursday to defuse the crisis, as Obama aides anticipate. But the president will not extend the punitive measures to whole sectors of the Russian economy, as some administration officials prefer, absent a dramatic escalation.

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The more hawkish faction in the State and Defense Departments has grown increasingly frustrated, privately worrying that Mr. Obama has come across as weak and unintentionally sent the message that he has written off Crimea after Russia's annexation. They have pressed for faster and more expansive sanctions, only to wait while memos sit in the White House without action. Mr. Obama has not even imposed sanctions on a list of Russian human rights violators waiting for approval since last winter.

"They're playing us," Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said of the Russians, expressing a sentiment that is also shared by some inside the Obama administration. "We continue to watch what they're doing and try to respond to that," he said on CNN on Friday. "But it seems that in doing so, we create a policy that's always a day late and a dollar short."

The prevailing view in the West Wing, though, is that while Mr. Putin seems for now to be enjoying the glow of success, he will eventually discover how much economic harm he has brought on his country. Mr. Obama's aides noted the fall of the Russian stock market and the ruble, capital flight from the country and the increasing reluctance of foreign investors to expand dealings in Russia.

They argued that while American and European sanctions have not yet targeted wide parts of the Russian economy, they have sent a message to international businesses, and that just the threat of broader measures has produced a chilling effect. If the Russian economy suffers over the long term, senior American officials said, then Mr. Putin's implicit compact with the Russian public promising growth for political control could be sundered.

That may not happen quickly, however, and in the meantime, Mr. Obama seems intent on not letting Russia dominate his presidency. While Mr. Obama spends a lot of time on the Ukraine crisis, it does not seem to absorb him. Speaking privately with visitors, he is more likely to bring up topics like health care and the Republicans in Congress than Mr. Putin. Ukraine, he tells people, is not a major concern for most Americans, who are focused on the economy and other issues closer to home.

Since returning from a trip to Europe last month, Mr. Obama has concentrated his public schedule around issues like job training and the minimum wage. Even after his diplomatic team reached the Geneva agreement to de-escalate the crisis last week, Mr. Obama headed to the White House briefing room not to talk about that but to hail new enrollment numbers he said validated his health care program.

Reporters asked about Ukraine anyway, as he knew they would, and he expressed skepticism about the prospects of the Geneva accord that his secretary of state, John Kerry, had just brokered. But when a reporter turned the subject back to health care, Mr. Obama happily exclaimed, "Yeah, let's talk about that."

That represents a remarkable turnaround from the start of Mr. Obama's presidency, when he nursed dreams of forging a new partnership with Russia. Now the question is how much of the relationship can be saved. Mr. Obama helped Russia gain admission to the World Trade Organization; now he is working to limit its access to external financial markets.

But the two sides have not completely cut off ties. American troops and equipment are still traveling through Russian territory en route to and from Afghanistan. Astronauts from the two countries are currently in orbit together at the International Space Station, supplied by Russian rockets. A joint program decommissioning old Russian weapons systems has not been curtailed.

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Nuclear inspections under the New Start arms control treaty Mr. Obama signed in his first term continue. The Air Force still relies on rockets with Russian-made engines to launch military satellites into space, although it is reviewing that. The United States has not moved to try to push Russia out of the W.T.O. And the Obama administration is still working with Russia on disarming Syria's chemical weapons and negotiating a deal with Iran to curtail its nuclear program.

"You can't isolate everything from a general worsening of the relationship and the rhetoric," said Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and an adviser to multiple administrations on Russia and defense policy. "But there's still very high priority business that we have to try to do with Russia."

Still, the relationship cannot return to normal either, even if the Ukraine situation is settled soon, specialists said. "There's really been a sea change not only here but in much of Europe about Russia," said Robert Nurick, a Russia expert at the Atlantic Council. "A lot of the old assumptions about what we were doing and where we were going and what was possible are gone, and will stay that way as long as Putin's there."

Mr. Nurick said discussion had already begun inside the administration about where and under what conditions the United States might engage with Russia in the future. "But I can't imagine this administration expending a lot of political capital on this relationship except to manage it so that the other things they care about a lot more than Russia are not injured too badly," he said.

Stuart Don Levy