Fraters Libertas

Do the French Have a Word for Insouciance?

Have you ever had the experience of reading a Laura Billings column, coming across a sentence fragment which wasn’t even relevant to the column’s main thrust, yet was so maddening, misleading, and purposely vague that you dedicated the rest of your life to to disproving it and thus exposing her journalistic failures? Slowly picking away at the threads of her complex web of deceit until it all unravels! Exposing a stinking clump of lies, so foul, so heinous, that not even the editors of the Pioneer Press could stand to breathe the fetid air belching out from her cubicle any longer!!! (Preceding sentences to be read using a Newman-esque tone of indignant outrage).

You haven’t? Well then I haven’t either. But ... I have been investigating the accuracy of a sentence fragment she included in a column last week. To quote:

in the year since we "liberated" that country (Afghanistan), child malnutrition has nearly doubled.

Last week I posted a rebuttal to her implication that the US did more harm than good in the overthrow of the Taliban regime. But I also wanted to run down the statistic itself. First, to see if it was accurately cited by Billings and second, to verify the organization originating the statistic was credible and that their methodology was valid.

I’m going to do you a favor by making a long and dreadfully dull story slightly less so by not going into the details. Or do you like painstaking descriptions of unproductive Google search string variations on “malnutrition” and “Afghanistan”? If you do, let me know as I’ve got the long winded account residing on my hard drive, awaiting future media historians, my personal biographers, or perhaps future members of my psychiatric team.

In summation, the research study producing this statistic does not exist anywhere on the Internet, at least in English. (If your Google skills are superior to mine and you can find it, let me know). The study was referenced in a picture caption in a New York Times Week in Review (link no longer available) which Ms. Billings cited to me in an e-mail as a source for the information. And it was referenced on a blog called Bloggy (which I found on my own, and which includes a remarkably similar commentary on the data as Billings provided, right down to the use of scare quotes around the word “liberate”). But that’s it.

I’m not sure why the alleged sponsoring organization, Action Contre de la Faim, wouldn’t have a press release available (in English) on their Web site. Or why they don’t distribute the study anywhere on the Internet. Perhaps their French sensibilities dictate they use carrier pigeon or singing telegram or a Pony Express-like intercontinental cancan line to communicate the results to the media. Since I’m not on their distribution route, I only have a few flimsy shreds of information to judge the accuracy of the statistic. But judge I must and thus far I conclude the following:

1) According to the New York Times citation, the statistic references malnutrition in Kabul only, not all of Afghanistan as Billings stated.

2) The reported increase was from 6% to 11%. While this is indeed “almost doubling”, the overall scope is still relatively small. Stating “almost double” without context misleads the reader into making catastrophically high projections. Even if the data is correct, it’s an icrease of 5 percentage points.

3) According to the Bloggy reference (which sounds way too chipper for this subject matter), the main cause of this alleged increase in malnutrition was an influx of refugees. Approximately 1 million Afghanis, returning to their country from abroad. Meaning that the removal of the Taliban regime and the creation of an American sponsored government has convinced these individuals the conditions in their country may be tolerable again (which I think is incontrovertible evidence of “liberation”).

4) The sponsoring organization for the stat was French. A nation whose primary ethnic characteristic is lying to further their own interests.

But if their Frenchness alone isn’t enough to ruin their credibility in your judgment, check out this article from World Corporal Punishment Research (whose swim suit issue comes out next week, by the way). This is from April of 1997, which was prime time for the pre-”liberation” Taliban way of doing things:

Afghan charity workers receive lashing, set free

KABUL (Reuters) -- Five local employees of a Paris-based aid organization have been released by the purist Taleban after receiving lashings yesterday for being in the same compound as unveiled Afghan women.

"The five men were released today after receiving a symbolic lashing on their backs and legs", Jean-Fabrice Pietri, the director of Action Contre la Faim's (Action Against Hunger) Afghan program, said yesterday.

The five Afghans, with two Frenchmen, were arrested on Feb. 21 after a lunch given by the charity's female expatriates for their Afghan female employees. The seven men were tried and found guilty on March 21 of crimes associated with being in the same compound as unveiled Afghan women.

The two Frenchmen, Jose Daniel Llorente and Frederic Michel, were sentenced to a month in prison -- which they were deemed to have already served -- and to deportation. The five local staff were sentenced to one and a half months in prison and between 9 and 29 lashes.

Since the Taleban took Kabul last September, they have decreed that women should wear an all-enveloping, shroud-like veil when in the public and in the presence of men who are not family members. Pietri said that although he believed the men were innocent, he thought the way that the judge had administered the punishment showed leniency.

"On principle, we are not satisfied because we believe that these men are innocent, but the way they applied the punishment was not so bad," he said. "The cook's 29 lashes were over in 29 seconds, and the men were allowed to keep their clothes on. They were all wearing three pullovers. The whipping happened outside in the court compound, with probably 30 people looking on. The whip was a flexible piece of thick leather about 60 centimetres long and 6 centimetres wide," he said.

Classic French appeasement-speak. Their employees are imprisoned for a month and lashed repeatedly with a leather strap, all for the crime of being in the presence of unveiled women at a “thank you” luncheon, and the director of Action Contre la Faim calls the punishment merely symbolic , lenient, and “not so bad”. Then years later they allow the US to be portrayed as the villain in this drama.

And how about Laura Billings? The brutal, fascist, anti-woman Taliban government is removed, the Afghanis flood back into their country, causing what could be a temporary increase in malnutrition, and she uses this as an opportunity to condemn the US, the true liberators of Afghanistan, instead of those who created the refugee crisis in the first place.

Until now I didn’t realize Billings was a French word. I think it means sophistry. (Or does sophistry mean sophistry in French? I wouldn’t know, given the option to take French in high school, I took woodshop instead.)