Philip Sugg | Blog

Craig Whitlock’s new book, The Afganistan Papers, is based on a trove of formerly unreleased interviews with hundreds of U.S. officials who participated in the War in Afghanistan.

What makes Whitlock’s book so great are its minutia, produced by interview subjects who were thinking on the fly in spontaneous conversation, and who didn’t necessarily know that their thoughts would be made public. Many of these details will likely never find a home in more synoptic accounts, but they add a fascinating texture to the broadest accounts so far of the U.S. occupation.

Given recent events, the book couldn’t have been better-timed. The early sections cover important questions about the motivation to stay in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

From the first chapter: In the war’s first months, the U.S. troop presence was kept so small and provisional that there were almost no facilities of any kind. Whitlock writes that “soldiers who wanted fresh clothes had to fly their dirty laundry by helicopter to a temporary support base in neighboring Uzbekistan,” and there were no showers until around Thanksgiving 2001:

Some of the guys had been there for up to thirty days, so they needed a bath," Maj. Jeremy Smith, the quartermaster who oversaw the laundry unit in Uzbekistan, said in an Army oral-history interview. His superiors didn’t want to send any extra personnel or equipment to Bagram but finally relented.

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On Sunday night (August 22nd, 2021), this was the view from the Chicago South Side, looking southeast over the lake, of the four Galilean moons. They are easily visible through 10x30 binoculars. From a sketch I made around midnight:

What attracted my attention about Callisto’s position is that lies well outside the apparent plane of the other three moons. I usually see the visible Galilean lined up with one another, like we are looking at them edge-on from Earth, in the same orbital plane.

A quick illustration shows how the configuration in the sketch can occur. None of the four moons orbits in the exact same plane, although their inclinations are very close to one another. And the orbital plane of Jupiter is slightly tilted toward Earth. These factors mean that we see the orbits of the Gallilean moons at a slight angle to us, like we are looking at very narrow ellipse rather than single-dimension lines:

Callisto, the outermost moon, has a much larger orbit than the other three moons, meaning it travels up and down across the largest distance in both dimensions (see arrow in illustration), and giving it more latitude to reach an apparent position “above” or “below” the other moons, as we see it from Earth.

The story about the library book returned 100 years overdue is one those lighthearted newspaper pieces that still gets written up. Sometimes these overdue books come with an explanation that makes for a human interest story, but just as often they are returned anonymously, left on a doorstep or mailed back without return address or explanation.

When we do find out the reason for the return, it’s usually because because someone is clearing out belongings, and has sentimental attachments that lead them to send the old book back. The library is still there after all these years, and returning the book connects a dusty past to a living present. If the book was in the possession of a dead person, the return might be a kind of act on their behalf.

An article about the old, returned library book gives the public an occasion to reflect on a private possession. Still, for the most part, millions of objects, however interesting and worthy of attention in the distracted present, will never get that much recognition before they are sold as junk, stored until they rot, or tossed in the trash. But as long as those artifacts are on still on paper, they have a claim on existence, awaiting notice by some later passerby. It’s possible to return century-old books to the library because they are durable and resilient in storage. Paper, even if stored in degrading conditions, lasts a long time.

This article in the New York Times summarizes the recent scientific research on a problem I wondered about a few months ago: what happens to animals that navigate by starlight, when the stars are washed out by the city? As it turns out, there are many other animals that rely on celestial phenomena to move about. Dung beetles may walk a straight line by looking at the trail of the Milky Way. Seals appear to swim with consistency toward bright star-like objects in the sky.

They also mention the study I discussed previously, about Indigo Buntings. The birds were taught in artificial conditions to treat the bright star Betelgeuse as the pole star instead of the current north star, Polaris. Stephen Emlen, the scientist responsible for the study, is quoted interpreting the results this way:

This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not derived from some star map encoded in their genes…In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky.

If we accept his theory, it suggests that the birds may be clever enough to deal with the perpetual, gradual change in alignment of the night sky. They did not evolve with some fixed blueprint of specific stars. Even better, they were born with a rudimentary awareness of how celestial rotation works. 26,000 years, the period over which the Earth’s axis wobbles to point at different stars across the sky, is enough time for evolution to change an organism, but not that long a period when compared to the one hundred and fifty million years or more over which modern birds evolved from dinosaurs.

No one decides who gets to be a naturalist. There are no degrees or governing bodies. The term is distinctive, in that it describes an activity that is very demanding and absorptive, yet inclusive. A person is on the way to becoming a naturalist when he, for example, takes pictures of biological samples in the field and contributes them to an open population database like iNaturalist. And the “New Naturalist Library” series has for 75 years published detailed surveys by top scientists, who study the natural world, from climate and weather to butterflies. These scientists, specialized and rigorous as they are–they call themselves naturalists, too.

The plant biologist Oliver Rackham writes in the preface to his book Woodlands:

I was brought up on such classic New Naturalist books as London’s Natural History by R.S.R. Fitter, Mushrooms and Toadstools by John Ramsbottom and The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge. In that tradition I deal mainly in observations that do not call for specialised equipment and that any well-motivated observer can make. In this field amateurs can still do things that professionals, locked into their own ethos and culture, find difficult. I hope to inspire young readers to lay down the basis for long-term observations to be repeated in future decades.

Rackham makes no attempt to wall off the naturalist’s calling from the ordinary public. Quite the opposite, he suggests that the amateur can do more than participate in naturalistic activities. The amateur can, in fact, contribute to an activity defined by “observation,” provided that he is willing to keep at it over the long term.^1{#ffn1 .footnote}^

James Scott writes convincingly about the tendency of large institutions, like states and private enterprises, to pursue their own interests by abstracting away the complexity of the actual world:

The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.^1{#ffn1 .footnote}^

According to Scott, any organization that works on a large scale, across different populations or a wide geographic area, will find systematic ways to work on its own terms. This could be people, natural resources, land–it doesn’t matter. The point is that large organizations work with the tools they have available: standardization, which is achieved through quantification and measurement, and control over the environment that makes up the local system. Large organizations pay very close attention to all these variables so that they can exclude or pay a lot less attention to everything else on the ground.

Scott argues that no state has ever come into existence through asking all its people what they need and want. Instead, it brings people under its control, who already have purposes, goals, and ideas of their own , and treats them according to what it thinks they need to do and be. In the past, this meant making them grow crops or serve in a military. Today, these same states might get people ready for compulsory schooling, provide employment, and supervise their health and wellness. Some aspects of these programs may be beneficial, but still, the state only offers the benefits that it has the tools to administer.^2{#ffn2 .footnote}^

I started looking at the birds more during the pandemic. So did a lot of other people. Most field guides about birds are written for one purpose: to identify them. Birding is easy to distill to its basics: you look at a bird, you figure out the name that somebody else gave it, and you keep lists of what you’ve seen.

But it would be deflationary to leave it there, that birding is about mere bird identification. It doesn’t account for why there are so many people who are very serious about identifying birds in particular. Sure, almost every branch of nature has people who take an interest in it.^1{#ffn1 .footnote}^ But I know of no other outdoor nature activity centered on identification that generates anywhere near the same excitement as birding.

One of the most thoughtful teachers of birding I’ve found in print is Ken Kaufman. His Field Guide to Advanced Birding is a good place to start figuring out what birding is really about.^2{#ffn2 .footnote}^ The “advanced” part of the title is somewhat misleading. The book is not really trying to define a bar for experts so much as give a more systematic account of the practices of modern birding, organized by case studies on, say, a specific feature (e.g., “Plumages, Molt and Wear”), a habitat type (e.g., “Learning to Identify Seabirds”), or a genus (“The Empidonax Flycatchers”). Kaufman writes in the introduction about his experience in the field teaching beginners to bird:

One revelation was the importance of understanding. It was clear that birders could memorize dozens of field marks and song descriptions and still misidentify birds, simply because they didn’t really understand what they were seeing and hearing. (5, original emphasis)

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