Archive for the 'not-so-hot ideas' Category

LA Times still doesn’t get it

September 12th, 2008, 9:03 am by jhogg

At some point I’m really going to have to quit worrying about this sort of stuff.

WASHINGTON — As part of an escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan, the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

This is the first I’ve heard about the Predators were “instrumental in crippling the insurgency.” Perhaps this is because I lack access to this trove of unnamed U.S. military and intelligence officials, but I’m willing to bet I’ve never heard the claim because there is really only one logical response to whoever makes it:

When it comes to the Iraq “insurgency” (as if there is only one) most people are referring to the ominous specter of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the hillbilly militia of Mesopotamia. And when it comes to AQI the only thing that crippled it was being AQI. The Iraqis are not fundamentalists, and whatever excitement might have been conjured by standing against the Americans was quickly stomped out by the idea of living in a hardline Salafist Islam society. The Iraqis ran AQI out afterwards, we just happened to be standing around to take credit.

But being misinformed or flat out stupid about Iraq is one thing. Claiming that a clearly decremental tactic is effective as a justification for using it again is another. The myth of winning through air power is a hardy one that no amount of dead joes and lost battles seems able to dispel. It was there at the Battle of Stalingrad, and there at Dien Bien Phu, and there at Khe Sanh and is still alive and haunting us in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Manned or otherwise, airpower is no more capable of “winning the war” or “crippling the insurgency” than a carrier group is capable of holding Death Valley. Used correctly air power is a valuable asset, used poorly it is exceedingly detremental. The U.S. will be no more successful at bombing the Pashtun into compliance than the Germans were in bombing the Brits or the French were in bombing the Viet Minh.

The sooner we understand this the better off we’ll be.

Posted in: Afghanistan • not-so-hot ideas • old stuff • warfare | 1 Comment »

Stupid about Pakistan and wrong about Russia - beam me up, Scotty.

September 10th, 2008, 8:43 am by jhogg

It’s sometimes all I can do to keep from flying back to my bed, bottle of “medicine” firmly in hand, and contemplating ways to leave this universe and emerge in another. When the tide of stupid crashes endlessly against the levies, I suppose this is a natural reaction.

Behold:

The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year, compared with three in 2007. The attacks are part of a renewed effort to cripple al-Qaeda’s central command that began early last year and has picked up speed as President Bush’s term in office winds down, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials involved in the operations.

That would be the Washington Post article, “In hunt for Bin Ladin, a new approach.”

There is nothing new here, the grasp of warfare in this post is as old as Napoleon and cold as his bones. Note the theme - that we can concentrate on the base in Pakistan and beat back the central command - presumably to Berlin or possibly Krakow. The article goes on to state that we are now looking for Bin Ladin by flying around in Predators and shooting the occasional missile with predictable results.

Apparently the Post writer and whoever ladeled out this story consider that the Pakistan-Afghan border is some tiny, irrelavant place and that with enough Predators and enough missiles we are bound to find him, you know, eventually. The premise of the article and of the strategy simply do not wash with reason or logic. It is what my grandfather referred to as “bottle-assing around” - ineffectually moving around in an attempt to look busy.

______________________________________________________________

Onward and upward.

The mighty darlings at the Heritage Foundation (oh how I love them) have served up yet another steaming platter of preposterous. You can find it in the ominously titled “The Return of History: Confronting the Russian Bear after the Georgian War.” I think the better title would be, “Europe and Russia: lets you and him fight.”

It’s the same old tired story: that we need to like, TOTALLY invite the Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, and Russia is like so totally mean, and I just can’t believe what Vladimir Putin was wearing the other day. OMG LOL!

You can always tell when the apes are getting serious because they throw in the serious word du jure - geopolitical. Like so - The Russian-Georgian war rocked the geopolitical landscape.
Well dear lord, we know they’re super serious now. The geopolitical landscape, you say. This calls for serious cat!

He's serious

Heritage, as always, is chock full of good ideas: the Europeans should goad Russia into war, the Europeans should not have fuel to heat their home of cook their food this winter, the Europeans should make demands that Russia will never accept, the Europeans should militarize and then beef up their NATO presence which will be led by… take a guess who Heritage thinks NATO will be led by. Come on, I dare you.

Jaded though I am, I will excuse Heritage as simply being utterly clueless. But it’s truly discouraging when supposedly educated people lend credence to this unadulterated nonsense.

In the month since the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Bush administration has crafted a policy that should please some liberal critics and upset conservative hard-liners — a low-key approach that tries to help the Georgians recover without backing Russia further into a corner.

From my view in the cheap seats it hardly looks like Russis into any corner anywhere. Flush with money, flush with resources, increasing their influence and re-exerting themselves in the so called near-abroad - if they are in a corner it is one of the more spacious and luxuriant corners I have ever seen.

The world has changed dramatically in a few short years and America is refusing to point itself in the new direction. I know its pointless to get upset about things I can’t change, but we are talking about fundamentally failing to understand the big challenges of the modern world. Oh well.

Posted in: Europe • Georgia (the country) • NATO • Pakistan • Russia • not-so-hot ideas • politics | Post a Comment »

Contradictions, confusion and (mis)information warfare

September 5th, 2008, 12:09 pm by jhogg

It’s pretty hard to piece together anything out of the dozens of different stories, rumors and various and sundry outright lies flying together about the various military conflicts right now.

We’ve got the Wa Po saying the Pentagon wants a long pause in post-surge drawdowns, at the same time Barack Obama is claiming the Surge “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” and without missing a beat we have “top military officials” saying we’re going to haul 7,000 troops out of Iraq early next year.

The long and short is that no one really has a clue what is happening, and nobody wants to make promises they’re likely going to be eating later. The Republicans really, really want to get some meat on the table before November to shore up their victory credentials. Given that one month and three days before the election the Shia government is going to take control of the Sunni Awakening Councils, there is probably a good amount of puckering going on over at the GOP campaign headquarters.

To make matters a bit worse, everyone watching Afghanistan can see things unraveling quickly. Hamid Karzai himself visited and appealed to a village that was hit by a U.S. led strike. There are variety of numbers out there, the U.S. said we got 30 bad guys and 7 civilians, the villagers and the United Nations say it was more like 90 people including 60 children. I’m inclined to believe the number is somewhere in between the two claims, but it still plays to the Afghans, who are increasingly able to castigate the U.S. as a technological goliath whom everyone should fight.

This is compounded by the fact that U.S. troops are now conducting cross-border raids into the tribal areas of Pakistan. Pakistani politicians realize things are at a boiling point right now and wisely negotiated a ceasefire during the holy month of Ramadan. The U.S. moving in with a contingent of Tajiks and Uzbeks to start shooting and bombing during that ceasefire could potentially blow the top off the situation. It goes without saying that Pakistani politics are currently at a dangerous level. The ruling coalition has collapsed and there are a lot of power struggles going on in a nation with nuclear weapons. If the U.S. comes across as a physical and not just moral and political aggressor against Pakistan we could easily find ourselves with a hostile government in Islamabad. There is always the possibility of putting in another tin pot to beat the country into submission, but the U.S. desperately needs an image as the arbiter of democracy to continue support for its current operations. You did what with it?

The Ball Gunner, for one, is wondering what in tarnation is happening at Centcom that made them suddenly toss the counterinsurgency manual out the window. Especially when you consider that the guy who wrote the fricking thing is getting ready take command, you’d think who ever is getting all airstrike and raid crazy might take a step back to reconsider exactly what the hell they’re hoping to accomplish.

It’s looking more and more like a comedy of errors at this point. There are way too many plans at this point and each plan depends on the one before it working before it can go into affect:

We need the Surge to work so we can reduce troops in Iraq
One we reduce troops in Iraq we can send them elsewhere
Elsewhere largely being Afghanistan
Once there we can use the same tactics used in the Surge
But first we need the Surge to work

As any private that has spent a week in the field can tell you, no plan survives contact with the enemy and whatever can go wrong will. There are lots of rabbits waiting to be pulled from lots of hats at this point and as things cool off in Afghanistan and everyone proceeds to bed down to reequip and retrain for the winter there are any number of wires that could come loose.

Posted in: Afghanistan • CENTCOM • Pakistan • Ramadan • intelligence • not-so-hot ideas • politics • warfare | 1 Comment »

No news is the only news on Georgia

August 14th, 2008, 9:42 am by jhogg

Mrs. Rice, if you please There’s too many conflicting stories to piece anything sensible out of the Caucasus hijinks at this point. First the reports are that Russia is withdrawing, and then reports come in that Russia is pushing into Poti, following reports that Georgia has been cut in half. The absence of credible information hasn’t ended wild speculation, which is disappointing when it comes from people who should know better.

We know there is still the banga-banga-banga and pow-pow-pow of guns and mortars going off along with the RRRRRRRRRR of armor moving around. No doubt some hot-blooded Georgian youngsters have decided to gin up an irregular force and try to carve their names into history, so there is likely still some mopping up going on, and any dullard can tell you that you don’t
park your tanks and trucks for long unless you really want your wheels and crews to get mortared and artilleried into swiss cheese.

If the Russians are pushing into Poti then it’s truly an ambitious shot. Without Poti the Georgians don’t have a significant port outside of the southern autonomous region of Ajara. There is a dandy little UN map, here. That includes every autonomous region BUT South Ossetia, for some reason. Curious. For the U.S., which is hoping to ride to the rescue, not having a port presents some pretty big problems. For start, supplies would have go be flown in, which is expensive and manpower intensive. A few flights have already come and gone, but its not sure where those are coming from. The air bases in Turkey are convenient, but the Turks, not wanting to get drawn in, might tell the U.S. to find their airspace for that mission elsewhere. When it comes to ships, moving carriers and relief ships into the Black Sea is not only time-consuming and expensive but dangerous as hell. ta da!

If you’re wondering where Georgia is on the Black Sea, then look no further:

The big thing is that the U.S. has to do SOMETHING. It can’t throw Georgia under the bus without being humiliated like… well, like Russia was in the wake of Kosovo. President Bush is certainly not shopping for active hostilities with the Russians right now. If the sitting administration opened a third front it’s very likely that the Republican National Committee building would have a “For Sale” shingle out front come November.

An old friend, who I didn’t know was a Ball Gunner fan, sent me some interesting questions:

Also, is this just the scenario needed to help propel Condi Rice out of obscurity after failing to deliver any meaningful developments between Israel and Palestine? Is this enough to remind people she’s an expert on Soviet/Russo matters and get her some looks for vice president on the McCain ticket?

Rice, last I heard, wasn’t chasing a VP nod. Washington being what it is, the political winds can shift. But it’s not entirely clear that John McCain would want to attach his campaign to a very high-profile member of the controversial Bush presidency. But by all accounts she was (is?) considered very knowledgeable on the region. It seems that she was one of the old-timey bureaucrats who staked her name on the Cold War dragging on into the second coming. Once that dogged out she moved to academia. What remains to be seen is whether her own ego-feeding successes are going to get in her way when it comes to brokering a treaty that is agreeable to all sides. The fact that she is blowing off Moscow entirely on her trip is not encouraging. You’d expect a Russian expert to be aware of how insulting these sorts of things are in Russian culture, or anywhere for that matter.

Russia, on the other hand, must realize that the U.S. hand in this matter is weak. The object is not, and has never been to “take over Georgia,” as much as it is to emasculate the United States. Georgia sent troops to help the U.S. mission in Iraq, the U.S. sent water bottles and chocolate bars to Georgia while they were getting ground into paste. It certainly appears that Georgia expected more support from their ally. President Saakashvili apparently took the aid pledges as a promise to safeguard key Georgian infrastructure components and caused the U.S. to issue a correction. The Georgians are not getting the help they expected, and that disappointment will be an albatross around the neck of U.S. foreign affairs for some time.

As my friend noted:

…the fact that a “new” battle began on the same day as the opening of the Olympic Games is bound to catch people’s eyes.

The 2008 Olympics in Beijing was meant to be China’s “welcome back to the world” party. It is no coincidence that the day also marked the moment that the United States and the world no longer had the luxury of writing off Russia as a has-been power.

Posted in: Georgia (the country) • Russia • not-so-hot ideas • politics | 2 Comments »

A whole friggin media industry serving up stupid pie

August 12th, 2008, 1:11 pm by jhogg

Occasionally the Ball Gunner gets so incensed at the tripe passed of as objective fact that he wants to follow the advice of Hank from a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and, “Hang the whole human race and end the farce.”

In general, military matters are poorly reported. I can resign myself to this inevitability. But when stupidity bleeds into sheer revisionism and a propaganda campaign so intense that its almost questionable that it occurred accidentally, then the Ball Gunner gets his scowl on.

This recent incident, a frilly little war involving a dispute that has been going on for near a thousand years, has sent the bed wetters into overdrive. The Russians! They’re coming to get us. We must run and be afraid. AHHHHHHHHHH!!!

AHHHHHH

Let’s look at the headlines from the recent Georgia- Russia conflict.

August 8 from the Telegraph:
Caucuses in crisis: Georgia invades South Ossetia

Read the headline CAREFULLY. Who did what to whom? Who started all this?

August 11 from Global Financial News:
Bush slams Russia for Georgian Invasion, calls relationship “damaged”

Finally, we come to today, August 12, From the LA Times:
U.S. has few military options in Russia response

Really? Four days? It only took FOUR &*$%#@& DAYS to spin this into the EXACT OPPOSITE of what happened?

Let’s look at a few more.

I loved the BIG FARGING stink made about Russia bombing the airports, port and infrastructure.
Reuters on August 10:
Tblisi civilian airport hit in Russian air strike

To give you a good contrast, here is CNN on July 16, 2006 during the Lebanon-Israeli dustup:
Israeli warplanes hit Beirut suburb

Really? A suburb, you say? Oh wait, in the secondary head -”Israel attacks airports, major highway after Hezbollah lobs rockets”

The War Nerd already has a great entry. Go read it. But if you’re feeling lazy, he sums it up like so:

1.    The Georgians started it.
2.    They lost.
3.    What a beautiful little war!

If you’re wondering what number 3 is all about, and you should be, click the link. Until then, I really, really encourage you to not pay attention to the vast amounts of stupid being dished up piping hot for all to enjoy. I especially hope you notice the literary lobotomies coming out of the pundit factories right now. Lots of whom seem to be seeking active hostilities with Russia.

By all means, if you’ve got some questions shoot the Ball Gunner a line. I’ll help you out the best I can. If you are relying on any of the big outlets (especially American outlets, European media occasionally does a reasonable job in covering war) then you are being aggressively led astray.

Posted in: Georgia (the country) • Russia • not-so-hot ideas | 2 Comments »

Wrong on Iraq… again

August 7th, 2008, 8:24 am by jhogg

The American Enterprise Institute has a puff piece titled “Iraq: Why we are winning” wherein the standard and incorrect arguments are put forth:

1) That we beat the Sunni extremists

2) That we beat the Sunni insurgency

3) That we beat the Shia extremists

4) That the Iraq security forces are improving

One wonders who writes these things and how much they get paid. But these points are simplistic and easily dismissed.

1) By all accounts the extremists defeated themselves, the Iraqis are not now and historically has not been prone to religious extremism.

2) The Sunni insurgency was defeated by bribing the insurgents and then arming them as the Sons of Iraq, Awakening Councils or whatever. A move that a good number of people have predicted will explode in the coalition faces once the bribes dry up.

3) If we beat the Shia, someone obviously forgot to let them know. The Desert Fox has proved a capable and cunning tactician with a penchant for politics. If we push the Shia into a corner or disregarding Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, we will learn precisely how non-defeated the Shia are.

4) By most accounts, yes. I’ll give them 1 out of 4.

But even if we were to go line-by-line to disassemble the puff and nonsense, we still would be faced with the same conclusion that the report ignores; the same fundamental problem that we have created and are unable to solve in Iraq.

There is no Iraqi state

Al-Maliki may have been ordained as the nominal head of the Iraqi state. But it is a state that no one disputes dances to the beat of the coalition forces drum, with Washington, D.C., conducting the band. If the coalition troops vanished from Iraq tomorrow at sunrise it is a safe gamble that there would be a new head of Iraq and a different government by sunset. This point is largely, though unintentionally, conceded by AEI in their own report.

The political reality that enables me to make the claim that I just did about winning and achieving our objectives arises from several things. Congress and the administration browbeat the Maliki government into a national legislative patch, the so-called benchmarks. We insisted on eighteen benchmarks that the Iraqis had to accomplish. The rationale was that by forcing national legislation, political reconciliation with the Sunnis would occur.

So the path to success was in getting Al-Maliki to do what Washington wanted. Of course! It stands to reason that an executive from the upper class enclave of New Haven, Connecticut, the sheltered graduate students at the State Department and the dweebs and dorks in Congress have a better grasp on how to run Iraq than Nouri Al-Maliki, an Iraqi.

It is not to say that success in Iraq is impossible or possible at this point. The U.S. has embroiled itself in long war, a fact that AEI seems glibly ignorant of, and defeat is still well within our grasp. This, of course, does not compute. As the preface to the article begins:

General Jack Keane spoke at an AEI conference, stating flatly that we are winning in Iraq and that the momentum is irreversible

I would caution General Keane against statements proclaiming inevitable. History has a way of turning inevitable successes into resounding failures.

Posted in: Iraq • not-so-hot ideas • politics • warfare | 1 Comment »

Crack CIA spy travels in secret to Pakistan to report…

July 30th, 2008, 8:48 am by jhogg

That the Pakistani intelligence agencies has been compromised by militants! GORLEY!

Well, golly-Ned. We can only wonder what crack agent of peace and justice cracked open this case that every foreign affairs blog and news source worth a damn has been reporting for years.

Keep up the good work, Spooks-R-Us. How’s that wall in Berlin doing these days?

Posted in: Afghanistan • Pakistan • intelligence • not-so-hot ideas | Post a Comment »

The Ballgunner is ALIVE! Just like the Taliban

June 17th, 2008, 12:13 pm by jhogg

There’s been all sorts of stuff just begging to be ballgunned (TM) lately. I won’t play catch up, if you read the Ball Gunner then you’re obviously a person of refining cast among the common rabble. Congratulations.

But I simply can’t pass up what is currently happening in Afghanistan. It has sneezed rigor on to these arthritic bones of mine. Plastered across Fox News even as I type is “NATO and Afghan troops to take back villages from the Taliban.” I doubt Taliban commander Mohammed Omar himself could have picked a better line to set the stage for what’s coming.

What the gulls in Washington haven’t figured out is that the front has shifted from Iraq back to Afghanistan. Iraq is done for by any and all estimates. The hapless goobers in the big media have snuggled up to the “security gains” of late, except nobody has really let slip the slimy truth that we are paying all sides to play nice and behave for awhile. No one is asking, because once that question gets asked someone is just going to be FORCED to ask, “Well, what are they spending the money on?” and the short answer is that they are making down payments on dead Americans, collaborators and rivals with our own money. The British financed their own defeat in Afghanistan long back when Kipling was writing about it. Now, we’re doing the same in Iraq.

But since we’re feeding our own flames in Iraq, the folks we’re fighting, the ones we still believe are some clueless ‘tards with an AK and an RPG, are shifting funding, logistics and operations to Afghanistan. The story is that the Taliban has “seized” a bunch of small towns around Kandahar, the Ball Gunners speculation is that there wasn’t any “seizing” like when the Germans “seized” Stalingrad (however briefly) or the French “seized” Dien Bien Phu. These sorts of “seizings” imply that you fought your way in, I’d imply the Pashtun “seizing” the area around Kandahar is more like Raiders fans “seizing” the Oakland Colliseum, except that the Pashtun have fewer guns and are better mannered.

Simply put, you can’t seize something that’s yours to begin with. This is something the U.S. grapples with - you can’t liberate a place from the people who live there. After the liberators are gone the people are still there, except now they hate you.

Speaking of things the U.S. grapples with, how about diversity? The Afghan army is held up as a model of people from different tribal regions and groups and ethnicities palling around like they’re the A-Team. Which is great, and gets you about 5 feet outside the military base before it breaks up. What it means for current operations can be pretty well summed up.

I. An army full of Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks and a half dozen other groups is going to be sent into the heart of Pashtun country to fight.

For settling down a region, this strategy would rank right up with sending in the Klan to calm down the L.A. street riots. Which is to say, it will not only not work, it will probably fail spectacularly.
Even assuming the combined armies manages to pacify the area you still don’t get past your first stumbling block - the people you’ve liberated are still there, except now they hate you. You’ve shown the Pashtun that you’re on the side of the people they’ve been fighting since long before the U.S. was even a feeble idea. You’ve shown a proud people that you’re going to make them subservient to others. You’ve, in essence, rammed hell down their throats.

Trying to do anything in Afghanistan has historically been shown to be a pretty pointless venture. Everyone from the Soviets to Alexander can attest to the fact that once you enter that realm everything you know about how people organize and function rewinds about a thousand years. But the one rule, the BIIIIIIG thing you JUST. DON’T. FORGET. is that once you alienate the Pashtun your options are limited to 1) retreat or 2) a repeat of General Elphinstone’s disaster.

Summer sure got hot early.

Posted in: Afghanistan • Army • not-so-hot ideas • politics • warfare | 1 Comment »

Don’t second guess the Special Forces guys!

March 11th, 2008, 8:51 am by jhogg

Seriously. These guys are the best at what they do. This isn’t some vague term, as in “they are one of the best,” or “they are pretty good,” or “gee, golly, these guys are neat.” The army Special Forces and Delta operators are the best at what they do.
That being said, why someone with a Meritorious Freeway Driving medal, carpal tunnel and fallen arches is allowed to jerk the tools out of these guys’ hands is just a freaking mystery.

Via the Army Times

The Army has stripped the Asymmetric Warfare Group of its weapon of choice - the Heckler & Koch 416 - saying that its mission requires the unique outfit to carry the standard issue M4 carbine.

The decision reverses a policy that allowed the AWG to buy 416s instead of carrying M4s when it was established three years ago to help senior Army leaders find new tactics and technologies to make soldiers more lethal in combat.

Members of the AWG have declined to comment on the issue, but sources in the

416s, arguing that they outperform the Army’s

community told Army Times that the unit fought to keep its several hundred M4 and require far less maintenance.

I don’t know who finds themselves qualified to argue with these guys about what weapons work best. I’m more than willing to have a discussion about what I do. But if you try to criticize my writing style while being illiterate, yourself, I’m not likely to take you seriously. The guys of Army Special Operations don’t use their weapons in some vague laboratory setting with such and yon variable to determine functionality in this and that environmental condition, they take their boom sticks to far and nasty places and use them to complete their missions and come home.

Having hauled the M-16 (which, internally is the exact same as the M-4) through Kuwaiti dust storms, I can attest to the fact that the damn thing didn’t work as intended. It jammed, it fouled, it would fire, at most, two shots before remedial action was required to get it to go BANG again. The crappy direct impingement gas system, as opposed to piston-driven, simply lacks the reliability to perform in the field. This has been proven and tested time and time again.

I really shouldn’t expect better

January 25th, 2008, 11:09 am by jhogg

The Los Angeles Times has published one of the shoddiest editorials I’ve ever read about Afghanistan. It’s pretty bleak in there, and you might want to shield your eyes, but if you’re feeling intrepid you can find the greasy monster here.

“By every measure, the war in Afghanistan is going badly, and NATO is showing the strains.”

I was advised, long ago, to not make statements about “everybody” or “everything” because these statements are really just patently untrue. When you open your editorial with needless hyperbole I’m automatically going to front you all the credibility of a Garfield cartoon.

“That’s because most of the NATO countries don’t want to fight — they believe they signed up for peacekeeping duty, not a “hot war” — and the rest have battle fatigue. The latest casualty is Canada, where antiwar sentiment threatens to bring down the government.”

Following the news is something I do. It’s, you know, my job. But I’ve obviously been watching the wrong channels or maybe surfing the wrong Webs, because these angry hordes laying siege to Ottawa have somehow escaped my attention.

“A high-level panel has recommended that the (Canadian) government insist on the deployment of at least 1,000 combat troops from another country (presumably the United States) to the free-fire zone in southern Afghanistan … Expect a showdown at the next NATO summit in Bucharest in April.”

A free-fire zone? Truly? Considering that there have been more murders in Los Angeles than TOTAL coalition deaths in all of Afghanistan this year, I can only imagine that southern California is some nightmarish Mad Max war zone where grizzled veterans prey on the peasants, rape the livestock and drive off the women.

“To keep NATO from disintegrating, the U.S. must accept that it will have to do more of the military heavy lifting and allow Canada and Britain to do less. In return, Washington should increase its efforts to persuade its partners to spend far more on grass-roots economic, political and infrastructure development.”

Gimme a break. Saying the U.S. is going to do the heavy lifting in NATO is about as radical as saying the sun will rise in the morning.

Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that U.S. policy if Afghanistan has been ham-fisted at times. When you’re surprised that Afghanistan is selling opium it’s pretty obvious that you skipped history. There’s a lot to be said about what we could be doing better, but don’t try to talk to me about problems in the region if you can’t even slip “Pashtun” into a sentence to sound smart.

Posted in: Afghanistan • NATO • not-so-hot ideas | 2 Comments »