If you own a computer, a TV or a radio you’ve heard about the assault that killed 9 U.S. soldiers and wounded 15 in Afghanistan. It doesn’t take a dynamo like the Ball Gunner to point out that things do not appear to be going well in the mountain lands.

Whatever brain trust operates in the State Department feeding whatever passes for human intelligence to Defense these days continues to look like a clumsy, fat kid trying to swat a fly. It’s all flailing and flopping and chubby arms waving all over the place.

“We just don’t get it. They’re coming from Pakistan, but we aren’t at war with Pakistan. Why do they keep coming? What is going on? Who am I? Why am I wearing this dress?”

Since the books of grand military failure are always chronically unpopular (as opposed to books of stirring success which fly off the shelves) the answer remains shrouded in mystery except to us grand cynics who realize that the nation-state model is a grand ruse of modern living. The solution, so evasive to the PhDs, is that the Pashtun, the ones we are currently fighting, don’t known and don’t particularly care about state boundaries and national sovereignty.

On this mountain, they are Pashtun. On that mountain over there, they are Pashtun, too. That a cartographer in London decided that this mountain is Afghanistan and that mountain is Pakistan is not relevant. What is relevant to the Pashtun is the Pashtun. 

This, of course, doesn’t preclude fighting among the Pashtun tribes, which the Pashtun do with aplomb. The Gilzai Pashtun, for instance, love to go to war against the Durrani Pashtun. As luck would have it, the Gilzai have a golden opportunity to fight the Durrani by fighting against president Hamid Karzai and the largely Durrani government.

All this crazy tribalism is a tough sell, end even über geeks like the Ball Gunner can’t really wrap their heads around it. But all you really need to figure out is that Afghanistan is one of the toughest places on the globe to eek out a living. The people that do it are some tough bastards, and when resources like food, shelter and habitable land are in short supply you had best be ready with a big stick when someone tries to shove you off of yours.

When it’s an all in or all out sort of game - with staying alive as the take-home, it forges some pretty tight knit and wild groups. Taking a look at just the various tribes, sub-tribes and sub-subtribes of the Pashtun ethnic group is like reading like the spreadsheet from hell, and you’ve not even factored in a half-dozen other groups from Tajiks, to Uzbeks, pseudo-Iranians, people left over from 30 failed invasions of Afghanistan through out several thousand years of history; it’s like a big party of multi-culturalism with everybody either oppressing or alternately being oppressed by somebody else. Go to certain areas of Afghanistan and you might find definitely non-regional traits like blond hair and blue eyes.

The real joke is that despite all the quips about barbarism and how wonderfully advanced “us folks over yonder in ‘Merica is” a good swath of the uneducated Afghan hillbillies are bi- or tri-lingual (even if they are illiterate.) So the next time the chest-thumpers gripe about how their children “aint never gunna learn them no Spanish” kindly remind them that hicks in the “uncivilized” part of the world know three languages, most of which aren’t even from the same language family.

So that’s the short answer for ongoing problems in Afghanistan. The U.S., like the Russians, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Romans and a long line of others are learning that when the cards hit the table the Afghan tribes stick with the Afghan tribes. They might tolerate you, feed you, wave when you go by, they might even like you. But if you expect the loyalty of the Gilzai to point anywhere but the Gilzai then you’re obviously thinking in terms of West Europe rather than Central Asia.

At the end of the day, the U.S. is appearing more and more to have somehow found itself on the wrong side of the fight in Afghanistan. Whatever the intentions going in, we’re now fighting the absolutely last people on the world you want to fight in the last place in the world you want to fight them.

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.

There’s been a big stink between Russia and Georgia lately, which is to say Russia is doing what it wants and Georgia is complaining to NATO.

The latest from Reuters:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russia’s deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war “very close”, a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday.

Separately, in comments certain to fan rising tension between Moscow and Tbilisi, the “foreign minister” of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.

“We literally have to avert war,” Temur Iakobashvili, a Georgian State Minister, told reporters in Brussels.

Asked how close to such a war the situation was, he replied: “Very close, because we know Russians very well.”

To start with, Georgia does not go to war against Russia in the same sense that Junior’s pee-wee team does not play football against the New York Giants. Whatever its failings, during the 90s, Vladimir Putin’s reign as president (which ends today) saw the resurgence of the Russian military. The Russians have a military tradition a bit beyond extraordinary, they lost 3 million people in the first World War, then fought a long, bloody civil war, to the tune of 9 million, then lost 20 million people in the second World War and still weren’t giving an inch when the U.S. forces in Europe thought they’d be a push over. When you put 32 million people into the meat grinder in half a century while standing firm on the mat you get your hardcore military culture bona fides. Then to spike the ball, you release a picture of a guy doing this:

and the Ballgunner is really willing to concede that his manhood is measured in fractions, possibly even fractions with decimals.

When you take this and put it against the Georgians, whose military consists of, uh……… Well you get the point. The Georgian military is defensive oriented, but defensive against other military power houses like Azerbaijan, Armenia or possibly the dreaded Ossetians. Georgia vs Russia would not look even remotely like a fight. The Russians tried the touchy feely stuff in Chechnya, and got embarrassed. Then, someone on the command staff realized they had been reading from the American book, they took a big swig of vodka, proclaimed Мы Русский! and put the hammer down. Do you hear of any problems from Chechnya?

When you consider that every country in the former Soviet sphere is chock full of Russian intelligence agents throughout the government and the military, there arises the even more delightful scenario that Georgia might try to assemble the military only to find half of them already lined up on the other side.

In a lot of ways this is really fun to watch. Russia was warning the west to leave Serbia alone in the Kosovo matter. But in a monument to hardheadedness, NATO got involved in the Orthodox/Catholic/Muslim debacle that predates every standing government in the world and will still be raging when NATO is listed next to League of Nations and Chechnya in the book of “Ooops!” But the U.S. signed off on Kosovo by playing the ethnicity card, oblivious to the fact that the “area” of Kosovo is about as Serbian as Bunker Hill is American. Now, the Russians are saying, “Look! The poor Abkhazians are ethnically distinct from the Georgians, they should have their own country too! It’s even better that they want their country to join our country!” I’m sure it has nothing to do with those lovely Black Sea shipping lanes that are up for grabs (not that Russia doesn’t already have some, but you can never have too many ports.)

Now, the west really looks silly. They can try the, “No, no. That’s not fair,” routine and wind up looking like hypocrites. Or they can throw Georgia under the bus, at which point an alliance with NATO will be shown as worth less than a big pile of doody. Meanwhile, Russia gets to sit back, enjoy the show and ponder their next move. What about those large Russian populations in the Baltic nations? What about the divided population in Ukraine? There are opportunities aplenty for Russia to thank NATO, the E.U. and the U.S. for stomping on its toes for the last few years.

We’re reminded of one of those people from long ago, when folks seemed to know what they were talking about. That someone was Otto von Bismark, who left us this: “The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.”

The Israelis blowing something up is hardly news worthy. But when they punched a hole in the paper thin Syrian air defense and leveled something in late September 2007, it became a story because the Israelis seemed to be doing back flips to get it out of the spotlight.

First it was nothing, then an air strike, then the online analysts started putting things together and thinking this was something big. But something big didn’t make sense either; if the Syrians were two rods away from a nuke it only seems logical that the U.S. and Israel would be yelling it from the rooftops.

Instead, we got more stories about the event than the local VFW. Until the other day when President Bush started beating the Syria nuclear drums again. The intelligence was unveiled for a number of really damn odd reasons. “One would be to the North Koreans to make it abundantly clear that we may know more about you than you think,” was the President’s reason du jure. I’m not entirely sure what it is “we know that they don’t know that we know,” but even I know that the fat man from Pyongyang already has  nukes, he made them and tested them in the face of some of the most furious finger-shaking I’ve seen since Catholic school. So we’ve really got nothing explained here.

If the war voices hadn’t been evangelizing Iranian nukes for a year or so I might be able to get a grip on why the lid was kept on the information. It’s not like we’re cozy with the Syrians. We can’t even get them to control their border, which has been a huge entry point into Iraq for various and sundry bad guys since the beginning. So why wouldn’t there be singing and dancing in Washington for a good solid reason to slap Syria around?

When you get down to possible reasoning there’s not a lot of cause to celebrate. We’ve already pretty much figured out that withholding the information doesn’t make any sense. So what are we left with?

One possibility is that Syria had managed to put a nuke program together and almost put together a bomb without anyone noticing. If this is the case it probably qualifies as one of the biggest intelligence blunders in a long, soiled history of intelligence blunders. Given that the intel now claims the Syrians built their stuff using North Korean technology, this really makes the Ballgunner’s head turn backwards. If North Korea, a country we’re supposedly watching like 20 hawks, managed to sneak it’s nuke program out of the country and set it up, right next to a gigantic U.S. theater of operations without anyone noticing then that implies a whole slew of people asleep at an impressive array of switches.

The other possibility, and one the Ballgunner hopes is accurate, is that a story is being cooked up to cover butts from the Potomac River to the Golan Heights. It could be the Israelis acted on bad intel, the Syrians had something they weren’t necessarily supposed to have (doesn’t have to be nukes), maybe a high ranking terror leader popped his head up for a second, who in the world knows? Syria, for its part in the mess, hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with details. They assure us they are the victims just as loud as we assure them they were the aggressors. For all I know it was a wink and a nod at Iran to not get too froggy. But none of these make much sense in the grand scheme.

The Ballgunner is going to be waiting to see what’s next in this field. There are lots of conflicting stories bumping around that only look good right at the surface.

There’s a choice bit of newsy cotton-candy at the Washington Post about how the U.S. and Iraqi forces are back in Sadr City. This would be extraordinary news if they had asked why this trip into Sadr-ville as opposed to the bajillion other trips.

Always fans of glorious military battles, the American public, aided by news services that really are ignorant about war, like to think these forays into guerrilla territory are some sort of frenzied armored lozenge rammed down the throat of hell where snarling demons chomp at the heels of soldiers.

The truth (always more mundane than reality) is that when the superheroes barreled into Sadr City they probably found……
barbers, shop keeps, mechanics, children, bums, restaurants, tailors, etc…

These sorts of wars make for boring reporting, atrocious fiction and movies like “Jarhead,” which four whole people went to see. We love to think of the military charging bravely through the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge because it sounds exciting and we get to ignore the grimmer details. But, these grand “decisive battles” just aren’t happening in Iraq. No matter who wishes it were so.

To get a better idea, a friend of mine who spent time in Vietnam described the experience as “months of boredom followed by a few minutes of sheer terror.” Unfortunately, guerrillas are very, very, good at using those few minutes to kill lots of people.

But this is where people foul up. There isn’t and won’t be any excitement in Sadr City. Guerrillas don’t fight when they’re outnumbered. Instead, the U.S. and Iraqi forces will go in there and make a lot of noise, they’ll probably rough some people up, somebody in a tank will accidentally smash grandma’s falafel stand, someone will impose a curfew, then lift it, then impose it again, they’ll bottle up an area of 2 million people and set up one entrance and exit point making it hard to bring in supplies or food. Then, to claim success, they’ll snatch up about 20 people that the press releases will call senior leaders and scram.

Once they leave, the Mahdi Army will help rebuild grandma falafel stand, they’ll deliver food and medical supplies, and once the U.S. and Iraqi forces shove off and leave a mess, the local guys will wind up looking like the Eagle Scouts.

I realize the Petraeus policy has been a sensible form of counter insurgency looking to avoid just this sort of scenario. But a platoon of infantry in the heart of Sadr City doesn’t have time for that touchy-feely crap. They’re well aware that a good number of eyes on them aren’t friendly.

Thing is, the Mahdi Army knows that, too. In fact, they’re probably counting on it.

    Muqtada Al Sadr has extended the cease-fire for an additional six months. The absence of the Mahdi Army is undoubtedly beneficial to U.S. efforts in the region, but the “deafening silence” from those who have pledged to defeat us brings some questions of their own.

Primarily, it’s not clear what Al Sadr gains from prolonging his cease fire. The elements in Iraq and the surrounding region with animosity toward the U.S. have not gone away, and unless the U.S. military is fielding experts in mental judo, they haven’t decided they like us, either. Al Sadr got his name into the books by taking a ragtag band and making at least a credible stand against U.S. forces. People started heading his way because they thought it meant a chance to stand against the Americans. If Al Sadr starts coming across as weak or timid, his following might dissipate as fast as it formed.

So, what gives?

One theory is that the big cheese has lost control of his Mahdi Army and is trying to reestablish himself. This could go either way for the U.S., if the force remains fractured then they’ll remain impotent as a side effect. Being able to write the whole group off would be about as awesome as apple pie falling from the sky, and about as likely. The other possibility is that that someone else will elbow he of the black turban out of the way. Al Sadr’s got a legacy in the area because, as they say in the sticks, “his pa was big doin’s.”  Bumping the Al Sadrs out of SADR CITY would be a mutiny right up there with the HMS Bounty.

The other thought is that aid from Shia Iran might have suddenly become lean. Al Sadr might just be a nut with a martyr complex, but he’s not a stupid nut with a martyr complex. He’s not up to bleeding himself purely for Iran’s benefit. We’re not hearing as much mouth out of Iran, and there appears to be some dissension in the ranks between the clerics who run the country and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who serves as sort of a Daffy Duck spokesman. So it’s likely there’s some sorting going on in Iran, too. I’d expect the volume to come back up around November.

This doesn’t even exclude the possibilities, that Al Sadr is being bought off by the U.S. with the knowledge that in a post U.S. Iraq he will have some serious leverage. This would be politically risky, because if he is seen to be collaborating with the Americans his claim to fame will be up.

It’s an odd game being played. But Al Sadr has shown himself to be pretty adroit at following the music. He’s only 34-years old, so he’s likely to be around for quite some time.

 __________________________________________________

    But if silence in Sadr City is the upside, the U.S. may be forced to pay for the blessing in the north. Turkey has already announced that they have begun military ground operations into northern Iraq in attempts to quell violence from the Kurdish-nationalists in the PKK.

    Turkey has invaded Iraq, a nominally sovereign country.

    What this will mean for the region is unclear. No one is naive enough to assume that Turkey is doing this on the sly. Someone is feeding them intelligence, and no one has better intelligence in Iraq than the U.S. Given that the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is Kurdish, this encroachment into what is supposed to be sovereign Kurdish territory will undoubtedly echo through the Iraqi parliament and into Iraq - U.S. relations.

    The Kurdish north has long been the U.S. success story of the war. The Kurds were third-rate citizens under Saddam and have seen a cultural and ethnic revival since the 2003 invasion. A destabilization of the region would be a tremendous setback for U.S. goals in the are, and a worst case scenario where the Kurds make a sovereign break for it would mean a dog pile between Syria, Turkey, Iran and the Kurdish north, with the U.S. being forced to take a side that would hurt its goals either way. This would also give the Russians a chance to return the favor for Kosovo by rushing aid to the Kurds. A whole lot of regional ugliness would ensue.

    A number of events are playing out within Iraq and internationally that are going to be making waves for years to come. The next few weeks will be interesting to watch.

Sink an aircraft carrier, if you’re smart about it.

Back in 2002, the U.S. Navy ran the “Millennium Challenge” to simulate war in the Persian Gulf. As anyone who has been involved in these things can tell you, the ultimate conclusion is that BLUEFOR (the good guys) will emerge grandly victorious, decimate the OPFOR (the bad guys) and prove once again that nothing can stand in the way of the U.S. military, least of all, the U.S. military.

But to play the role of Bad Guy in Charge (BGIC) for the Millennium Challenge, the Navy hauled up a crusty, retired leatherneck by the name of Paul Van Riper. Van Riper wasn’t even given the benefit of a proper military for the simulation — No real navy, no real air force, just some old boats, propeller planes and archaic surface-to-surface missiles. The general plan was that Van Riper would put up a token resistance before Johnny came marchin’ right on through, haroo, haroo.

At what should have been the end of the exercise, 2/3 of the big, fancy U.S. Navy fleet was nestled cozily along the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Since defeat deviated from the script - the Navy simply refloated the fleet and continued along the simulation as if nothing ever happened. Van Riper, refusing to play the sucker, stumped out of the exercise. Gary Brecher, was the first to point out what a huge freaking deal (warning this site is a goldmine of information mixed in with big boy language and occasional human anatomy) this is for U.S. operations. The War Nerd reprises his assessment of the whole thing (and takes a sharp jab at the big media (which caught on about six years too late) here.

Naval theorist who are not posed to make money on ship construction have been claiming the days of the surface navies are well-past. William Lind recount’s Admiral Hyman Rickover’s forecast in his column, “Davy Jones’ Locker.” (This Web site is safe for all audiences.)

About thirty years ago, my first boss, Senator Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, asked Admiral Hyman Rickover how long he thought the U.S. aircraft carriers would last in the war with the Soviet navy, which was largely a submarine navy. Rickover’s answer, on the record in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was, “About two days.” The Committee, needless to say, went on to approve buying more carriers.

Barring modern U-Boat warfare, bad guys the world over are learning that the best way to beat high-technology, is to go for technology so low as to be almost primitive. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers found out that the government’s high-performance jet fighters are great against other jet fighters but lousy against dinky propeller planes that can fly slow enough to make tracking a pain and low enough that shooting them out of the sky might pose more of a threat than letting them toss homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails out of the window. (This too, courtesy of Brecher.)

When we’re staring at one of the largest defense budgets since world war 2, it’s sobering to to realize that our enemies are very capable of doing more with less. The U.S. public has a very strong opinion about the invulnerability of its military. It’s hard to tell what effect the USS Coral Reef might have.