Archive for the 'warfare' Category

Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the military and Pakistan

September 9th, 2008, 9:17 am by jhogg

The NY Times magazine has a spectacular piece on the mishmash of loyalties and difficulties in Pakistan’s tribal areas. It is quite long, but well worth the read.

Abu Muqawama pointed me to the article and has some good commentary.

My own two cents:
The U.S. has an incredibly poor cultural and historical understanding of these sorts of conflicts, for one simple reason: we’ve never had to share a neighborhood with someone we disliked.

The history is Europe is largely a history of containment, war, treaty and further containment. At one border France ends and Germany begins. Your Belgiums, Luxembourgs and Switzerlands exist by finding balance between cultures to avoid alienating one and provoking war. Major powers made treaties and then worked diplomatic ways around them. But diplomacy was endlessly important. No state benefits from ceaseless war.

The United States, on the other hand has not warred with a neighbor since The War of 1812 when British Canada invaded as part of a greater British offensive. As far as wars go, The War of 1812 was flat out lame. Hardly 4,000 troops were dead after three years, (more than 30,000 during the U.S. Revolutionary War) and the U.S. defense was so sloppy that the Canadians actually got to put a torch to the original White House, a war act that makes the Ball Gunner incredibly jealous and gives the Canadians undeniable bragging rights.

Some might try to argue the Mexican-American war, which was all about stealing Texas and California from Mexico, a historic blunder if ever there was one. Nevertheless, Mexico represented about as much of a strategic threat in 1848 as it does in 2008.

After that, nada. We butchered ourselves up pretty good in the Civil War, and after that decided the best wars are the ones far away.

The point of all this mess, is that the U.S. knows diddly about living with your enemy. If France and Germany went to war then the victor was expected to come up with a treaty that established their victory without humiliating the loser into another war within a generation. That’s the problem with wars, even if you win it costs a lot of money, supplies, burns up your fields and chews up the younger generation. The whole maximalist objective thing is entirely a 20th century creation and an American one at that. Crap, even the Mongols just burned through everything and kept a boot on your neck, the Americans are the only ones that expected to be hailed as heroes while they waded through the ashes.

So what this means for a sticky place like Pakistan is that America has no concept of diplomacy in these tricky situations. They sort of stumbled upon it in Iraq, but we’re still out on whether or not the duct tape will hold. If anyone at the State Department reads the Ball Gunner (har har), my advice would be to reel in the Predator pilots for awhile and throw in to the Pakistani governments plan. I realize from an American perspective this makes no sense - it doesn’t involve “going in there and gettin’ em,” but Pakistanis are going to manage Pakistan better than Americans, even Americans with big fancy degrees and titles.

Long and short, you aint driving the Pashtun out of either Pakistan or Afghanistan. You better learn to deal with them before they learn to deal with you. As we’re seeing, they’re pretty quick learners.

Posted in: Afghanistan • politics • warfare | 2 Comments »

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 »

Iraq, Georgia, Pakistan, TOO MUCH! TOO MUCH!

September 2nd, 2008, 9:21 am by jhogg

The Ball Gunner spent last week with too much to do and too many fragrant options sizzling on the international buffet to even know where to begin. No point in pining over missed blogging opportunities, it’s a new week promising to be every bit as juicy as the last.

Big news over Labor Day was the apparent completion of the now you see it now you don’t Anbar handoff.

Finally passing the buck on Anbar is a huge PR move for the coalition force, and it’s been an elusive objective for a number of reasons.The big plan is to pass control of the U.S.-funded Sunni militias to the largely Shia Iraqi government. What the Iraqi government does with these militias will be the real meterstick of the Iraqi states progress. The underlying conflicts of the Suni militias being shoved aside by the Shia bureaucrats does not appear to be resolved, and Iraq will not have the patience to bribe these militas into compliance as the U.S. has done. A bunch of angry, disenfranchised, young men with guns does not a stable government make. If the Awakening Councils aren’t given something to do, they’ll make their own work and choose their own bad guys.

The stress test is about to begin for the legacy of both the Iraq War and it’s darling General Petraeus. If Anbar comes apart again it will be a tremendous stretch of U.S. political and military will to reengage. A good number of military and political reputations have been staked on the Surge, and the Ball Gunner has long argued that the endless bickering of “It worked!” “No it didn’t!” “Nuh-uh!” “Yuh-huh!” is wasted breath. We planted the seeds, but planting seeds and harvesting the fruit are two completely seperate actions each dependent on a different set of circumstances.

On a broader front, it does not seem all in Iraq is going according to plan. Nouri al Maliki is showing himself to be a cunning politician in a tough environment. The U.S. came in and did the dirty work of getting him into power. The trade-off was supposed to be using Iraqi hinterlands for a permanent military presence. Al-Maliki now has snatched the permanent base chips off the table.

Via the NY Times

“It is not possible for any agreement to conclude unless it is on the basis of full sovereignty and the national interest, and that no foreign soldiers remain in Iraqi soil after a defined time ceiling,” Mr. Maliki said in a speech to Shiite tribal leaders in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The architects of this plan are doing everything in their power to spin this into something managable. They are claiming that Al-Maliki really means “no troops in the cities” or “no groups larger than a brigade,” but in the English spoken by the Ball Gunner, “no foreign soldiers” is a rather unambiguous statement.

Al-Maliki is now proving himself to be more of a leader than the U.S. bargained for. The U.S. cannot backpedal on a withdrawal now that talks have been held without appearing a blatent occupier, and Al-Maliki is rolling out a hardline stance by throwing out the existing Iraqi negotiators and installing his own. It is a safe bet that they are securing Al-Maliki’s future as head of Iraq, in addition to a troop drawdown .

A lot of shoes are fixing to drop. The infrastructure built by the Surge is getting its first load test, the U.S. is finding itself with an increasingly surly Iraqi president and ethnic tensions in key areas are still sizzling.

It is too early to tell what will end up where. But the worst-case scenario of an authoritarian, Shia-led Iraq allying with Iran is now a very clear possibility. If and when this happens it will represent a cataclysmic failure of U.S. interests and efforts in the region.

PS - I’m getting caught up with old work and so will be back to blogging, soon. Look for more on Georgia and Russia tomorrow.

Posted in: Iraq • politics • warfare | 3 Comments »

Tu jour Pervez, tu jour

August 20th, 2008, 9:07 am by jhogg

The United State has lost its blank check to operate in Pakistan.

Airstrikes into tribal regions of Pakistan have become a de facto tactic for fighting in Afghanistan. There are no guarantees that the next president will allow the U.S. to use the airspace for the operations, and if the U.S. defies Pakistan and continues the attacks it will only be perceived as an act of war.

The Pashtun in Pakistan and Afghanistan, of course, do not care where the line on the map falls. They will support the Pashtun. Combined with the ongoing conflict in Georgia, the U.S. has suffered some rather grim political setbacks. It will be interesting to watch how the next few weeks play out.

Posted in: Afghanistan • Georgia (the country) • Pakistan • Russia • politics • warfare | 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 »

Balooning of the air mission in Afghanistan

July 28th, 2008, 8:19 am by jhogg

The Baltimore Sun story does an unusually good job of explaining how the mission swell has affected things in Afghanistan and what the impact of large amounts of air strikes are.

Air strikes are not only a poor way of fighting an insurgency, they’re really about the worst way of doing so. But the combined push of military contractors pushing the myth of technological superiority and the command terror of casualties ensures that ground forces are loaded to the gills with gadgets, gizmos, body armor and likely one or two kitchen sinks.

Consider that U.S. issue Interceptor Body Armor weighs 16.4 pounds (without the additional side plates or throat and groin protection), strap on a first aid kit and load bearing gear, factor in that NATO forces are mostly going to pack their own food and water, along with individual weapons (including the poor lug assigned to haul the M-240, a medium machine gun never designed for light use and weighing in at a whopping 27 pounds.) Some poor schmoe has to haul the radio. Some poor schmoe will probably be stuck with a tripod for the machine gun. This isn’t even counting for the presence of a mortarman.

The Taliban insurgents have some AKs, maybe some RPK machine guns (10-11 pounds) and a few RPGs (15 pounds for the launcher and 5-10 pounds for the rounds.) Food and water can be provided locally or foraged.

NATO forces have pretty much been reduced to the tactics of bumping into bad guys and calling for fire — this is a sheer issue of mobility. The Navy or Air Force fighter jock is, of course, listening to excited calls and hearing gun fire and explosions over the radio and wants to save the guys on our side. Things happen quick and not always as planned.

But barring a major strategic shift in NATO operations, this is what we will continually be stuck with. The answers are out there. The Imperial German Army had them developed in 1918. I can say with reasonable certainty that those books moulder on a shelf somewhere.

Posted in: Afghanistan • warfare | Post a Comment »

Bad news from Afghanistan

July 14th, 2008, 10:49 am by jhogg

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.

Posted in: Afghanistan • Army • NATO • Pakistan • politics • warfare | 1 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 »

Georgia “very close” to war with Russia: who says there’s no good fantasy left

May 7th, 2008, 9:30 am by jhogg

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: Sweet mother of god

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.”

Posted in: Balkans • Europe • NATO • Russia • politics • warfare | 1 Comment »

The Syria story; fishier than a Vietnamese pier

May 1st, 2008, 2:05 pm by jhogg

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.

Posted in: North Korea • Syria • intelligence • politics • warfare | 1 Comment »