The WSJ reports that US officials had to exert sustained pressure on Pakistani officials to mount a raid which netted the Taliban’s number 2 man, Mullah Baradar, who was operating the Quetta Shura Council from Karachi.
Pakistan’s capture of the Afghan Taliban’s operations chief came after months of U.S. pressure that involved showing officials details of intelligence that linked Pakistan’s spy agency to Taliban attacks in Afghanistan … As recently as October, an officer in Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the Quetta Shura was an “American myth” and that no Taliban leaders spent any time in Pakistan.
According to the WSJ, General McChrystal overcame Pakistan’s reluctance to act by arguing that the Afghan Taliban were conspiring with the Pakistani Taliban to undermine Islamabad. After objections were removed Baradar was taken into custody. What stood between Mullah Baradar and capture was less a deficit in detection than a lack of Pakistani political will. “With ISI officers attending meetings of the top Taliban leadership, the Pakistanis couldn’t say they didn’t know where Mullah Baradar was, said a former Defense Department official.”
Bill Roggio explains that Taliban operations had long been headquartered in Pakistan. “The Afghan Taliban’s leadership cadre have long operated from within Pakistan. The Taliban’s leadership council, called the Quetta Shura, has operated from the Pakistani city of the same name for years, according to Afghan and US officials.” Pakistan had always denied it, but recent events have made it harder for them to plead ignorance. “Baradar’s arrest, if confirmed, creates problems for the Pakistani government. Numerous Pakistani government, military, and intelligence officials have repeatedly denied the existence of the Quetta Shura and have disputed claims that it had moved to Karachi.” Baradar is but one head of the snake. There are others. Roggio writes:
The Pakistani military has refused to take on the Haqqani Network, a dangerous Taliban group allied with al Qaeda and based in North Waziristan, and other Taliban leaders who support the fight in Afghanistan. The military has ruled out an operation in North Waziristan over the next year.
Pakistan’s long term game plan get the snake pit to clean up its act. The key to achieving this is to establish the idea of “good Taliban, bad Taliban”. By including some de-AlQaedaized factions in the political future of Afghanistan, the “good Taliban”, Pakistan assures itself of what a seat at the postwar table, what it called “strategic depth” on its Western border. India says it has been alone in rejecting this concept. An article in Foreign Policy by Kapil Komireddi in February of 2010 argued that Washington was determined to appease Pakistan whose main desire was to maintain an influence over Afghanistan after the US left. India, Komireddi said, was alone in opposing this strategy.
There was a lone dissenter at last week’s Afghanistan conference in London: India.
As representatives from more than 60 countries convened at the historic Lancaster House, New Delhi’s representative to the summit, Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna, emphasized to his British counterpart that it would be a monumental folly, at this juncture, to make a distinction “between a good Taliban and a bad Taliban” or to legitimize the former through reaching out. From India’s perspective, because the Taliban was originally an extension of Pakistan’s intelligence agency and because it has been used by Islamabad to mount attacks against India, there can be no “good Taliban.” … As control of Afghanistan is being gradually handed back to the Taliban, an increasingly alarmed New Delhi will start looking for ways to prevent trouble. …
What this means is that India, the only stable secular democracy in the region, is being actively prevented from helping in Afghanistan in order to appease the Pakistani regime, lest it re-enact the carnage that was visited upon Mumbai in 2008 and the Indian Embassy in Kabul in 2008 and 2009. Which raises the question: Is the U.S. objective in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, or is it to secure the country for Pakistan? To New Delhi, the answer looks increasingly like the latter.
The scenario that Komireddi paints is one of a post-withdrawal Afghanistan in semi-trusteeship to Pakistan. Whatever President Obama’s exit strategy is, the Christian Science Monitor believes that Baradar’s capture may be part of it. Baradar’s value, the Monitor believes, is as a go-between to entice the other leaders to get on board a comprehensive settlement process. Unlike Komireddi, the CSM believed that the final shape of post-US Afghanistan had not yet been fully determined. In any event “the capture of Mr. Baradar, who could now possibly play a role in negotiating an end to the conflict, only hastens events that may make the path easier for US forces to leave.”
All these moves by India, Pakistan, and Karzai to maneuver for a post-US era still leave the question of what to do with the Afghan Taliban. The rising strength of the insurgency since 2006 means it likely can’t be defeated militarily but merely weakened enough to allow negotiations aimed at peeling off certain parts of its ranks.
But which parts? The US and India as yet don’t see the top Taliban echelon agreeing to three key terms: breaking ties with Al Qaeda, respecting Afghanistan’s Constitution, and renouncing violence. They see mainly local insurgents and regional commanders splitting off. And they don’t want the government in Kabul to make compromises that would set up a partially Islamic regime.
Clearly the Afghan War is tinged by more than its share of politics. Even in Washington and New York a political game is being played out. The BBC interviewed the New York Times to ask them why they so readily agreed to hold a scoop on Baradar’s capture at the request of President Obama whereas they vociferously objected to similar requests by President Bush.
BBC: So why did you decide to do this? You don’t always acquiesce to these kinds of requests. …
KELLER: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the thought process. What actually happened, was yesterday our stringers in Pakistan and Afghanistan started calling our bureaus there and saying, we’re hearing reports that Mullah Baladar is in Pakistani custody, we took that to the White House and they said, yeah we understand it’s not holdable anymore.
BBC: Right, so you published it. Now you visited the White House in 2006 while President Bush was in office and you were getting ready to publish a story about domestic wire tapping and very famously you were told if you published that story you’d have blood on your hands. Is that the kind of dire warning you got from the Obama White House?
KELLER: No, first of all this didn’t even get to my level, they dealt with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief, I mean obviously if they felt they needed to call me, I’m always willing to take a call, but it didn’t even rise to that level. Back in 2006 the conversations were professional and civil, but in the end when we didn’t agree to hold the story as they wanted us to, it was a kind of firestorm of criticism from the White House aimed at the Times. So far anyway we haven’t had that acrimony with this administration, nor as far as I know have other news organisations.
Sometimes there’s just a meeting of the minds and there seems to be a mental accord between the NYT and the current occupant of the White House. Carl von Clausewitz argued that war is neither completely an act of force nor utterly governed by reason. It is a combination of coercion and persuasion; a struggle of body and soul. But a struggle toward what end? Perhaps not even the current crop of politicians know what the consequences of their policies will be. But one thing is sure. There’s the can; and there’s the road.
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What’s really amazing here is that the Pakistani government may finally be starting to see the Taliban as a serious threat to themselves, rather than as in-house pets that they pretend not to have anything to do with and which they then send after any enemies they have.
I still believe that it is at least a strong possibility that Bhutto was killed on orders from the ISI. The most important point is that the Pakistani government has had the intel to have picked this guy up (and Omar, and the rest of the Taliban) anytime that they had wanted to over the last 8 years. So why now, finally? Maybe the Taliban has finally outlived it’s usefulness to them. It happens.
Ernst Rohm learnt that lesson the hard way.
“Sometimes there’s just a meeting of the minds.”
It’s much easier to do when the press doesn’t see the administration as a greater enemy than the Taliban. It’s really very simple to see, in retrospect.
Someday someone will look back on the MSM through this era and write a story titled “Murder or Suicide?” I wonder what will have to happen for them to get that story right.
Who will be the reliable source of the truth for that story, the Times itself? I suspect they’ll be going through those archives with a big box of salt.
How often does the world need to watch Pakistan play out it’s bobble-head pan-Islamic gambits? It wants to bottle up tribal antagonisms, preferably via Islamist appeals, to conterbalance Indian dominance. And of course it can never acquiesce to a dominant India, even if India is in every sense dominant.
Eventually the ‘settled science’ regarding AWG unraveled. Perhaps the settled knowledge that we need to cultivate the ‘good Islamists’ will unravel also.
Here’s a blog entry from some kind of subcontinent forum. I just googled ‘Pakistani cognitive dissonance’ and got this item, probably by a Hindu or fed-up Pakistani, which is probably as good an analysis as anything coming from Foggy Bottom.
Laddu, on “Chowk”
“Cognitive dissonance between Arabic world view and modern world is the cause of suicidal distress.”
Posted: Nov 6, 2009 Fri 10:23 pm Views: 250 Interacts: 2
“Muslims live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. Their Islamic mind is incapable of coping with the freedoms of the modern world. They are torn apart by two opposing forces. On one hand there is freedom, which they find irresistibly seductive and at the same time sinful and immoral. On the other hand there is the fear of hell. In this tug-of-war, fear always wins. Fear is a lot more powerful than the desire to be free, especially if that freedom is regarded as wicked and sinful. Freedom will never wean Muslims from Islam. They respond to fear. This makes them withdraw into their protective shell, and become more and more extremist.
“They sin, they feel guilty, and to overcome their guilt they become jihadis. This, in a nutshell, is the reason for the revival of jihad. Muslims have suddenly come in contact with the modern western world and they are not equipped for it. They are fascinated by it, while at the same time they fear it, believe it leads them to hell, and they want to destroy it. It is under this light that we must understand Muslims. Only then can we understand what drives them to terrorism. Islamic terrorists are not troubled or insane. They are normal people. The only thing troubling about them is that they believe in a religion which holds them hostage to fear, controls their thoughts and actions, and glorifies murder as the highest form of devotion.”
Good on Obama, or Gates, or Clinton, or McChrystal, or Panetta (!?), or whoever managed to get this done.
And good on Obama today for approving the building of some new nuclear generators for the first time in 30 years.
At this rate, who knows, maybe Obama’s next round at the bowling alley would exceed 50.
“So far anyway we haven’t had that acrimony with this administration, nor as far as I know have other news organizations.”
Yes and the NYT didn’t have any acrimony with Joseph Stalin as he killed millions in the Ukraine, in fact to the contrary of other reports at the time the NYT consistently promoted the line of crap that Walter J. Duranty reported about everything in Stalin’s Soviets was just dandy. They knew the truth and simply printed lies to maintain their access to Stalin, thus becoming accessories to his murdering as many as 14.5 million in the years 1930-37 as a result of Stalin’s terror.
Nor does the NYT have any acrimony with Nazi collaborator and leading Democratic Party financier George Soros or Goldman Sachs.
The NYT does however have a white hot hatred for the American people in the “Great Fly Over” which has been reflected in their editorial positions and gross lack of rectitude in reporting to the people the true facts. The NYT is an adversarial press to the truth about US policies worldwide and a truly professional rag for spreading the propaganda of our enemies.
If it’s anti American propaganda you care to read, read the NYT.
The ISI had to offer up Baradar to atone for the CIA bloodbath.
Normally one does not capture critical players to open negotiations. Rather, the player himself is the bargaining chip/hostage.
The recent precision offensive against the Taliban smacks of Baradar’s co-operation.
Just on that presumption he’d be alienated from his buddies affection.
…
The cessation of the Pakistani ‘offensive’ against the Paki-Talibs is very likely coincident with Baradar’s capture. The cost-effectiveness equation hit the Army over the head.
BTW, it is the Army that changed it’s mind — not the government. All of those suicide attacks against Rawalpindi left a mark.
You could argue that if Afghanistan were inherently incapable of standing on its own then the only alternative would be to put it under the guardianship — full or partial — of the neighboring powers. It has been that to some extent for a long time. You might argue it was that even before 9/11. Now it will reopen, not under different management, but under different managers. A few letters in difference and perhaps an equal distance in concept. The dispute will be over the degree to which the takeover will happen. Ideally, the political coalition left in charge of Afghanistan should be stable and in where a peaceful country is in their self-interest. Karzai’s government or its successor will remain, but probably only in the shadow of its neighbors.
Provided such a coalition could exist, then NATO could gift wrap it and present it to the International Community as an exit strategy. And provided the arrangements were stable the thing could remain inert and not trouble the world for the indefinite future. If however, the coalition is unstable, Afghanistan will eventually become an extension of Pakistan and become no more stable than the parent is. The Afghan problem will merge into the Pakistani one. You could argue that it already has. In that case NATO will have defused one time bomb only to replace it with one that is much larger, and in fact, nuclear powered.
Except insofar as it allows President Obama to meet his withdrawal timetable, this strategy has only one other virtue. It consolidates the problem in one basket: Pakistan. If leaving the whole thing in Pakistan doesn’t preclude further mischief then the next time some devilry is brewed in those parts there will be only one door to knock on: Pakistan’s. And yet it will not be so. Pakistan is like a condominium with a single foyer, but lots of entrances and exits. In the end the consolidation will have solved nothing of value. But like I said, there’s always the can and there’s always the road.
How can we hand over anything to Pokiston that doesn’t even control half of its own territory.
And the half that it does control ain’t no prize neither, nohow.
There are half educated people, the kind who read book review like they were books, who once saw a two page excerpt or summary of Clausewitz and who therefore think that saying that “war is an extension of politics by other means” proves that they are great scholars. They often get the point backwards and think that more politics can substitute for military methods when the “objective conditions” as those of the Left used to say would dictate otherwise. Partly the problem cam from the British who really were good enough to rule India with a few thousand soldiers and fewer civil servants. They made a virtue of having to “punch above their weight” and continued to attempt the practice even when it became inappropriate. If the Americans were occasionally to quick to reduce a problem to force the Europeans became to quick to reduce the option of force. This confusion of means and ends reached its logical conclusion with Obama putting military operations under international legal scrutiny and moving unlawful enemy combatants to civilian courts. The Pakistanis were just playing the game the British taught them.
Josh you fogot your sarc smilely. Because I know you really don’t believe that load about new nuke plants.
I must agree with blert @ 6 on this. It was a payback. If ISI had decided to strike a serious blow against the Taliban they could have rolled up nearly the entire command structure, dozens of “Moolahs” instead of one man.
This was indeed probably the minimum they could get away with in order to appease certain portions of their government and ensure continued access to Infidel Americans filthy lucre and airbourne intelligence.
On the other hand, there are large portions of the ISI, other parts of Pakistans civilian government and its military who realize a Taliban take over of the entire nation wouldn’t be the end of their world and may happen eventually. These are many of the same folks who created the Taliban and continue to nourish them. They are our enemy as much as any Al Qaeda jihadist or Talib fanatic. We will never “win” in Afghanistan until we are willing to strike at the enemies true centers of gravity or to resort to old school, un-politically correct warfare.
If the current Paki regime pushes hard enough, Pakistan may splinter along language and culutural (hillmen vs. lowland) lines. The best hope for Pakistans continued existence in its current unstable form is the withdrawl of most U.S. forces and interests from the region. They’re walking a tightrope and have been since 9/11.
If the Taliban come to dominate, of course India will move in one way or another to ensure New Dehli and Bombay don’t disappear in mushroom clouds.
I think this “capture” was just for show. If I had the money I would accept bets from anyone believing Baradar won’t escape from “prison” in the next 18 months.
I don’t think we can win in the long run (determine the political outcome) in Afghanistan because the Pashtun can breed jihadis much faster than we are willing to kill them under the rules of engagement. I also suspect that given the choice between perpetual insecurity and civil war and the sharia of the Taliban that most Afghans would choose the latter. There is no cultural tradition of personal liberty anywhere within 1,000 miles of Kabul, and even worse, just about everybody in the region has had their DNA fried by 1,000 years of Islamic nuclear mind turds.
That being said sweeping the terrible swift sword of the world’s most efficient killing machine around the landscape every once in a while keeps the jihadis off their game and 5,000 miles from NYC. For so long as the red, white and blue is planted on Afghan soil the jihadis have to deal with their failure and impotency in today’s world.
The problem is Islam. Islam in Afghanistan. Islam in Pakistan. Islam in Bangladesh and everywhere else in the world that sharia crushes the human spirit.
We call it the WOT but this war has been going on for a very long time.
Wretchard — Uh Oh, I am seeing Peter Boston’s comment with a “click to edit” … using Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu Linux. Tocque disabled.
Now that I add a comment its gone. Hmm …
I don’t want to try and edit Peter’s comment, just thought I’d mention this.
Ann Althouse links to a Guardian article saying that Baradar is being persuaded by Pakistani interrogators. The Guardian adds that the Pakistanis are frequently brutal. So Althouse asks, ‘is Baradar being tortured’, and it would be a bold man who would categorically declare the Pakistanis stop short of that kind of thing. And I mean real torture, the kind that leaves you gimping and going through the rest of your life whistling through your broken teeth with the aid of a seeing-eye dog.
One of Althouse’s commenters remarks that it is no matter, because “ritual purity” has been maintained. It isn’t happening in US custody, so we can enter the temple. Obama can jut his jaw on stage and continue to declare “let me be perfectly clear”. Althouse’s commentator probably meant his observation bitterly, if not sarcastically. But such Jesuitical distinctions are important to certain scrupulous people. For example, over at another PJM Express blog, Rod Radosh is refusing Andrew Sullivan’s call for an apology and a removal of his blog on the grounds of McCarthyistically impugning Sullivan’s criticism of Israel. Sullivan puts great store by what he thinks of people and what other people think of what other people think. Obama is ritually pure, and ergo he is pure. Nonsense? Well, symbols are important to some people, whether they be of the Tarot or astrological in character. Klatuu barada nikto. Ash forgot the last word in Armies of Darkness, and see where that got him. Yes, symbols are important.
Sometimes I think that being an intellectual consists largely of the privilege to contemplate the worst things without feeling oneself sullied with mud. It’s a difference without a distinction I think. In the end everyone sullies himself with mud. One really has to accept that hell is open to those with a good education too. Perhaps it is run by them.
Baradar, the dark tower?
Ah ,Islamic nuclear mind turds…..reminds of those public service ads; “this is your brain on drugs”. “this is Akmal’s mind on Islamic nuclear mind turds”. Problem is there ain’t no cure.
I always thought GWB came to the issue forthrightly and this was clear when he refused to play the clintonian rendition game. Which deepened my respect for him and Mr. Cheney because in the end we are responsible for both the good and the bad. One of the downsides of being a representative democracy is the fact that every citizen is responsible, no matter how they voted for (or did not vote). Which is one of the reasons I would like a very limited government, with most government closest to the people (subsidiarity as well as federal) with the rest left to civil society (even when it’s inefficient and arguably poorly done) – because I do not want to be responsible – esp. since a free people cannot, should not, must not place themselves in a position where they are not each responsible for their own actions, and the actions of those in their employ (which here means both the bureaucrats and the elected acting in our name).
Where to claim “I am not responsible for my or my employee’s actions” demeans me, my free will, and by induction.. my freedom.
@10 jfsanders I’m only now hearing about Lord Zero and the loan guarantees to my chosen field of study… but I agree with you, this is a crock. Ok, fine, guarantee a bunch of money to build a couple of new plants… and they come on-line in what, ten years from now? Granted, IF I THOUGHT the entire years-long process would result in real, live, state-of-the-art functioning power plants, I might get excited… but you and I both know that the legal challenges that utilities know they would face from all the enviro-nuts will prevent this from resulting in anything more than ink on paper. Obama knows this – so do his leftist supporters.
Now, if this initiative was accompanied by some sort of instruction to the relevant agencies to open up some known offshore reserves (oil/gas) along with some capacity expansions in refining… someone who knows the oil/gas biz step in here… wouldn’t that be a quicker way to opening up our own energy spigot?
Don’t promise me a bunch of money (you don’t have) and expect me to jump for joy. Get govt the h3ll outta the way and let us do what we know how to do: PRODUCE.
Triton
I think the Afghan/Pak problem is a decades long one. The Paks are an artificial construct begat by the UN and therefore at the root screwy. Any level of trust that we invest in the Paks should be leavened with a basic understanding that lying to an infidel is grounds for praise to an islam.
Afghanistan is what it is; a tribal uncivilized wild area, not different than the back corners of Borneo or the Amazon. They dont have trees so we are forced to look at them. Their advantage in their war on us is that they are only a few hundred miles from an airport to the real world.
America should pay a LOT of attention to what the Indians say. They’ve been fighting with this crowd for decades as a nation-state and for eons as a people. They have an understanding of the nature of the enemy that we ought to recognize but refuse to accept. They also have the benefit of having paid attention to the better parts of the lessons that the English brought to them.
Taliban: A word meaning students. The Saudis supported Madrasas in Pakistan offering “free” education. Since schooling is not free in Pakistan these Wahhabi promoting schools got a lot of students from the tribes and refuge Afghans. So over the years you got a lot of hard core Wahhabi’s amongts the tribe on both sides of the borders. In some ways Pakistan is a client state to the Saudi’s. The Paks have supplied up to a couple of brigades worth to the Saudi Royals at one time or another. The ISI got to be cheek by jowl with the Taliban during the Soviet occupation, or the War of A Thousand Cuts. So a lot of Kammeraden feeling developed.
Of course nothing is ever simple. There is resentment between the Paks and the Afghans dating back to the creation of Pakistan. The Afghan govenment of the time did not want to recognize Pakistan as a nation at the start.
“Oh the Afghan can fly a plane and drive a tank, but he can’t ride a bicycle well because he does not believe it will balance. That’s why they always wobble when ever you see them going down the street on one.” Pakistani on Afghans.
I can go with “In the end, everyone gets muddy.”, but I’m not there with sully as the operative verb, W. Lotsa people gettin’ muddy whilst doing their best to remain undefiled.
Candidate Obama — who wished to seem less of a wimp while promoting defeat in Iraq — frequently said that Afghanistan was the central front of “The War With No Name” because Al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11 using that country as “the base.” This was like telling the region’s Islamists “give us a couple of Big Wig AQ leaders and we will declare victory and leave.”
President Obama’s request for peace talks with the Taliban made that offer more or less explicit. Plus, President Obama declared war on Al Qaeda as soon as his approval numbers sank below 50 percent, but did not mention the Taliban. But the Taliban figures Obama will leave Afghanistan anyways, so why give up any Top Prize AQ leaders?
With a lack a response from the Taliban, the Obama administration committed to something like a surge. Except it soon became “surge and leave” so again, why should the Taliban cooperate? Well, they need to feel Obama’s pain. I suspect the jump in “targeted killings” and this high leader grab are part of the effort to make the Taliban feel his pain. He does not want to win (he pretty much says so himself) but he does need a win: Dr. al-Zawahiri would be nice and bin Laden even better (and both dead might be best). Then he can declare victory and get the hell out.
Unfortunately, the Islamists want to win, or at least look like winners. For them to win President Obama cannot be given his win. So the only way they will give up the prize is if they are on the mat and need to be let up. Will targeted killings be enough? Only if they are quite accurately targeted (which requires great intelligence). Does Pakistan really want us gone? Our being there — neither winning nor losing — offers them some advantages (big bucks, for one).
jfsanders @ 10: Josh you fogot your sarc smilely. Because I know you really don’t believe that load about new nuke plants.
Why not? I expect to see Barack and Michelle out there tomorrow morning with hardhats, shovels and clawhammers, assuring their completion by this weekend.
Without further investigation, I have no idea to what degree these particular plants are serious proposals or already in progress. But come on, everyone has been screaming at Zero to start taking things in small bites, this is domestic energy, it is only a federal guarantee on an existing project, it seems to fit the bill – no matter that it is a long lead-time, and a drop in the bucket. Next item is to allow more domestic offshore drilling, or Alaska ANWR.
Better to light a couple of (loan guarantees for) nuke plants, than to curse the darkness.
In some ways Pakistan is a client state to the Saudi’s.
Yeah but afaik it was a local inspiration for Pokiston to name its capital as it did.
Fasten your seatbelts
Not to sound too sarcastic, but I think the notion of “winning and losing” is a Western social construct. I am not trying to sound post-modern, either. We delude ourselves if we think about this situation in that manner.
The tribal peoples of Afghanistan-Pakistan have been fighting the outsider and each other for millenia. Their natures pre-date Islam. The warrior religion part of Islam, always on the razzia, the raid,Jihad, suited their pre-existing mentality.
They are hard people in a hard land. It’s hard to work the land and eke out an existence, so the more “manly” thing to do is go take what you want from the “other”, outside your tribe or local family group.
But now they have been manipulated by the Arabic Al Qaeda, that can psend money from KSA like water, and use these tough tribal peoples as a “vanguard of the Caliphate”. So even if Al Qaeda is exterminated/ captured/ put out of business, the business of these tribal peoples will go on. The fighting and the raiding will continue, and now they have tasted the fruits of the possibilities of a global scale razzia. Think of them more like a mafia family than some kind of indigenous tribal people with some kind of yearning for what we have. They like being tough and independent and the violence.
So yeah, Obumble and his merry band of Southside Chicago polls can work a deal with some of these jokers, and a few years will pass, and then these guys will do something outrageous again, and again we will hear about “lost opportunities”, “Failure of follow-up”, etc.
Three possible alternatives (not three conjectures):
1) Find something constructive for these people to do and break the cycle of tribal violence.
2) Realize that anything we do is just a band-aid on the situation, and we will have to go back in there someday and collect some scalps.
3) Turn the troublesome parts of the Tribal regions into a glassed over wasteland. And that’s a really terrible thing to contemplate about a whole lot of people, and I personally don’t wish that on anyone, but it would be the “Carthaginian Peace” of the 21st century.
Terrible but effective.
He does not want to win (he pretty much says so himself) but he does need a win: Dr. al-Zawahiri would be nice and bin Laden even better (and both dead might be best).
Heh. Wouldn’t it be such a coincidence if bin Laden was suddenly captured oh, I dunno, around late October 2010.
Sometimes it’s important to be cruel in order to be kind. There’s a type of liberal that will doing anything, anything at all as long as someone doesn’t really react nastily to it. What Al Quaeda and Taliban have learned is that Americans are squeamish: they want their security, sure, but they are unwilling to do the necessary to get it. What would doing the necessary constitute? For starters, overwhelming, crushing attacks all along the Afghan-Paki border. Carpet bombing, indiscriminate killing in the neighborhood of wherever a Taliban sweety shows his ugly head. That delivers a message, and the message is this: “You mess with us like you did on 9/1l, and we will destroy you utterly. Utterly. You will pay a price so steep that merely to think of doing it again, even if it’s in your sleep, you will awaken in a cold sweat.” That will do the job. The trouble is that too many Americans do not have the sufficient will to survive so as to will the necessary. This is what differentiates the USA 2010 from USA Dec. 7, 1941, and later over Hiroshima in 1945. In those cases, they recognized the language which the Japanese were speaking, and they recognized what they were saying, which came down to “We will stop at nothing we are capable of doing to destroy you and keep you out of our backyard while we gather in all the material resources of SE Asia.” Once America received that message, it recognized that that was the message it received, and that to do anything at all about that was worth doing involved utter annihilation. Of course, the Japanese helped by announcing that its soldiers would never surrender alive, that Americans had to kill every one of them. The logic of that exchange of messages was the dropping the bomb first on Hiroshima, and then again on another city in order to convey the second message that America meant the first message.
This has all been said before, and it requires saying every time global strategies against jihadism come up for discussion: only when Americans are seriously attacked in their homeland (9/11 was serious but not serious enough: Manhattan still lives and breathes and goes about its daily business) will it finally be generally-enough understood that the Jihadis are baiting us with the following threat: “We will continue to kill Americans until we provoke you to go all out and kill us all. We do this, because we believe that America no longer has the will to survive. If you want to prove to us that Americans still have the will to survive, you will have to prove it by coming after us with everything you’ve got. Then we will believe you, but not otherwise.”
Obama? Obama is a spoiled child with a spoiled child’s mind, which is to say that he is at bottom frivolous.
Hey lookit this, VDH says Obama’s ar on terror policy is to cynically talk like the left and act like the right.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTE1MzY4NmM4NDMyMTU5NjQ3M2UyODQ2ZTlhMjY2NTU=
26. E. Nigma:
In reality how are they any different from the ‘balestinians’?
There is nothing anyone can do to satisfy their needs/demands.
Since when does it take a Presidential act to get a Nuclear Power Plant started?
I thought we had a process for these things that involved local planning, applications, permits, environmental impact studies, surveys, hydrologic research, development and approval of engineering designs, etc.,etc.,etc.
But, well, I guess this is the Obama way, since the Present One has ascended to the throne.
Three Mile Island partial core meltdown happened 12 days after the movie “The China Syndrome” was released. Talk about a one-two punch!
How did we get here, how and why
This stan, this place of clans
This place where Muslim killers rule
Just like in other stans
We’ve had our own stans in the past
Stan Laurel comes to mind
Stan Musial was a lefty but
One of the hitting kind
The purest hitter I did see
And that includes DiMag
Not like the hitters in these stans
Who come back from the hajj
All full of hate and fear and spite
Determined just to kill
And if they die those virgins wait
No sweat, it’s Allah’s will
I’ll take our Stans and they keep theirs
Stan Laurel makes me laugh
And Stan the Man would hit all ropes
Against their pitching staff
26/E. Nigma. Our host recently referenced an interview Michael Totten did with Lee Smith (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385516118?ie=UTF8&tag=michajtottesm-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0385516118) that the regional players will back the strong horse, and that there is no shame in changing sides repeatedly.
This book http://www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-Hundred-British-American-Occupation/dp/0230614035/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266377432&sr=1-6 makes the same point.
Then there is the age old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. I’ll take Door #3, Monty, sooner rather than later. Though later it will be.
Since when does it take a Presidential act to get a Nuclear Power Plant started?
It takes a community organizer to get them neutrons to behave.
correction:
“ass-ended”
Okay, quick and dirty here’s the problem with the nuke guarantees and why Obama’s plan is meaningless: you gotta certify you have a place to put the waste or else the plant can’t get a final operating permit, the one that allows it to begin loading the fuel. The only place we’ve come up with to safely store nuclear waste long term in this county is Yucca Mtn in Nevada. To appease Harry Reid and the Las Vegas gaming interests, Obama has issued orders to permanently close Yucca Mtn, and there is currently no effort at all to find a permanent nuclear waste storage solution.
Therefore these plants, even if they are built, will never be able to get operating permits. They will never be loaded with fuel. But since construction will take 15 years, Obama and the current crowd will be long gone when we get to that point so why should they worry about that now?
This loan is just a stunt – a way to shovel some money out the door to pretend something is being done when in fact no energy at all will ever be produced from them. It’s a jobs program that will pay off a lot of union workers but in the end do nothing. In that, it’s just like all the rest of the stimulus plans that have been coming out of Washington.
Okay, quick and dirty here’s the problem with the nuke guarantees and why Obama’s plan is meaningless: you gotta certify you have a place to put the waste or else the plant can’t get a final operating permit, the one that allows it to begin loading the fuel. The only place we’ve come up with to safely store nuclear waste long term in this county is Yucca Mtn in Nevada. To appease Harry Reid and the Las Vegas gaming interests, Obama has issued orders to permanently close Yucca Mtn, and there is currently no effort at all to find a permanent nuclear waste storage solution.
As if by magic, a CNN has this article Obama’s nuclear power push faces obstacle: Waste . I didn’t think people could be that cynical.
There are two major reasons why Pakistan is unstable.
Firstly, there are Pushtun and Baluch regions in western (especially northwestern) Pakistan that simply do not accept central authority. In particular, the Northwest Frontier is historically part of Afghanistan. As long as the Pakistani government continues to assert authority over regions and peoples that never liked or wanted Pakistani authority, there will continue to be trouble. Indeed, many Pushtuns would have preferred to stay part of India instead of getting dragooned into what they see as a lesser state.
Secondly, the Pakistani military is far too big for the internal stability of Pakistan. On the one hand, the Pakistani military needs to be every bit as big as it is to face down India. If anything, it needs to be bigger and better simply to keep up with India. On the other hand, Pakistan’s strategic desire for parity with India not only drains its economy but puts it at the mercy of foreign powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, that subsidize its military ambitions.
The paradox here is that if it weren’t for its titular control over tribal regions and bloated military, Pakistan would be an ordinary Asiatic democracy, possibly even an “Asian Tiger”. Yes, Pakistan’s politicians are legendary for their venality, but that isn’t much different from most of the developing world. Even Pakistan’s military doesn’t act much differently than most other militaries, its principal difference being its sheer size (and hence political power) and its control over Pakistan’s national intelligence services.
The key question facing Pakistan is whether it is willing to live under India’s shadow. If Pakistan accepts Indian supremacy as inevitable, Pakistan can become an ordinary Asiatic democracy. If Pakistan seeks to burnish its role as the “Sword of Islam” against Indian hegemony, it will necessarily become an implacable enemy to India, the United States, and Afghanistan and a resolute ally to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
I doubt that Pakistan is able to decide between guns and butter. It is in no position to choose both.
Cynical? Do you mean, killing Yucca Mountain more or less contemporaneously with authorizing some money for a couple of Potemkin nuke plants?
These things are piling up –i keep thinking of a party in that Bill Ayres living room, where Rahm is doing a stand-up comedy routine running thru all the punchlines already writ. Poland was cool –as was killing the Constellation on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster.
OT
Commented on a post at Ed Driscoll’s
http://bit.ly/d0qhIf
Lemee see, scientists (when there usedta be some) noticed that cosmic rays impinging upon our sweet little atmosphere produce a number of daughter particles from the high-energy collisions, including CARBON-14, which is an unstable – RADIOACTIVE -isotope of Carbon. It is being created continually, and as an atmospheric component, it is breathed in by plants, and incorporated into plant tissues. So every time we burn a stick of wood, or a lump of coal, radioactive Carbon14 is released back into the atmosphere.
BUT WAIT, it’s radioactive EVEN BEFORE WE BURN ANYTHING!!!! So we’re being exposed to radiation when we walk through a meadow, or a lovely forest glen!!!!
And those pretty polished GRANITE blocks used to face our public buildings have been tested some years ago and were found to include radioactive traces.
AAUGH!
Here’s a quote from The Solid Surface Alliance website:
“Radiation will vary in different granite materials, so much so that the Chinese
enacted radiation standards years ago and actually prohibit the export of the
safer, lower radiation level granite. Think about that, any Chinese granite
imported into the United States or elsewhere is considered too dangerous to be
put in a Chinese dwelling. The health risks from granite radiation are small yet
not as small as other health risks. For instance, the granite in the Thomas
Jefferson building in Washington D.C., will give you an incremental cancer risk
50 times greater than the Super Fund clean up trigger levels.”
And then there’s the RADON gas that can accumulate in our basements – especially sealed basements. It’s a naturally-occurring gas, given off for instance as one breakdown product the trace radioactives in granite.
Flying in a passenger jet at high altitude coast-to-coast puts you above 90 percent of the protective atmosphere, and exposes you to as much additional radiation as people used to get in old-style Chest X-rays. (That is, in the bad old days before the Pre-Obama health industry improved diagnostic equipment so an extremely low dose of X-rays suffices for an image.)
But we have a couple generations of idiots who can’t tell you the difference between an electron and an erection, but they want to tell everybody else that Radiation is EVIL! NO NUKES! (Drive into the People’s Republic of Berkeley. You’ll pass a bunch of signs telling you proudly that it is a Nuclear-Free Zone!)
Makes me think of how the Deutsche Grüne Partei managed to bully the Bundestag into banning nuclear power plant development. The EU seems to have over-ruled the Greenies and modified those measures. But while as of 2008, 23 percent of electrical power in Germany is generated by Nuclear plants, ONLY 15 percent comes from ALL renewable sources. Meanwhile, neighbor France generates more than 80 percent of its electrical power by Nuclear Power, and Germany makes up for its regular shortfall by purchasing French nuclear-generated volts.
God help us! The whole world is being run by dumb-asses.
I didn’t think people could be that cynical.
I do.
hdgreene @ 22 and Voltimand @ 28 are closest to my views.
I strongly suspect that Obama’s strategy is to arrive at a ‘settlement’ with the Taliban, turn over the security of the Afghan region to the Karzai administration with Pakistani support and leave. Guarantees of ongoing financial aid will be made as part of the deal.
That is a formula that will directly result in the Taliban taking over both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Probably fairly quickly too.
When we leave, the Taliban will know we’re not coming back and they will start planning a coup in Pakistan with elements sympathetic to their brand of Islam. The loss of American aid will not dissuade religious fanatics.
After they seize power in Islamabad, they’ll focus on Kabul.
Once the Taliban have consolidated their hold on power, Al Qaeda will surface and have access to nukes with nuclear protection for their bases.
All courtesy of Obama.
Actually, I suspect that if you tested for Radon in the basements of Las Vegas casinos, the amounts would be very high. Of course, your life would likely be in danger if you ever got caught at a Vegas casino with radon detection equipment in your hands!
So, Vegas casino opposition to nuclear waste is more about public relations than caring about the safety of their mugs and suckers.
Of course, if the Obama administration really wanted to “break Vegas”, President Obama could reverse himself and fully commit to a nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain just in order to scare the gamblers toward Indian casinos, Atlantic City, and New Orleans. That could get interesting.
Hey, y’all!
Want to see the earnest face of modern environmentalism?
Check out Environment Texas founder Luke Metzger.
Malaysia’s stats, from the CIA world fact book:
Pop: 25 million. Urban population: 70%, urbanization at 3% annually, 2.95 Total Fertility Rate, Literacy 92% male, 85.4% female, GDP per capita $14.700, population below poverty line, 5.1% .
Pakistan’s stats, from the CIA World Fact Book:
Population, 174 million. Urban population is 36%, urbanization is 3% annually. TFR is 3.43. Literacy is 63% male, 36% female. GDP per capita is $14,700, population below poverty line is 5.1%.
The idea that Pakistan “could be an Asian Tiger” does not pass the laugh test. Asian Tigers have the following characteristics: mostly urban, high literacy rate, high education rate, more manageable populations.
Pakistan has always been a mess. It will always be a mess. It is a mess because it is mostly rural, poor, illiterate, tribal, and is too damn big. Mohammed Mahathir is not my idea of a genius leader, and he is not even on the level of Lee Kwan Yew who was merely adequate. But even he can manage Malaysia without screwing up too much, with only 25 million people to manage. A nation of 174 million is just too big. Even if Pakistan were blessed with sudden competent, good, and incorruptible government, there is no way they could make a difference without first just KILLING a lot of people which in a place like Pakistan given rugged terrain, is impossible. There’s not even the possibility of a Mao, Tito, Stalin, or other “Big Man” imposing the peace of the graveyard, gulag, and collective.
Metzger link –he was Berkeley campus organizer for CALPIRG, then came to Texas to run U.S.PIRG –wow –the nomenclature of the wannabee nomenclatura!
Tar and feathers coming on, doo dah, doo dah
Tar and feathers coming on, doo diddly doo dah daaaaay Oh!
***
Intapundit just put up
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/93994/
linking to Powerline’s question, “What’s Obama’s Beef with India?”
maybe this is a clue?
I just posted an update in the Amy Bishop “Shadow” thread about some more things discovered about her. The first thing is an incident at an IHOP where she beat up another mother concerning a dispute about a high-chair. The second thing is the testimony of a neighbor who lived next door to her in Ipswitch.
Frankly I’m not surprised by any of it. Despite the protestations from the previous threads about how can you derive or attribute so much to a person due to his or her political persuasion, I don’t know what to say. Yes, you shouldn’t be able to attribute so much. But, you often can. Everything about her position and her general outlook is consonant with her behavior. Let me be quick to add that this is not to say that everyone who shares her views is the same as her, and let me bemoan the fact that I shouldn’t have to point that out. Can’t stand that liberal tit-for-tat “you’re saying this makes you a {racist; sexist; enemy of the color blue}”. Talking psychologies here, folks. Sorry, the whacked out feminist professor who’s led a secret life as a street thug is, drumroll, going to be an ardent, dyed-in-the-wool liberal who is all around insufferable. Just the way it is.
Thanks, Buddy,
I thought I would leave some fatherly advice for him – to start looking for a new gig, since the AGW fraud had been fully exposed. And O is reportedly looking for a new Manure Assessment Czar.
I lay down until that feeling went away.
Sometimes it would really be nice if we had space probes, and you could get away from the planet until you actually miss Berkeley.
Все те неотесанные люди. Очень некультурный.
JJR/50; Re ‘U.S. PIRG’, note the slight semiotic torque –the word ‘group’ is not very soviet –but it makes an acronym that reads phonetically as “purge”!
Да. Они представляют собой проблему. Их время придет.
bwa ha haaa!
Voltimand @28
“…For starters, overwhelming, crushing attacks all along the Afghan-Paki border. Carpet bombing, indiscriminate killing in the neighborhood of wherever a Taliban sweaty shows his ugly head.”
I used to agree with you, then I saw the terrain. Carpet-bombing would be almost entirely ineffective. It is really a huge area.
Unless you have often climbed mountains over 12,000 feet high I don’t think you can really understand it. Much of the border is a series of extremely rugged ranges of very high mountains with no soil, little water except for snow pack and melting snow, and relatively narrow river valleys that could charitably be called fertile in the mind of a Swiss farmer. The population outside Kabul, Khandahar, Herat and a handful of other cities is extremely sparse. Outside those cities, which are usually not security problems, there is no industry aside from agriculture that has been dominated for the past several decades by opium poppy cultivation.
The centers of gravity for such a bombing campaign are more properly in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other gulf states who contribute large sums of Zakat to the cause of Jihad! Some of the Saudis and other gulf Muslims don’t even know what their money is spent on. They have no way to know if they are buying powdered milk and rice for poor refugees outside Khyber or ammunition and rifles for poor young Talibs crossing into Paktika to wage Jihad. The Pakistani government, or at least portions of it, knows very well what they are doing by harboring and collaborating with Al Qaeda and Taliban.
In order for aerial bombardment to be effective in Afghanistan we would have to do what General Sheridan succeeded in doing to the Shenandoah Valley during the U.S. Civil War, that is make it so barren it could no longer support a clever, committed bunch of irregular fighters intimately familiar with the local culture, resources and terrain. The only realistic way to do that is to follow E. Nigma’s Carthaginian Peace solution and turn the fertile valleys to radioactive glass.
If you targeted every nearby remote village where a Taliban “…shows his ugly head”, you will have Taliban fighters from rival tribes staging attacks exclusively in territory of their ancient tribal enemies.
What a great way to end a blood feud…permanently. Attack the Nasrani kuffar near a hated enemy tribal village, then NATO will bomb the evil tribesmen to smithereens! I wonder how many attacks will suddenly occur near Hazara villages? Two birds with one stone! Kill the infidel and a whole village of Shiite scum.
I agree with some of what you wrote, and sympathize with your frustration, but as was posted above, we aren’t going to do the necessary!
New ideas won’t help until we’re willing to do the necessary!
The reason why Pakistan is a mess is because of bad leadership. That’s all there is to it.
Look at economic figures for South Korea in the 1950’s. They were downright awful. Japan was once a land of rice paddies ruled by a stifling elitist ruling class. Malaysia was once a nightmare for capitalists. So was Indonesia. There was a time when Thailand’s main export industry was sex. In comparison to the rest of Asia in 1950, Pakistan was in pretty good shape. What a difference sixty years of mismanagement brings.
The fact is that Pakistan has put its capital into military armament at the expense of education and export industries. Pakistan could have become a major exporter of textiles, but Pakistan’s political leadership (especially its military) regarded getting big missiles and nuclear weapons as more important. Pakistan can’t really pay for the military it has; it relies upon subsidies from outside powers such as Saudi Arabia and even the hated United States. Pakistan did attempt to turn nuclear weapons technology into an export industry, but the United States has done everything within its power to shut down that sector of the Pakistani economy.
I think it’s a mistake to presume that Pakistanis are condemned to become a bunch of stupid illiterate monsters that will always support al-Qaeda. Most Pakistanis want better schools, better jobs, and better opportunities for their children. If America appeals the hopes of Pakistanis better than either the Pakistani political parties or its military, then we will have greater legitimacy in Pakistan than the Pakistani government.
We should consider building a few model schools in Pakistan that teach a model curriculum that would meet the approval of both ourselves and local notables. Meanwhile, there ought to be investigations into the rampant pedophilia in Saudi-funded madrassas. Pakistani families have a right to be concerned if the Taliban are sexually corrupting their young boys. It’s a scandal that the Pakistani government has not done more to stop the trafficking of Pakistani children for the sexual appetites of Arab sheikhs.
In order for aerial bombardment to be effective in Afghanistan we would have to do what General Sheridan succeeded in doing to the Shenandoah Valley during the U.S. Civil War, that is make it so barren it could no longer support a clever, committed bunch of irregular fighters intimately familiar with the local culture, resources and terrain. The only realistic way to do that is to follow E. Nigma’s Carthaginian Peace solution and turn the fertile valleys to radioactive glass.
Or give the fertile valleys over to Afghan peasants who are enemies of our enemies. Once it becomes clear that any population that supports the Taliban will lose its property, many Afghans will have a change of heart.
This is fiercely aggravating “Purge” Metzger’s hemorrhoids:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1661844120100216
Gov. Rick Perry, Attorney General Greg Abbott and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples today announced that the state is taking legal action in the U.S. Court of Appeals challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.
“Texas is aggressively seeking its future in alternative energy through incentives and innovation, not mandates and overreaching regulation,” Gov. Perry said. “The EPA’s misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ. This legal action is being taken to protect the Texas economy and the jobs that go with it, as well as defend Texas’ freedom to continue our successful environmental strategies free from federal overreach.”
(‘Purge’ decides to talk down to Texans, likening the guv’s action to sumthin’ th’ dumasses c’n mebbe unnerstan’)
“Governor Perry should win an Olympic medal for taking the environment downhill,” said Luke Metzger at Environment Texas. “Global warming is the greatest environmental threat facing Texas and the planet and Governor Perry’s obstructionism puts the state at great risk.”
“Hey, Elmer, lookee hyar, the dang guvner is gone dang ski’n rat cheer n’ th middle of a ENVARMENT criziz!”
>>”Aww, NAW! Rilly?”
“Yup!”
“Governor Perry filled up his Stetson with wet cow poop and then put it on his head and fandango’d clear acrost the daints floor in his Justin ridin’ boots,” said Luke Metzger at Environment Texas. “Global warming is the greatest environmental threat facing Texas and the planet and Governor Perry’s obstructionism puts the state at great risk.”
Buddy; You still up? Got a great quote fer ya. “If Dick Cheney is Darth Vader then Joe Biden is Jar Jar Brinks.”
Hie thyself over to townhall.com and see what Austin Bay has to say about the latest Afghanistan offensive. Might want to link it in here if you can. I’ve never learned that trick.
But it sure sounds like GEneral Mac is making a monkey out of the nuke em all crowd and the war can’t be won crowd as well.
Be back in a few.
Aside from the NYT’s blatant partisan actions, the real question is how long will Mallah Quetta remain in custody?
Will, he be traded for another prisoner? We the jail doors just swing open at in the middle of the night. Will his buds bust him out? Will Eric Holder try him in a criminal court in NY and then put an ankle bracelet on him?
http://townhall.com/columnists/AustinBay/2010/02/17/mcchrystals_afghan_offensive
Or just click here for brother dave’s recommended Austin Bay report of the new look Afghan ops.
Will read it too, dave –maybe not tonite …gettin’laaate
***
“If Dick Cheney is Darth Vader then Joe Biden is Jar Jar Brinks.”
…and Eric Holder is a Chiquita Banana!
***
“Hey joe, guess whose career is a link between the AQ of Arabia and the Narcoterrorists of South America?”
>>”Uh, the Attorney General of the United States of America?”
“Yup.”
>>”Damn.”
wws/37
This loan is just a stunt
Xactly my reading.
4 JOSH
And good on Obama today for approving the building of some new nuclear generators for the first time in 30 years.
……….
Whatta buncha cr*p. Plant Vogtle has been in operation for years … AND the application for the two new plants has been in the works for YEARS.
Obanocchio had NOTHING to do with it.
As a matter of fact, Southern Company got legalistic approval to start charging a surcharge to cover the ‘interest expense on the building loans’ or something like that, with a law passed last summer, IIRC.
We are paying for the plant that has not been built, that has not gotten its final approvals, and has yet to start construction.
I can’t believe Teh Wun is claiming the jobs there as something on which he even had a fleeting influence.
tom
tomw, why you can’t believe it? Teh Won does it all the time.
Years and years ago the Brookings institute gave the feds the recommendation to store radioactive waste in an old salt mine because in part it would be dry. Well the Feds selected a mine…….It was the only salt mine in the country that had an underground river running through it, which was why it was defunct….back to the drawing boards.
I recall that one of the reasons for closing Yucca Mtn was a finding that even though it is completely dry now, there was water flowing in the area about 12,000 years ago.
Yep, and 12,000 years ago there was an ice sheet over a mile thick sitting on top of what is now New York City. If those condiditions come back nuclear storage is going to be the least of our problems.
What’s maddening is to watch Reid and his allies now say that onsite storage in burial pits is the “best” option, when every scientific study ever done has always pointed out that this is the worst option possible of all concievable options. This is what anyone who says “transportaion is dangerous!” is advocating. Yes, transportation is dangerous, but it’s a short term, controllable danger. Leaving radioactive waste in 100 poorly secured sites around the country not only is more dangerous, but it’s a long term, ultimately uncontrollable danger.
Of course the anti Yucca Mtn advocates know this, which is why their true goal is the permanent destruction of all nuclear power capability in this country no matter the consequences.
On the topic – a good article yesterday on the multiple failures of one of the Green’s most beloved energy sources, wind power:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
“Klatuu barada nikto. Ash forgot the last word in Armies of Darkness, and see where that got him. Yes, symbols are important”
OK Wretchard, this is it, fess up you aren’t just one person but a cabal of genuises. You have managed to quote Clauswitz and (one of my favorite movies) Army of Darknes in the same thread. The biggest reason I read your work is the brilliant epoch-spanning connections you make.
Just how big is you library?
Alexis @54:
“Or give the fertile valleys over to Afghan peasants who are enemies of our enemies. Once it becomes clear that any population that supports the Taliban will lose its property, many Afghans will have a change of heart.”
Perhaps you are not aware that in much of the rural countryside in Afghanistan, and particularly in the mountainous East and entirely Pashtun South, the Taliban control pretty much everything aside from a few cities, towns, and well patrolled routes.
The vast majority of farmers cultivate poppy, not because it is their number one choice, although many farmers have at least some land that is fit to cultivate little else, they cultivate poppy because the Taliban came through and threatened them at gun point to do so or else…, or came through and “recruited” their son, or “married” their daughter and took her back to Pakistan.
When there is no effective government, and a group of young thugs with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades show up in your small village, you either cooperate, or die.
Over the last several decades the Afghan villagers learned the hard lesson English farmers learned at the hands of the Vikings. You and your fellow villagers can resist effectively, but you will lose men, and there always seem to be more fresh raiders.
The raiders are all at least half trained warriors, and act fearless, you and your fellows are mostly untrained farmers, and don’t want to die! You must tend your crops, flocks, business. The raiders from Pakistan (and neighboring rival tribes, your traditional enemy) can wait for the most oportune time to strike, when many men are away from the village. They have backing from Al Qaeda and deep pockets in Saudi and are buying their rice, meat and supplies with Riyals. They have no farming or business to take care of. Their concern is dominating you and your village so they can use you as support. Intervillage / Intertribal raiding is a long tradition in A-stan that both Taliban and Al Qaeda take advantage of. It’s all so much simpler and lifespan enhansing to just go along with the “Holy Warriors”, especially since what passes for government isn’t offering a much better alternative…
To this toxic mix, add Islam.
It doesn’t help when your village Imam tells you it is haram to kill Taliban and that it is Zakat to contribute food and clothing to support them. Islam dominates life in a manner difficult for most westerners to even imagine. The closest equivalents we have in the west are cults, and I don’t mean borderline fringe religions like Scientology…
Believe me, if victory was as easy as leaning on the locals to resist the Taliban, or even arming, training, and supporting (paying) the locals to resist the Taliban, they would’ve been defeated years ago, Hell, the Soviets would’ve defeated their predecesor Mujahadin without breaking a sweat!
It’s a very tough nut to crack. We’re fighting not only Islamic jihadist suicidal fanatics, but grinding poverty, no infrastructure, no concept of liberty or modern governance, widespread illiteracy and ignorance, and thousands of years of perhaps the most backwards and repressive culture on the planet. On top of this it’s on the opposite side of the world, in a land locked country…
And, as was said before, even new ideas are of little use when we lack the will to do the necessary!
Radioactive glass sounding better yet?
Anton, you even left out a reference – he was also quoting “The Day the Earth Stood Still” with that line!
(Good thing for the world that Patricia Neal *Didn’t* forget the last word!)
Armegeddon Rex:
Okay, so import Chinese peasants. China has twenty million young men with no prospect of marriage.
If the Taliban thoroughly control the countryside, that makes our strategy even easier. The strategy I’m proposing worked like a charm during the Blackhawk War. Once the countryside gets settled by an armed peasantry with a vested interest in defeating the people whose lost territory they presently occupy, the Taliban will have a new adversary.
If fertile valleys get turned into glass, then what? If our enemies control the battlefield, they still control the battlefield, no matter how bombed out it is. Look, I don’t really care who controls Afghanistan so long as it isn’t our enemies. We need people who are willing to hold the territory we take away from our enemies and I don’t care who they are so long as they seek the deaths of our enemies.
Alexis @68:
Your propsal to bring in Chinese, ethnic Han I assume, to displace the Pashtun tribesmen would constitute ethnic cleansing. SHAME ON YOU!!! It just might work if proper support were provided.
The Taliban travel light. Most of their supplies are carried, some by mule, but mostly on their backs. In order to operate effectively they must get food and shelter from the locals for days and days if they are walking to targets near Kabul or Khandahar.
If you remove all the Pashtun men and replace them with hostile trigger happy Chinese, or remove the locals and contaminate the fertile valleys with radioactivity and destroy all the farms and structures, either way, the Taliban will no longer be able to operate effectively. Either method will stop them in their tracks.
The difference is that Obamassiah is planning on getting rid of a bunch of our warheads anyway, and they’re already paid for. Using them would cost little compared to one months operations in A-stan. For the cost of two or three months operations we could probably buy out and relocate nearly all the tribesmen before we vaporize their former homes and poppy fields.
Who would pay to relocate the Chinese there? The PRC government has better things to do with its money at the moment and already has Muslim problems in their West. They are largely dependent upon Mideast crude oil to grease the wheels of their economy.
Perhaps we could save money by hiring, equiping and supplying 500,000 Han Chinese as mercenaries to go in and take care of the Pashtun problem. You already proposed ethnic cleansing, so let’s just add the other component of real war…genocide! Then they could stay if they wanted. They’d get wives and land. We’d get rid of the Afghani Taliban, but starts a new war between the Han invaders and Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.
Why stop in A-Stan? To really solve this problem all the Pashtuns must go. Like Patton in central Germany in the spring of 1945. The army would already be there, just keep heading East until the Northwest Frontier Province and other ungoverned parts of Pakistan became defacto Chinese colonies!
Win, win for the U.S., and perhaps for the rest of the world as well.
Then who’s going to provide the PRC with petroleum when the gulf nations cut off their supply following such a venture, or do we just encourage the PRC to send another 500,000 west and clean up the Shiite in Iran as well?
This has possibilities. If you don’t mind wholesale, old-school ethnic cleansing and genocide, and empowering China to an extent not seen since the days of the Great Khan, and if the PRC will go along with it all, we may have come up with a workable solution to the A-stan problem.
But why expand Chinese influence like that when we may end up fighting them and dying by the thousands in a few years?
If we have the guts to adopt those tried and proven strategies, we can win in A-stan & western P-stan in a year or less. There are minerals and potential hydro electric power there that U.S. corporations would be happy to exploit if the price and risks were right. We could disappear the Pashtun men, go Roman on them and provide land grants to honorably retired U.S. military folks. I think the plan would meet with Whiskey’s approval and feminists everywhere. Perhaps the first time they ever agreed on anything. The deserving U.S. soldiers could find women who appreciate them, and the Pashtun women find men who might treat them like human beings instead of two legged goats.
What about Iran? If we’re going to advocate old-school solutions to clean up messes let’s take care of them, where in many ways the whole mess started. We already blew it by not seizing and exploiting all those Iraqi oil resources when we had the chance. Once A-stan and P-stan are pacified, why not seize the Iranian oil fields and really exchange some blood for oil this time? It’d be a much better deal than the U.S. has received so far.
Nah, never happen! Instead we’ll wait until one or more of our city centers is reduced to a crater and then do the necessary…
I propose to fight our wars by following the Geneva Conventions to the letter.
It is perfectly appropriate in war to confiscate property of enemy fighters or any persons giving aid or comfort to the enemy.
It is essentially immaterial to me what the ethnicity of any recipient of confiscated property happens to be. If there happens to be good tactical reason to regard a proposed recipient to be less than inclined to fight on our side to hold strategic territory against enemy forces, it may be necessary to geographically expand one’s search for possible recipients of confiscated property.
If there are any Pushtuns who have conclusively shown they are willing and able to fight against our enemies, they should not be discriminated against in the receipt of confiscated property. The burden of proof belongs to any relative, up to the level of third cousin, of any enemy partisan to prove that he or she actively opposes any and all activities of enemy forces.
I am proposing to win against our enemies by using ethics as a weapon on our side. Unlike our enemies, we must not commit “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide”, which also means that we must not allow our enemies to hide behind false accusations of “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” in order to undermine our war effort. Our concern is with winning this war. If, for whatever reason, every Pushtun in a particular region were to voluntarily decide to support the Taliban, it is not our fault if distribution of their property to their enemies would have an inadvertent effect of shifting the ethnographic balance of that region. Such blame would accrue strictly to the Taliban itself.
Alexis @70:
I’m glad you want us to wage war in accordance with our obligations under the Geneva Conventions. I agree with you, but I think I should bring up several points.
It is no more valid for us today to confiscate some Pashtun tribesmens property or land because they’ve been forced to grow crops for or to feed the Taliban than it was for our troops to burn down villages in Vietnam that collaborated with the Viet Cong. Both the Taliban and VC had the weapons and the villagers really had no effective means to resist organized large scale banditry.
Under the Geneva Conventions, people on a battlefield with military weapons and no uniform are illegal combatants and are assumed to be brigands or worse. They should be executed on the spot to encourage civilians to refrain from banditry and to refrain from becoming illegal combatants. It is also supposed to ensure enemy soldiers don’t break the rules resulting in the other side targeting everyone since combatants can no longer be distinguished from non-combatants. How closely do you think we should stick to this provision?
The Geneva Conventions only apply to nations at war with one another. Did the U.S. or NATO declare war on Afghanistan? On the Taliban? On Al Qaeda? Did they declare war upon the U.S.? Al Qaeda certainly declared war upon us if Osama Bin Laden was an authorized spokesman. Under U.S. law, wars are declared by congress. Lawyers can debate about the congressional authorization passed after 9/11, but it was not a declaration of war. I’m doubtful the Geneva Conventions even apply in this extended military expedition.
The Geneva Conventions apply between signatories to these conventions. The Taliban never signed them. Al Qaeda never signed them. The government of Afghanistan at the time our expedition began there hadn’t signed them. Please don’t argue that any new national government is obligated by treaties signed by prior violently overthrown governments. That’s hogwash and anyone with any intellectual honesty will admit as much.
Both the Taliban and Al Qaeda have repeatedly violated the conventions and the rules of land warfare. They are 21st century Bandits & Pirates. They deserve death everywhere we find them.
Armageddon Rex:
I agree with you that the Taliban/Qaeda are unlawful combatants. The technical term for them is “hostis humani generis” – enemies of humanity.
We are presently in a constitutional crisis. Congress did not technically declare war upon those responsible for the outrages of September 11. However, by applying the protections of the Geneva Conventions to prisoners from al-Qaeda, the Supreme Court effectively declared war. So, the United States is presently not at war for legislative purposes but is at war for judicial purposes. And now, we have a President who regards himself as an expert in constitutional law, and he must decide whether to obey the laws of the legislative branch or the legal rulings of the judicial branch.
I think Congress must decide our legal status in war. I do not think the Constitution gives our Supreme Court the authority to declare war.
Will Congress assert itself?
The Long War Journal is reporting a string of High Value Targets being rounded up by Pakistan — with fresh memories of Taliban assaults in Rawalpindi still in the Army’s mind.
Rather than coming in singles and doubles — the round-up at first blush appears sweeping.
Sunni Party will drop out of next month’s election.
BAGHDAD – The Sunni wing of Iraq’s leading nonsectarian political coalition said Saturday it will drop out of next month’s election as a result of alleged Iranian influence on a Shiite-led vetting panel that blacklisted hundreds of candidates.
When 7 CIA agents were killed in Khost, Afghanistan, I thought that we’d have no response. Now? You know, I’m not so sure? I don’t think this is “pakistani cooperation” so much as FEAR. Fear that the CIA will come after them. So they’ve offered up “candy.”
Mark@3
that quote is a good find, thanks!