Quiet Progress in Afghanistan

A tonic to the general cries of doom and gloom in the graveyard of empires: (H/T: Chequerboard)

The United Nations Security Council, who has issued almost 40 quarterly reports on the situation in Afghanistan since 2001, most recently reported in March that "the number of districts under insurgent control has decreased.… As a result of the increased tempo of security operations in northern and western provinces, an increasing number of anti-Government elements are seeking to join local reintegration programs.… In Kabul, the increasingly effective Afghan national security forces continue to limit insurgent attacks."

If current trends continue, the Invincibility of Insurgency will take another, hopefully final, blow.

It's Funny Cause It's True...

Stacey McCain reveals the true info source behind the Bin Laden Raid.

When You Kill a King, You Do It in Front of Everybody.

Look, I was kidding about displaying Bin Laden's corpse to the four corners of the realm. We didn't need to mount his head on the Pentagon. But burial at sea without showing that we have the body? That's just dumb. That throws away all the propaganda value of killing him.

And handled with accordance to Islamic tradition and practice? WHY? Who that would be offended by our killing him could possibly be mollified by that? Again, not that we had to piss on it or bury it face down in a vat of pig's blood, but seriously? What do we gain by that?

Just when I was prepared to give Obama a thumb's up, too.

On the other hand, the claim that he was hiding behind women? Only to be expected. But now our enemies won't believe us.

Thoughts on Bin Laden

1. It's obviously true and totally irrelevant that Al Qaeda and the Taliban will continue just fine in his absence, just as Iraq continued bloodily after Saddam was caught and hung. It matters not. This man declared war on us, and now he is fodder for worms. The message is clear: you may run, and you may hide, and the long years may seem to stretch on, but one day you will turn around, and one of ours will be behind you, and he will put two in the back of your head, and we will take your gangly corpse and display it to the four corners of the realm. Sleep tight.
2. Teleprompter hiccups aside, Obama looked presidential last night. He's milking this win for his own political capital, and there's no reason he shouldn't. As he said, he gave the order, and it redounds to the Commander-in-Chief's credit. Democrats are going to use this as evidence that The Shadow Way, the Non-Invasion Way, is the better way to defeat terror. After all, Bush missed Bin Laden for eight years, and Obama got him in two. But there's no way we would have done so without the assets that Bush put in country. Obama relentlessly praised the men and women, military and intelligence, who made this happen. We should not pretend that they started in January 2009, whatever Double Secret Probation that the President ordered then.
3. On a religious note, I don't really care all that much about Bin Laden's Final Judgment. If he should be barking in Hell, so be it. If I should run into him in Purgatory, and we stare dumb-foundedly at one another as the last of our wickedness is scorched away from us, so be it. Bin Laden's death means that he is no longer a problem for me and my countrymen. That is enough. The Almighty has His own purposes.

I Guess It's Finally Over, Over There...

The Last Doughboy has rejoined the rest of his comrades. Frank Buckles was an ambulance driver in the Great War, and all of 16 years old in 1917. His fondest wish: to restore the DC War Memorial, get a monument for the AEF, and to be buried by General Pershing.

"It has long been my father's wish to be buried in Arlington, in the same cemetery that holds his beloved General Pershing," Flanagan wrote as she began to prepare for the inevitable in a letter she sent to home-state U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

Here's hoping the Defense Department can make that happen. He ended up involved the the second war as well.

Buckles, after World War I ended, took up a career as a ship's officer on merchant vessels. He was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II and held prisoner of war for more than three years before he was freed by U.S. troops.

That sounds like more than one's fair share of bloodshed and toil. RIP.

UPDATE: As of now, the only living veterans of WWI are subjects of Queen Elizabeth: a British Woman and an Australian Man.

Good Morning, Mr. Taliban. You are Dead.

 

The XM25 allows Soldiers to engage defilade targets -- those behind a barrier, protected from oncoming weapons fire. The XM25 measures the distance to the enemy's protective barrier, and can then program the round to detonate a user-adjustable distance past that -- allowing Soldiers to put an air-bursting round directly above the enemy's head, inside their protected area. 

 We're just beta-testing the things now.

Walter Russel Mead on Sun Tzu

Since I mentioned it, here's an example of the kind of argument that only military historians make, and only conservative military historians at that:

The Art of War, a book which has inspired Chinese emperors, Japanese shoguns, Napoleon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, does not just subvert conventional morality. It is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures.

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China. The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us. There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy. When there is a problem — a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces — somebody must have made an obvious mistake. They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique. We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety.

We believe in reason, and reason is predictable. We claim that the world was made by forces which we can a) understand, and b) harness. This is a matter of gospel in the modern world. A conservatives, faced with an intractable problem which flies in the face of the creed, shrugs his shoulders and says, "it is what it is." A progressive cannot, for that is giving up on those who deserve his aid, and that is the sin by which the world is corrupted.

Owen Honors Pooped in the Punch Bowl. End of Story.

A good few wingnuts are up in arms over the fall of Owen Honors, the Captain of the USS Enterprise, who was a bit too Kirk for his own good. Here's Other McCain:

Just to be clear about the rules of the New Navy in the post-DADT era: An admiral can dress in drag and march in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, but any sailor who makes a wisecrack about such behavior will be drummed out of the service.

And Ace of Spades:

Honors is being hung out to dry for something that was either fine with his then superiors or which he was duly critiqued for and allowed to move on in his career. Either way, this is ex post facto outrage and the senior leadership of the Navy has simply thrown a dedicated and decorated officer to the wolves.

I respect their point of view, but I'm not sure I share it. There is no line of work in which you can make raunchy videos with your co-workers and subordinates and not get fired for it if it should come to light and embarass the higher-ups. Everybody blows off steam. Bosses are inclined to overlook blowing off steam, up to the point when it causes the public to question the judgement of the organization.

If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party, you might get away with it, depending on how funny everyone thinks it is. If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party and the pictures end up on Facebook, you're going to get fired, no matter how hard the boss laughed at the time.

Law and War are Not the Same

Bush understood this idea, and so, by some appearances, does Obama. But he has not been permitted to admit his understanding by his base. In the New York Post, Robert Turner of the Center for National Security Law lets the cat out of the bag:

"You keep using that Word. I do not think that word means what you think it means."

Now it's possible that Tom Hanks intended something other than to say our war against Japan was motivated entirely by racism and terror (at about the 3:35 mark), but frankly the segment is so fluffy that one can read anything into it (via Big Hollywood):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lick 'Em Tommorrow.

General David Petraeus quoting Ulysses S. Grant in the WaPo's On Leadership Video Series:



That's one of my favorite lines from the Civil War. It's vintage Grant, pure unperturbability in the face of chaos. Nor was it bravado: he turned his army right around the next morning and handed the rebels their ass, shoving them out of West Tennessee for the remainder of the war and establishing a safe base of operations against Vicksburg and the rest of the Western Theater. The last thing the Confederates were expecting to see on the morning of April 7, after knocking the Yankees around like tenpins the previous day, was to see those same Yankees pushing after them, full of fight. Not even Lee's masterful display at Chancellorsville the following year beats Shiloh for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

And that is a lesson about war that seems to need re-learning with every passing generation: it's not over until it's over. Afghanistan wasn't over in '03; Iraq wasn't over in '07. They're never over until one side stops fighting.

Since It's So Obvious that Iraq = Vietnam...

Let's look at the results of pulling out of that war. Lawrence Haas does, and look what he discovers:

In 1975, a Democratic Congress cut off funds for the U.S. effort in Vietnam. The public, disillusioned over Vietnam and Watergate, elected Jimmy Carter, who promised honesty and applauded the end of “our irrational fear of Communism.”

As America turned inward in the late 1970s, enemies sensed our vulnerability and dangers mounted. The fear of communism was not so irrational after all. In Ethiopia, Angola, Rhodesia and elsewhere, the Soviet Union or Cuba worked to stoke Third World revolution. The Soviets more openly laid bare their expansionist agenda in late 1979 by invading Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979 toppled a staunch U.S. ally. The student seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, leading to a 444-day hostage crisis, painted a picture of American impotence.

All of which resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan and a new belligerent American foreign policy, which further institutionalized the belief that Republicans are the hawk party and Democrats the dove party. Note as well the connection between the post-Vietnam era and the rise of current enemies.

The fact that this is penned by Gore's former communications director gives me hope that someone on the other side of the aisle appreciates that the post-Iraq situation will need to be handled by something other than blaming Bush for all our troubles. As I've recently been bothering the Commisar at Politburo Diktat, a conservative who's changed his mind about Iraq, I've been waiting six years for the Democrats and the Left to come up with alternative strategies to defeat the jihadis. So far, zilch. If that changes, I'll be the first to applaud it, and the courage of any Democrats to push against their extremists in doing so.

The Current State of Missile Defense

Austin Bay writes in TCS DAily that we have the a missile defense system, even if thin and still emerging. This is good because a) North Korea and Iran won't really be able to threaten us, and b) they won't be able to threaten our allies, either.

I perceive a few downsides, however:

1. The system isn't flawless. This means that political pressure from the anti-ABM crowd could still dismantle or delay it past the point of usefulness.

2. Even if a robust system is developed, the result could be a strengthening rather than a weakening of the desire to hunt terrorists abroad, a false safety, if you will.

3. It does nothing to defend against a "suitcase-nuke" scenario, which, while it might not be as plausible as it once seemed, is by no means beyond the bounds of plausibility. Having an effective missile defense will, paradoxically, increase rather than decrease the need to stay on top of international terrorists, to hunt them down and damage the states that protect them, even as it potentially saps the will to do so.

Doubtless dKos has the answers to all of these.

When in Washington, Do as The Romans Do...

The frightening idea of this post on the SanAntonio Express-News (HT: Austin Bay) is NOT that a good man with experience overhauling intel agencies could possibly be denied his post because of partisan politics. That's a great big So-What-Else-Is-New. No, the scary bit is the following line (italics my own):

But the same sloppy thinking, mindless stereotypes and casual acceptance of second-class citizenship that once marked American race relations all now reign unchallenged whenever the military class appears to be getting a little uppity. Fact is, there is a gap — already miles-wide and growing every day — between the American people and their highly professional military.

Let us admit that I am paranoid. Let us admit that I often look for evidence for my Pet Theory that America is Ancient Rome with computers. But surely it can't be just me who blanches when faced with the possibility of open hostility between the "military class" (a very unpleasant term) and the political leadership.

And oh, sure, for the nonce the mystique of the serving professional, the guardian of the Constitution who is its servant, not its master continues to have a powerful hold on the military, as does the fact that service is honored in modern culture, not military glory. But if this "gap" continues to grow, if the military begins to believe itself superior to the civilian leadership not just in ability, but morally, too, then this bodes not well for the civilian leadership. And that bodes not well for us. Just because I do not wish to see America become the next France doesn't mean I care to see it become the next Brazil, either.

Mean Girls, Boo Hoo

Lemme just say, as an educator and as a male, that this is a bunch of bunk. School biased in favor of girls? Boys need to be encouraged more? Maybe, maybe. But maybe the boys simply need to get off their dead arses and perform. It's high school, for Faber's sake. And public high school at that. How hard can it be?

Look, I've long been of the opinion that some of the things they do to boost girls' self-esteem would be counter-productive. Self-esteem boosting usually is. In fact, if I had to pick one thing that schools shouldn't bother about, that would be it. Encourage kids, yes. Encourage groups to get all excited about their groupiness, no. Because the end result of shaping boys' esteem isn't going to be improved scores, but excused pathologies. "You don't understand, I'm a guy. I ain't got time for none of that note-taking, book-reading stuff! I'm a rebel! I go where the wind takes me!" Have we really gone, over the course of a century, from "Women cannot think nor write," to its gender opposite?

Anyone who thinks that teenage girls have an easier time sitting still and paying attention than teenage boys has never ever taught teenage girls. Teenage girls never shut up, whine when disciplined, and act as though the world revolves around the particular ephemera they find fascinating. They only perform if they come from families that expect it from them. The same is true for boys.

Maybe it's me, but I've rather enjoyed not belonging to a Designated Victim Group. It meant I had no one to excuse my failures, and conversely, no one to put an asterisk next to my successes, such as they are. That's the creed that millions of men across the country live by: my life, my choices, my results. I really don't care to be turned into another sniveling worm under the lash of the Designated Oppressor.

Because in the end, boys, there's really nothing less manly than whimpering "the girls made me feel bad about myself." Should young gentlemen get outlets for their restless energy. Yes. Should we bring back Dodgeball? Yes. Should we dispense with all the gender-specific ego-encouraging? Yes, yes, YES.

The only way to have sanity in education is to insist on standards and keep to them, and stop making excuses for those who aren't interested. If boys don't wanna learn, indeed resist learning, maybe we should check what signals they're getting about learning from the outside culture.

I begin to wonder if reading books hasn't become a "girl thing" among boys, as it's become a "white thing" in the inner city. Do guys talk about literature and the arts with other guys? 'Course not, only gay guys do that, right? What do men talk about? Sports, music, cars, "guy stuff." Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of guy stuff. But you shouldn't be thought odd because you can discourse cleverly on Neo-expressionist paintings or tell a Shakespearean from a Petrarchan sonnet (and conversely, all the guys who can do that need to stop acting as though being downwind of an understanding of the nickel defense will rob them of their souls). But that notion of male intellect is enforced by just about everything you see in popular culture. Think that message doesn't get through to boys, while schools are saying "You go!" to to the girls?

It's really very simple. When the culture values and promotes intelligent manliness, we'll have some. Until then, enjoy the perfumed air of college graduations.

If We're Going to Do This...

....we would do well to consider the likely consequences. As far as I can determine, they fall along these lines:

1. Possible Iranian/Pan-Arab Military Attack on Israel. I don't know that this is very likely, but it is a possibility. If Saddam's WMD's actually existed in large quantities and actually made it to Syria, this is the kind of move the Baathists and others will be wanting. Scuds flying at Tel Aviv in revenge for Israeli surgical strikes into Iran are not beyond the bounds of possibility. A weakened Hassad may be unable to restrain the outbreak of war. And even if Syria doesn't launch, Iran might. Missiles flying back and forth across the MidEast could lead in a variety of places.

2. Protests/Riots/Blowback in Iraq. The extent of Iraqi sentiments regarding Israel have not, to my knowledge, been closely quantified. Nor, for that matter, have their sentiments regarding a nuclear Iran. Will they be outraged as Israeli cruise missiles flying over their airspace? Will they officially protest and cover their glee? Will they not care? It's something we should know.

3. Collapse of the Mullarchy. Military embarrassment is often the father of Revolution for unpopular regimes. So it was for Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, etc. A coup by the military against the "too-soft" regime might spin out of control. But we've been hoping that the people will throw off the Islamic state for some time, and so far the state has demonstrated the will to survive.

4. Failure. Iran's weapons facilities won't be as easy to take out as Iraq's was in 1981. Several of them are spread throughout the country, and I'm sure that several of them are near enough to civilian areas as to be uncomfortable. The Israelis might launch a strike and accomplish nothing but stirring the hornet's nest.

It would be nice to see some commentary along this line. Perhaps Belmont Club would be interested.

And the Military Recruiting Goals are...

...being met.

And will the earlier hysteria about recruitment and the Clear and Troubling message this sends about Mr. Bush's War be now redacted to reflect this new data? Of course not. You could grow old waiting for the WaPo to mention these numbers unless it finds a datum that it can make sound Controversial (perhaps there will be too many Hispanics or not enough left-handed people or something).

You know this. I know this. Intellectually honest people on the Left will admit this as well. So whence the determination that the WaPo or the NYT or the LAT or CNN or ABC, NBC, CBS, etc., are filled with objective professional journalists while the right-wing blogs and FoxNews are biased little cells of distortion?

I've said it before and will continue to say it: the pretense of objectivity must be dropped.

So What Would You Say it Is...You DO Here?

Do we have NO counter-intelligence capability? Are we completely unable to pick up enemy spies as the come in and hack into our main weapons systems? Is anyone minding the *expletive* store? What the *expletive* does the CIA do all day?

Oh, that's right. They send people to Niger. Or they don't. Or they do. Or...


UPDATEReuel Marc Gerecht, a former spook, reams his old company a new one.

It Takes Courage to be Cowardly (A Zombie Post from 2005)

[I really need to check the drafts more often. I had no idea this was here.]

Today's piece at the Belmont club reminded me of Monty Python.

Specifically, the following passage that Wretchard exerpts from Paul Berman's book Terror and Liberalism:

Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror ... But mostly they remembered the First World War ... They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. ... And, having analyzed the German scene in that manner, the anti-war Socialists concluded that Hitler and the Nazis, in railing against the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles, did make some legitimate arguments ... Why not look for ways to conciliate the outraged German people and, in that way, to conciliate the Nazis? ...

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they ... regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations-the truest danger facing France.

...made me think of this bit of silliness posted on the Official Monty Python Web Site (www.pythonline.com). More specifically, it made me think of this passage:

And why ? For one reason only, that cowardice is badly thought of. Now I would put it another way. I would say it is badly underrated. Dr. Johnson asserted that 'Mutual Cowardice keeps us in peace'. I believe it could, that this fundamentally realistic behaviour could be a great force for social cohesion. And I suggest that the reason why there is so much more internecine behaviour within the human species than within any other species of animals is because cowardice has got itself a bad name.

Man is a social animal. So let us look at the behaviour of other social animals. Take the wolf - he lives in a pack. Like man he is a hunter. Now, whenever a conflict breaks out between two members of a pack, either wolf can bring it to an immediate halt by making a ritual act of submission, by offering the side of his neck, his most vulnerable part, to his opponent. This immediately stops his opponent's aggressive behaviour. What a sensible system ! No feeling of shame for the submittor. Just peace.

True courage, goes the argument, lies in submission. This is not a new idea, being found, in various forms, in both Christianity and Islam. And to a degree, it has merit. It would indeed be a better world if we all could practice acceptance without feeling shame. To a certain extent, we already do. Submission to some form established authority is sine qua non of a lawful society.

But submission hasn't seemed to have been applied to war. Why not? Why don't weaker states simply accept the rule of stronger ones? Give them what they want? Why doesn't it work?

They Used to Fight Crusaders on Their Own Turf...

It appears that al Qaeda has decided to spend the summer peppering Europe in much the same way it's allies have been peppering Iraq and Israel: that is, blowing things up and killing civilians.

So far, so typical, although it gives something in the way of truth to those who would argue that the Iraq and Afghan wars haven't made us all that safer. But I wonder why they've decided to try this now. Surely, London, and many other important European cities have been pretty well infiltrated by those professing terrorist and Islamist ideologies. What made them wait?

Those that claimed credit for the bombing were quick to apply "linkage," as the saying goes, to Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming that "all the Crusader governments" will face similar bombings if they do not leave Iraq and Afghanistan.

Further grist for the anti-war mill, it would seem, along the lines of the "blowback" argument. Yet still I wonder, why now? The Counter-Terrorism Blog suggests that this "Secret al-Qaeda" is so only in name, an inspired group of emigrant malcontents rather than an actual cell bearing orders from bin Laden. If so, this may well have been triggered by yesterday's announcement of the location of the 2012 Olympics as by anything in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, we ought well be prepared for anything. The tempo of attacks might increase, or not, as the summer goes. But of one thing we should be sure. The fanatics have brought this war, and intend to fight it on their terms. To respond to them, many options may feasibly be employed, excepting one. We must give them nothing. They are not reasonable men, and their terms for peace will never be ones under which we can live.