On Leaving Afghanistan

Generally, as kind of a default, I'm in favor of going out of our way to help when a fledgling new government is trying to stand up a working democracy.

But no matter who you are, there's always a couple of problems with that, and especially so when you're the dominant power on the planet:

1) We can't be everybody's guardian - everybody's mentoring uncle. We have to choose our projects a lot more wisely, and then do it a lot better.

2) Our good intentions are usually worth exactly diddly-shit when there are assholes like Dick Cheney and Tom Cotton in on the deal - guys who wear The Helper mask so it's hard to recognize them as The Conquerors they truly want to be - so we'll always draw some harsh criticism for throwing our shit around.

 

Anyway, here's a piece from Slate lining it out pretty well.

We Now Know Why Biden Was in a Hurry to Exit Afghanistan

He made several missteps, but on the big picture, he was right.

There was a moment in Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when it became clear why President Joe Biden decided to get the troops out of there as quickly as possible.

It came when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why he and the other chiefs—the top officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—all agreed that we needed to pull out by Aug. 31. The Doha agreement, which President Donald Trump had signed with the Taliban in early 2020 (with no participation by the Afghan government), required a total withdrawal of foreign forces. If U.S. troops had stayed beyond August, Milley said, the Taliban would have resumed the fighting, and, in order to stave off the attacks, “we would have needed 30,000 troops” and would have suffered “many casualties.”

And yet, as Milley also testified on Tuesday, he, the chiefs, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and other military officers advised Biden to keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 deadline. The difference is that those troops wouldn’t be attached to any “military mission.” Instead, they would “transition” to a “diplomatic mission.”

However, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban would have observed the semantic distinction. In their eyes, 2,500 U.S. troops would be seen as 2,500 U.S. troops, regardless of whether their mission was officially said to be “military” or “diplomatic.” Therefore, the Taliban would resume fighting, as Milley said they would, and Biden would then have been faced with a horrendous choice—to pull out while under attack or send in another 30,000 troops.

Some historical-psychological perspective is worth noting. In the first nine months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the generals were pushing for a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan—an increase of 40,000 troops—and a shift to a counterinsurgency (aka “nation-building”) strategy. Biden, who was then vice president, was alone in suggesting an increase of just 10,000 troops, to be used solely for training the Afghan army and for fighting terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border. As Obama recalls in his memoir, Biden urged the new and relatively inexperienced president not to be “boxed in” by the generals. Give them 40,000 troops now, and in 18 months, they’ll say they need another 40,000 to win the war. As Obama later acknowledged, Biden was right.

And so, as Milley was advising Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, even while acknowledging that another 30,000 might be needed if the Taliban resumed fighting, it’s easy to imagine Biden thinking, “They’re trying to box me in, just like they did before, just like they’ve always done since the Vietnam War,” which was raging when Biden first entered the Senate in 1973 and has shaped his views on war and peace ever since.

Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, both acknowledged at the hearing that the U.S. military was flying blind through much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. The officers of the day tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making them too dependent on U.S. technology and support, so that once we withdrew, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and to the corrosive effects of the Afghan government’s corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So, Biden might well have been thinking, why should he pay attention to anything these guys had to say on the war in Afghanistan, which they’ve been wrong about from the very beginning?

Biden made several missteps, some of them disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Most of all, he should have pulled out all the spies, contractors, U.S. citizens, and Afghan helpers before pulling out all the troops. But on the big picture, he was right, and the generals, as they now grudgingly admit, were wrong.

And that last bit is the operative principle - generals make the plans, but the civilian command authority makes the decisions.

Meet The New Boss

Nobody wins a war. The "winner" is whoever can make a credible claim that they lost the least - or maybe that they weren't the ones who quit first - or maybe it's just that they're the cockroaches that managed merely to survive the conflagration.

It's stupid and wasteful and we have to figure out how to stop doing that shit.

AP:

One of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law when they last ruled Afghanistan said the hard-line movement will once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, though perhaps not in public.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi dismissed outrage over the Taliban’s executions in the past, which sometimes took place in front of crowds at a stadium, and he warned the world against interfering with Afghanistan’s new rulers.

“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi told The Associated Press, speaking in Kabul. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”

Since the Taliban overran Kabul on Aug. 15 and seized control of the country, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will re-create their harsh rule of the late 1990s. Turabi’s comments pointed to how the group’s leaders remain entrenched in a deeply conservative, hard-line worldview, even if they are embracing technological changes, like video and mobile phones.

Turabi, now in his early 60s, was justice minister and head of the so-called Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — effectively, the religious police — during the Taliban’s previous rule.

At that time, the world denounced the Taliban’s punishments, which took place in Kabul’s sports stadium or on the grounds of the sprawling Eid Gah mosque, often attended by hundreds of Afghan men.

Executions of convicted murderers were usually by a single shot to the head, carried out by the victim’s family, who had the option of accepting “blood money” and allowing the culprit to live. For convicted thieves, the punishment was amputation of a hand. For those convicted of highway robbery, a hand and a foot were amputated.

Trials and convictions were rarely public and the judiciary was weighted in favor of Islamic clerics, whose knowledge of the law was limited to religious injunctions.

Turabi said that this time, judges — including women — would adjudicate cases, but the foundation of Afghanistan’s laws will be the Quran. He said the same punishments would be revived.

“Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” he said, saying it had a deterrent effect. He said the Cabinet was studying whether to do punishments in public and will “develop a policy.”

In recent days in Kabul, Taliban fighters have revived a punishment they commonly used in the past — public shaming of men accused of small-time theft.

On at least two occasions in the last week, Kabul men have been packed into the back of a pickup truck, their hands tied, and were paraded around to humiliate them. In one case, their faces were painted to identify them as thieves. In the other, stale bread was hung from their necks or stuffed in their mouth. It wasn’t immediately clear what their crimes were.

Wearing a white turban and a bushy, unkempt white beard, the stocky Turabi limped slightly on his artificial leg. He lost a leg and one eye during fighting with Soviet troops in the 1980s.

Under the new Taliban government, he is in charge of prisons. He is among a number of Taliban leaders, including members of the all-male interim Cabinet, who are on a United Nations sanctions list.

During the previous Taliban rule, he was one of the group’s most ferocious and uncompromising enforcers. When the Taliban took power in 1996, one of his first acts was to scream at a woman journalist, demanding she leave a room of men, and to then deal a powerful slap in the face of a man who objected.

Turabi was notorious for ripping music tapes from cars, stringing up hundreds of meters of destroyed cassettes in trees and signposts. He demanded men wear turbans in all government offices and his minions routinely beat men whose beards had been trimmed. Sports were banned, and Turabi’s legion of enforcers forced men to the mosque for prayers five times daily.

In this week’s interview with the AP, Turabi spoke to a woman journalist.

“We are changed from the past,” he said.

He said now the Taliban would allow television, mobile phones, photos and video “because this is the necessity of the people, and we are serious about it.” He suggested that the Taliban saw the media as a way to spread their message. “Now we know instead of reaching just hundreds, we can reach millions,” he said. He added that if punishments are made public, then people may be allowed to video or take photos to spread the deterrent effect.

The U.S. and its allies have been trying to use the threat of isolation — and the economic damage that would result from it — to pressure the Taliban to moderate their rule and give other factions, minorities and women a place in power.

But Turabi dismissed criticism over the previous Taliban rule, arguing that it had succeeded in bringing stability. “We had complete safety in every part of the country,” he said of the late 1990s.

Even as Kabul residents express fear over their new Taliban rulers, some acknowledge grudgingly that the capital has already become safer in just the past month. Before the Taliban takeover, bands of thieves roamed the streets, and relentless crime had driven most people off the streets after dark.

“It’s not a good thing to see these people being shamed in public, but it stops the criminals because when people see it, they think ‘I don’t want that to be me,’” said Amaan, a storeowner in the center of Kabul. He asked to be identified by just one name.

Another shopkeeper said it was a violation of human rights but that he was also happy he can open his store after dark.

The "End" Of A War - Again - Still - Whatever

We're always left with that one big bromide - "Don't blame the warrior for the war".

But in a country that beats its chest celebrating the super macho rugged individualist making his own way and holding himself accountable ultimately and solely to himself, I can only reiterate the one basic truth:

You don't have much of a war

if nobody shows up to fight.

Here's WaPo, choosing an Architecture Critic to sum up the platitudes for us. And while he does manage to hit on a coupla decent points, this piece (and the jillion others that will come out over the next god-knows-how-many-years) sounds a little like "never again", but actually begins the process that will make sure we'll be suckered right back into it next time, because it gives us a way to let ourselves off the hook by pretending we can be philosophical about the monumental multi-level waste of war.

Philip Kennicott:

The last U.S. soldier to board a military plane out of Kabul on Tuesday was actually a general, Army Maj. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. He is seen in several widely circulated images taken in the final moments of the U.S. occupation, including one in which he strides up the ramp of a waiting C-17 military transport plane. He is rendered in the monochromatic green of a night-vision scope, a solitary figure, alone for a moment on hostile ground. Behind him, a few lights still shine at the Kabul airport, now controlled by the Taliban.

This is the end of a 20-year war. That’s the meaning ascribed to this powerful but deeply fraught image, which has the potential to do lasting damage if we can’t separate its truth from its mythological power.

The truth of the image, as far as we know it, is precise but limited. While he may have been wearing “the last boots on the ground” by the definition of some journalists and politicians, he was certainly not the last American with feet on the ground. Americans remain in Afghanistan, some willingly, others not, and we will almost certainly be back one way or another.

And while the American military evacuation is now over, other countries and many NGOs continue to operate in the country. Donahue’s departure initiates a new age of American military and diplomatic absence, but it closes the book on few things that are essential to the daily lives of Afghans.

Thus, the ghostly green picture symbolizes not the end of a war, but the end of a mission. But images are subject to “mission creep” — the almost inevitable expansion of purpose that dogs so many military ventures — and it is tempting to use this as an iconic bow to wrap up a long and tragic chapter of American and Afghan history. By accident or design, this representation is perfectly constructed to give a sense of cinematic finality. Although the palette is green, it renders the world in black-and-white, like films made a century ago. The round format — not obvious in many reproductions which crop it square — suggests the classic “iris” shot used by directors in the age of silent movies to end a scene, or a whole film.

The basic trope — the last man on the ground — recalls an emotionally resonant idea of responsibility and even chivalry. The captain is the last one off a sinking ship. The general is the last one out the door as the United States turns off the lights in Afghanistan. War, which is always messy, brutal and chaotic, is represented by a scene of individual valor, which is an important but limited truth.

The reduction of the war to a solitary figure who looks a little beleaguered animates multiple narratives, especially the idea that leadership is a lonely business. It also recalls a story line common within the military: Soldiers do their duty, often in service to incompetent or unscrupulous civilian leaders. In this case, a general serves as the dutiful, common soldier in an image that implicitly says: We played our role and did our duty. Defeat is a political matter, not a military one.

As wars are increasingly fought with drones, it is tempting to underscore and celebrate individual valor, not just because it is worthy but because it appeals to romanticized ideals of how wars were supposedly fought in a less technological age. When the president and military leaders talk of managing the terror threat from Afghanistan with “over the horizon” capabilities, they almost certainly mean more drones, more satellites, more video screens and more decisions made from rooms thousands of miles from the battlefield. The “last boots on the ground” message elides that truth, tempting us to believe that war is still a symmetrical contest among men, not a battle fought on one side with machines and money, and on the other with terror and zealotry.

A year after the United States went to war in Afghanistan, Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff to George W. Bush, said: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” By “new products” he meant the looming war in Iraq, which was sold to Americans as easily winnable, with little hint of the long, bloody struggle that would follow. War, as a product, is always sold with an implicit end date, an inevitable victory, a promise of finality. Since the age of silent films, perhaps only one U.S. war, the one fought against Germany and Japan, has actually ended that way, but still the product sells.

It takes more than collective amnesia or delusion to keep buying the promise. It requires an emotional investment in the basic narratives of heroism and duty so profound that it limits critical thinking about the purpose, objectives and consequences of war.

This image captures an admirable sense of duty, and conveys a compelling sense of closure. But it says nothing about the consequences of war, either for U.S. personnel killed, injured or emotionally scared by the events of the past 20 years, or for the millions of Afghans for whom this was an unwanted and often brutal visitation.

"Conservative" "Thinking"

Hugh Hewitt never disappoints - we can always count on him to pimp some of our favorite "conservative" lies.

Like this:

For 20 years, the sacrifices made in Afghanistan were part of keeping the homeland safe.

Allow me to suggest an edit:

"For 20 years we've heard the lie that tries to link safety at home with funneling trillions of tax dollars to defense contractors for overseas military adventures - which fosters the various layers of corruption (foreign and domestic) wherever large piles of cash are made readily available, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to accomplish the stated objective."

Yes, we should stay appropriately engaged in the world, but engaging in "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan - "fighting them over there" - has led us to neglect the rising threat of terrorism posed by our very own brand of homegrown terrorism right here in USAmerica Inc.

The GOP has been in the process of attempting a coup not unlike what the Taliban has been attempting in Afghanistan. This little screed wouldn't have anything to do with stuffing Jan6 down the memory hole would it, Hugh?

That, and a little projection, intended to shift the criticism from Trump - who set all this shit in motion - to Biden, who's now trying to keep America's promises and make it work.

Hugh Hewitt, WaPo: (pay Wall)

America has lost a war, and the consequences will be terrible. Yes, this happened in 1975 with the fall of Saigon, but it is not easy to find a precedent in our history for a calamity such as that unfolding in Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans — the exact number is uncertain — are suddenly stranded far from home with no simple avenue for escape.

Events have left many Americans in a state of collective shock. The video of an infant being passed from family members over concertina wire to U.S. troops at Kabul’s airport illustrated the profound desperation that is sweeping Afghanistan, and elicited an awareness that we have betrayed much and many in the past week.

We can be proud of our warriors and still be deeply ashamed of our country.

The Pentagon suggested Thursday that if Americans in Afghanistan — mostly contractors and nongovernmental aid workers now — could get to the airport in Kabul, their safe passage home was likely. The Pentagon did not explain how Americans were to get safely to the airport. The president tried again Friday to give similar reassurance and guidance to the trapped — and failed again. He told the world they would get home. He gave no guidance on how they could get to the airport.

This is unacceptable. Is there really no alternative to simply hoping for the best? “Trust me and the Taliban?” Really?

Then there are sensitive questions about President Biden’s capacity to deal with fast-moving events. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) commented early in the week that the president appeared “shellshocked.” On Friday, Biden played his favorite loop in the East Room, promising to bring Americans and our loyal Afghan allies home — but not really explaining how. He is stubbornly attached to his inner narrative and won’t budge from it.

Questions about Donald Trump’s temperament and capacity dogged his entire presidency. To age, as candid older men and women will freely confess, is to slow down from previous capacity, to grow fixed in opinions and habits. Biden is our president, and we only get one at a time, but we can ask that everyone around him make doubly sure he is getting everything older Americans routinely need as they age — particularly unpleasant advice when they don’t want to hear it.

Maybe especially when they don’t want to hear it.

The broad unease about the president’s ability to adjust to quick changes in facts on the ground is genuine, and the fact that he finally allowed four reporters to ask questions on Friday about his decision-making did not allay that unease.

The families of every American abandoned to the tender mercies of the Taliban deserve a president who is accessible and commanding, not one who seems uncertain or half-withdrawn. CNN’s Clarissa Ward, reporting with incredible courage from Kabul, should not be Americans’ best source of information on conditions at the Kabul airport. It should be the president, but his answers on Friday did not help him much or set many minds at ease.

This is very much a disaster of choice, not inevitability. The questions are many: What did the president not know about the political landscape in Afghanistan — and for how long has he not known it? What options did he solicit? Which did he decline? What advice did he reject?

It is also necessary to ask: What signal does this send to an increasingly aggressive China and Russia, and will they act on that signal? What does this mean for the perilous situations in Taiwan and Ukraine? And how did the United States get blindsided again?

For 20 years, the sacrifices made in Afghanistan were part of keeping the homeland safe. That shield has dropped. The president again insisted on Friday that we have over-the-horizon abilities. But, as one reporter asked Biden, if we didn’t see the collapse coming, how can we be confident that we will see the next attack on the homeland coming?

Finally, given the president’s argumentative and defensive speech Monday, refusal to take questions after a threadbare deflection speech Wednesday, the confused and confusing sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and his halting do-over performance Friday, the Biden-friendly legacy media must press to learn what is happening behind the scenes. ABC News’s refusal to release the entire unedited tape of Stephanopoulos’s midweek interview with the president is unacceptable. The same degree of scrutiny that fell on every Trump move must follow this president.

At moments of national calamity, we all need to be respectful of our common citizenship, but difficult discussions must be had in public, and the president especially must be available and accountable to the people he has so long wanted to lead. This is not, as the president and his team may imagine, another sort of campaign crisis to be endured and overcome in a few news cycles. The oldest president ever must keep his circle expanding and information flowing in, with truth-speakers close at hand. And he must meet with the press again and again as the crisis unfolds.

BTW #1: The idea's been floated that Biden tried to convince Obama to get us out of Afghanistan pretty much the whole 8 years he spent as VP. That story will emerge at some point as people start to dig into the history of the first two decades of "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire".

BTW #2: In case you've missed it, "conservatives" have also been pimping the bullshit that Tom Cotton is their best bet for the 2024 GOP nomination. Look for more of this as we go, and especially be on the lookout for the Press Poodles to say things like "Well, that Tom Cotton guy has some common sense stuff goin' on yada yada yada".

Ya heard it here first, kids.

Watch This One Little Wrinkle

Afghan Veep Amrullah Saleh might be cooking up a few surprises for them Taliban fellers.

Reuters:

Afghan First Vice President Amrullah Saleh said on Tuesday he was in Afghanistan and the "legitimate caretaker president" after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country as Taliban insurgents took the capital Kabul.

Saleh told a security meeting chaired by Ghani last week that he was proud of the armed forces and the government would do all it could to strengthen resistance to the Taliban.

But the country fell to the Taliban in days, rather than the months foreseen by U.S. intelligence.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Saleh said that it was "futile" to argue with U.S. President Joe Biden, who has decided to pull out U.S. forces.

He called on Afghans to show that Afghanistan "isn't Vietnam & the Talibs aren't even remotely like Vietcong".

A video of desperate Afghans trying to clamber on to a U.S. military plane as it was about to take off evoked a photograph in 1975 of people trying to get on a helicopter on a roof in Saigon during the withdrawal from Vietnam.

Saleh said that unlike the United States and NATO "we haven't lost spirit & see enormous opportunities ahead. Useless caveats are finished JOIN THE RESISTANCE."

Saleh, whose whereabouts were unknown, said that he would never "under no circumstances bow" to "the Talib terrorists." He said he would "never betray" Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated by two al Qaeda operatives just before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Everything is up in the air and we won't know a lot more than we know now - which isn't much - until the airlift attempt has run its course and some of the dust settles.

So far, the Talibani have gone to great lengths trying to sound "reasonable", but just like every other bunch of theocratic assholes, they can be expected to revert to their usual asshole selves as soon as they consolidate their position.

Afghanistan

1. We keep forgetting that we can't kill our way out of our problems. And unfortunately, it seems we can't remember "No more Vietnams" either
2. There are US troopers fighting in Afghanistan who weren't even born when this SNAFU started
3. You're not going to beat a homegrown opponent who's willing to use bear skins and stone knives fighting against the most amazing military the world has ever known

It's going to get a lot worse for the Afghan people, and I'm sick about this whole fuckin' mess.

There's no reason for anyone to be surprised at how quickly and easily the Taliban were able to sweep up once the withdrawal of NATO forces was nearing completion.

About That "Deal"

Max Boot, WaPo:

Taliban and U.S. representatives signed on Saturday what has been described as a peace deal. Beware the treachery of labels. Just as Magritte’s painted pipe was not really a pipe, so this vaunted “peace deal” is not really a peace deal.

It has been heartening to see a steep reduction in violence over the past week — a U.S. precondition for signing the deal — but there is no agreement on a permanent cease-fire, much less a resolution of all the issues that divide the democratically elected Afghan government from the Taliban. What was signed on Saturday is an agreement to try to reach an agreement. To get even this far, the United States had to drop its long-standing demand for intra-Afghan negotiations to precede a U.S. troop drawdown. Now the Taliban will enter the talks, scheduled to take place in Oslo, in a stronger position after having already achieved their chief demand — a timetable for U.S. withdrawal within 14 months.

I envision three potential scenarios for what happens next: good, bad and ugly.

The good scenario would look like Colombia. After more than 50 years of war and four years of peace talks, the government and the FARC insurgency signed a peace deal in 2016. The rebels agreed to lay down their arms and to be reintegrated into civilian society. There has been some fraying of the accords since then — with accusations of violations from both sides — but the deal has largely held. The civil war has not reignited. The murder rate reached an all-time low in 2017, and although it has increased slightly in the past two years, Colombia remains far more peaceful than in the past.

The bad scenario would look like Lebanon. That country’s ruinous civil war began in 1975 and ended in 1989 with the signing of the Taif Accord. This agreement modified power-sharing among the major sectarian groups — Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Druze — and its implementation was overseen by Syrian occupiers. The Syrian troops finally left in 2005, but the peace deal has largely held — albeit at a significant price. While Lebanon is technically a democracy, real power is held by Hezbollah, which is both a political movement and a radical Islamist militia. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah has not imposed its fundamentalist views on more secular Lebanese people: Women are free to walk around Beirut without head coverings and alcohol flows freely in restaurants. But Hezbollah dictates who rules, and it uses its Lebanese strongholds to project power into nearby countries and across the world.

The ugly scenario would look like South Vietnam. The 1973 Paris Peace Accords brought an end to the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam, but North Vietnam began violating its terms at once. Two years later, the weakened state of South Vietnam was overrun by a North Vietnamese blitzkrieg. America’s abandoned allies had to flee or be consigned to brutal “reeducation” camps.

Max rates the probabilities for success in reverse order:

1. Ugly
2. Bad
3. Good

I think the only thing we can be pretty sure of is that we'll see the whole thing return to a kind of Status Quo Ante - more or less the same as it was before we went in there and started fucking with it.

And that's pretty much always how it works out when we take on these enormously stupid projects.

The lesson we never seem to learn is that we shouldn't do this shit just because we can.

And Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule gets truer and truer: You break, you own it.

Afghanistan

We need to stop this nonsense and get these people home.

Say What?`

This is what passed for "thinking" in the Jr Bush administration.

"We were not there in Afghanistan to eradicate corruption, or to end poppy cultivation. We were not there to take ownership of Afghanistan’s problems, tempting though it was for Americans of goodwill. If, as some have contended, we never had a plan for full-fledged nation building, or that we under-resourced such a plan, they were certainly correct. We did not go there to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan. Our more modest goal was to rid Afghanistan of al Qaeda, and replace their Taliban hosts with a government that would not harbor terrorists... " - Donald Rumsfeld; pg 682 of his memoir.

Look, Don - you really can't accomplish the 2 things you say we went there to do, without doing the things you say we didn't go there to do.

I think you should continue your service to this great country of ours by scheduling a nice long trip to Spain as soon as you can manage it.  They'll take really good care of you.

fuckin' putz

Afghanistan

From an Op-Ed piece by Scott Corey as posted on Juan Cole's Informed Comment.

"Today, power is so diffuse that empire and isolation are equally dead. Control of information, money, natural resources, and ideological persuasiveness all move parts of the political world. Still, all of it hangs on a framework of formal authority residing in a collection of states that wield force, legitimacy, representation, and diplomacy.
Terrorism prospers in the complexity of this political world. Political identity is no longer simple and fixed, so friend and enemy are hard to know. If I hit you, we fight, because the enmity is clear. If I coerce you with weapons, you might be intimidated or you might defy me, but the choice is clear. However, if I kill someone else in a spectacular manner, you need to know why before you can react. My cause might be just. My enemy might be your enemy. Or I might be coming for you and yours if you take the wrong path."

For The Record

I caught a short glimpse of Frank Gaffney on Hardball trying to argue that a real insurgency caused problems in Germany after WWII - which somehow is supposed to mean we should stay in Iraq and Afghanistan in spite of the locals' deep desire to get us outa there.

The 'Werewolf' in Germany was mostly fiction - made up of frightened hungry teenagers and some number of die-hard Nazi buttheads.  A Pentagon report listed 42 American soldiers "killed as a result of enemy action" between June and December 1945. In 1946, there were three.

Get. Out. Now.

Obama "Loses" Olympics

Obama's trip to Denmark was about something, but it wasn't about making a pitch for a Chicago Olympics.  I think he agreed to take a shot at it since he was there anyway, and the IOC meeting provided cover for something else.
Of course, the righty-wingers are trying to make it out to be something like: 'Obama fails in Copenhagen, and that means the IOC will soon have nuclear weapons.'

A couple of things come to mind.

First, he may or may not be going to the Climate Change conference in December.  If he's thinking he won't, then now's a good time to touch some bases and make his points face-to-face with people who will be there.
But second, the quickie with Stan McChrystal was prob'ly a lot more than it seemed.  I think it was a Come-To-Jesus meeting.  I think the general was told straight out that he can shut up and do his job as the president sees fit, or he can resign his commission and run for the office himself.

US Dead in Iraq and Afghanistan

09-11-09
Afghanistan = 821
Iraq = 4343

see source