BLUF: There is no option between human civilizations for ’we’ll each go to our little territories and stay there’. That’s not how humans work or ever have. Population pressure; desire for goods; desire for a certain land; conviction of one’s superior civilization, will keep us fighting and trying to expand (and btw, that last applies to ALL human civilizations. Yes, Islam believes they’re superior to and more powerful than the west. They have Allah on their side, after all.) Your choice is never "let’s all live in harmony." Your choice is colonize or be colonized. Think carefully of where you’d rather live, and which mind sets and conditions you’re willing to encourage.
And stop mouthing pieties about "massacres" when someone fights in self defense. Western Civilization is not always the winner, and will not always be the winner.
The fatal oikophobia you’ve been taught is the worm gnawing at the heart of the civilization that’s lifted most humans out of poverty. Examine carefully how you’d like to live before your throw your weight behind the supposed victims. They’re just another set of aggressors. And if you wouldn’t like to live under their rules, that’s not the side you should be fighting on.
No humans are angels. Some are just more accomplished warriors than others. That doesn’t make them bad. It all depends on what you’re fighting for.
[Sara Hoyt] Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
‐ Robert A. Heinlein
I found this Heinlein quote yesterday, while working on the article for PJmedia (I know most of my Heinlein quotes at a remove, because I first read them in Portuguese, so I need to check every time to make sure I don’t mangle them.) At first sight this resounds a lot with Mister Obama’s statement that "Sin is being unfaithful to my principles" -- which given the changeable nature of the left’s principles means that "sin is what I feel like it should be today."
Of course, that is not it, and if you look at it, it’s quite a different sort of thing. I’d never, at least consciously, come across that quote, but I’ve been living by it for years, partly because I absorbed its ethos from Heinlein’s books. Stuff like, if you save someone’s life you’ve assumed a Chinese obligation for that life. It was that principle that would not allow us, when we moved across the country, to do the common thing of giving away our cats, and just getting kittens after moving. Instead, we orchestrated a three part move to a new city, with cats shipped in two batches after us (and Pete, the difficult case, moving with us, in the car.)
It causes us to pay on contracts, even when it’s not convenient. It causes me to feel an obligation towards Baen, even in these days when Indie would pay me more. It causes us to drive through the night to go help a friend, even when it’s the LAST thing we want to do.
This is because we’ve assumed those obligations voluntarily, as we did the obligations for our children, the obligations for our own upkeep, the obligations to employers and friends, to neighbors and places where we shop and the obligations to this country, like my freely sworn oath to defend the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
What doesn’t it cover? Well, it’s not my duty to make the TSA’s job simpler. I might choose to do it, because the alternative is jail, but I don’t feel a DUTY to do it. It’s not my duty to pay the maximum tax I can owe. I can use deductions and loopholes (we don’t use loopholes, because we’re too poor to afford the lawyers, but you get my point.) It is not my duty to "provide for those who make less." It might be my duty to exert Christian Charity, again freely assumed, but that’s QUITE something else from giving someone a portion of my paycheck simply because on paper I have more money.
[Feral Jundi] So folks, I have been waiting a bit to post on this because so much has been written about it and I wanted to see where it goes. Basically Erik Prince came up with a plan for Afghanistan that would have historic implications for this industry and country if implemented.
Already, contractors are a part of the history of this war, with great sacrifice and from many partner nations over the last 16 years. But this....this is an entirely different level.
At this point in time, we have a standing US President that is actually considering a plan conceived by a contractor. Actually two, because Stephen A. Feinberg of Cerberus Group and owner of Dyncorp came up with a plan as well. But I will focus on the Prince plan because of how much traction it is getting. I say traction, because the media and the naysayers of this industry have been writing this off as insignificant or risible.
Of course they do, because they did not propose it.
But I say not so fast....because from what I have heard on the grapevine, this is getting much more serious consideration than what is reported.
About the plan. It is basically modeled after what the US did in post war Japan, using a viceroy to command over the effort and an army of contractors. US Special Operations would still have a presence in the country to counter the Taliban and the various jihadists. It is a long term, cost saving answer to providing presence in that country. A solution that would dramatically lessen the contractor footprint in Afghanistan according to Prince, and send most of the troops home (minus the special operations folks).
Please read the plan below. I would also suggest listening to Erik Prince talk about the plan in his media blitz, ever since November of last year. This too is historically significant. Since Prince donated to the Trump campaign, as did his sister Betsy DeVos (who is now Secretary of Education), Erik has had the ear of the President of the United States. He also speaks the language of business, which is familiar to Trump.
This interaction between an Administration and a private contractor reminds me of Claire Lee Chennault and his dealings with the Roosevelt administration for the formation of the Flying Tigers in China. The Flying Tigers were the only game in town after Pearl Harbor, and they were the rock star private air force that was sticking it to the Japanese in China. Claire made Time magazine’s man of the year back then, and several movies were made about what he did with his motley crew.
#5
Good question G(r)omgoru, If the CIA gets involved, we might as well write the whole thing off as a lost cause. What Skidmark said is more likely to happen then.
#7
I have been watching this and him for - forever.
There are others that watch too who are on the ground.
Here is the markup from june where relook at Afghanistan all came from. Here is Baba Tim with an outline of the situation:
http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/?p=6954
Here is Erik Prince's article in WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-macarthur-model-for-afghanistan-1496269058?mod=e2tw
An finally, presenting a probabable Viceroy
http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/?p=7071
Right now, with me, it is a GO.
Anyone have better ideas how to tame the scorpion?
#9
The drug trade becomes off limits when you are pushing upward in a waterfall. You cannot tell a farmer to stop that. You are not here to police their economics as far as non-humans are concerned.
Served better by knowing where those drugs are going (Iran, Russia...) than to cut off the farmers crop.
This is a banking and Intelligence game. And the DOD is woefully prepared to handle it with their MET - as far retarded it is for this region.
If you follow the monies, you have less overhead in munitions.
I have all their balance sheets. Figure that out for real and then act like you are going after IRGC.
House of Saud's influence may help or change the dynamic of this but as far as today - anything is up for grabs.
#10
The entire ME isn't worth a tin pale of warm camel pi**. Get out, stay out, and let them fight it out among themselves. Put all their evil, death cult who come near us to the sword or we too will perish.
#11
Until you take out Pakistan, you'll never remove a base of operation for the OPFOR.
The drug trade becomes off limits when you are pushing upward in a waterfall. You cannot tell a farmer to stop that. You are not here to police their economics as far as non-humans are concerned.
Given the American capacity to genetically engineer, a opium 'blast' should have already been developed and prepared for dispersal. It's not like its a food supply.
#12
DynaCorp? DynaCorp has been mentioned in WikiLeaks. Something about DynaCorp and dancing boys in Afghanistan. DynaCorp. No wonder, they decided to look at the Prince plan instead of DynaCorp plan, a Hillary leftover.
#14
Sounds like a good idea to me. One hitch I see up front:
MacArthur was made SCAP after Japan surrendered. One might think a MacArthur in Afghanistan would have to follow after an unconditional surrender there by ... whom? ... perhaps ... ?
I don't know. Maybe the parallel is not applicable.
#15
Reaching for MacArthur as a model is sure to set the cat among the left's pigeons. They hate the guy more than anyone else they know.
And who does Prince have in mind as the MacArthur for Afghanistan? Himself? MacArthur was a very great man, very unique. Prince must have someone in mind.
#16
Dynacorp was allegedly involved in the sexual exploitation of children in Bosnia in the 90's during peacekeeping operations. It was the subject of the 2010 film The Whistleblower - though nobody was ever convicted of a crime.
[Miami Herald] The Trump administration revealed it had canceled a CIA program to provide Syrian rebels with arms and training in July -- and I’ll give you three guesses as to how the story got framed. If you went with "misleading insinuations over Russia," you are correct. The Washington Post, which broke the news, ran with the headline: "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow." An anonymous quote in the story -- "Putin won in Syria" -- got traction online, in print and on TV.
It was a sloppy conflation: Policy that coincides with Moscow’s aims is not the same as policy meant to serve Moscow. In this case, there’s no evidence that President Trump was acting under the thrall of Vladimir Putin. More likely the president axed the CIA initiative because -- as many of us have been warning since long before Russia sent its military to Syria -- it wasn’t working. Additionally, it constituted an unwise intervention in the Syrian civil war, which holds little interest and no good options for the United States.
From the start, American weapons shipments had a curious habit of ending up in the hands of al Qaida and Islamic State fighters. Among numerous examples, the Pentagon admitted in 2015 that U.S.-trained Syrian rebels had voluntarily forked over their American-provided equipment, including half a dozen pickups, to the al Qaida offshoot Nusra Front. Islamic State soldiers have been documented running around with our anti-tank missiles. Even early on, when training and arms efforts were being carried out through the Saudis and Qataris, one U.S. official admitted, "The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it."
More recently, even Charles Lister, an ardent supporter of the Syrian rebellion, has estimated that 10 percent to 15 percent of American equipment was lost to al Qaida and Islamic State.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Sara Hoyt] Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
At this point in time, we have a standing US President that is actually considering a plan conceived by a contractor. Actually two, because Stephen A. Feinberg of Cerberus Group and owner of Dyncorp came up with a plan as well. But I will focus on the Prince plan because of how much traction it is getting. I say traction, because the media and the naysayers of this industry have been writing this off as insignificant or risible.
[Miami Herald] The Trump administration revealed it had canceled a CIA program to provide Syrian rebels with arms and training in July -- and I’ll give you three guesses as to how the story got framed. If you went with "misleading insinuations over Russia," you are correct. The Washington Post, which broke the news, ran with the headline: "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow." An anonymous quote in the story -- "Putin won in Syria" -- got traction online, in print and on TV.
