Every Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. The Communist government tried to tear down the old structures of mullah and khan; the anti-Soviet jihad set up new ones, bolstered with US and Saudi cash and weapons from Pakistan. There is almost no economic activity in the country, aside from international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. The Afghan army cannot, like Pakistan's, reject America's attempt to define national security priorities; Afghan diplomats cannot mock our pronouncements. Karzai is widely criticised, but more than seven years after the invasion there is still no plausible alternative candidate; there aren't even recognisable political parties.
Obama's new policy has a very narrow focus -- counter-terrorism -- and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state.
If the latter is true than Bambi is as much of a neo-con as George Bush ever was. That might not be a bad idea if we can stay in Afghanistan for three generations, because that's what it would take. But one can't say that one is fixing the Afghan state and still claim to be focused only on counter-terrorism. The writer is addled.
Obama combines a negative account of Afghanistan's past and present -- he describes the border region as ''the most dangerous place in the world'' -- with an optimism that it can be transformed. He assumes that we have a moral justification and obligation to intervene, that the US and its allies have the capacity to address the threat and that our global humanitarian and security objectives are consistent and mutually reinforcing.
Policy-makers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don't have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker: "If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists."
Nowhere in this description is an understanding that the Afghan people, far more than Iraqis, are tribal, with an honor-shame society. That means an integrated approach is necessary, but it has to be an approach that recognizes -- and then shatters -- the tribal structure.
Shatters? Explain, please. Briefly, if possible. ;-)
These connections are global: in Obama's words, "our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others."
Said a better way, our security and prosperity depends on that of others, and both can only be realized with a liberal application of personal liberty.
Or, as a British foreign minister recently rephrased it, "our security depends on their development". Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities -- building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaeda and eliminating poverty -- are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama's words, "security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project".
This policy rests on misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state. The power of the US and its allies, and our commitment, knowledge and will, are limited. It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Malaya -- control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government -- are lacking in Afghanistan.
I would think the goal in Afghanistan would be to seduce the locals into turning on the Taliban, as some of the tribes are doing on the Pakistani side of the border.
Exactly. Tribes. One recognizes the tribal nature of the world and use one tribe to work on getting the others to change (or kill them). But to bring that to an end you have to persuade the tribes to recognize a larger entity such as the nation-state, or else you'll be back in a few years to deal with more uppity tribes.
General Petraeus will find it difficult to repeat the apparent success of the surge in Iraq. There are no mass political parties and the Kabul government lacks the base, strength or legitimacy of the Baghdad government.
Granted, Iraq had none of those things once the invasion was completed in 2003.
Afghan tribal groups lack the coherence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes and their relation to state structures: they are not being driven out of neighbourhood after neighbourhood and they do not have the same relation to the Taliban that the Sunni groups had to "al-Qaeda in Iraq".
I'm not sure what that last clause means.
It means that the Sunni (and Shi'a) tribes of Iraq were more cultural and had been subsumed substantially by a national, or at least regional, identity long before we arrived. The Arabs felt Arab, the Kurds felt Kurdish, and the tribal chiefs were more brokers of deals and arbiters of disputes than controlling rulers. It was easier for us to deal with them because they were most of the way down the road where we needed them to be.
Afghans are weary of the war but the Afghan chiefs are not approaching us, seeking a deal.
Nor did they in Iraq until they trusted the Surge. We've only just begun to Surge in Afghanistan.
Since the political players and state structures in Afghanistan are much more fragile than those in Iraq, they are less likely to play a strong role in ending the insurgency.
Meanwhile, the Taliban can exploit the ideology of religious resistance that the West fostered in the 1980s to defeat the Russians. They can portray the Kabul government as US slaves, Nato as an infidel occupying force and its own insurgency as a jihad. Its complaints about corruption, human rights abuses and aerial bombardments appeal to a large audience. It is attracting Afghans to its rural courts by giving quicker and more predictable rulings than government judges.
But most of all, the Taliban can play the tribal card: the foreigners aren't Pashtuns.
Like some government officials, the Taliban has developed an ambiguous and sometimes profitable relationship with the drug lords.
Ambiguous? I don't think so.
It is able to slip back and forth across the Pakistani border and receive support there. It has massacred Alokozai elders who tried to resist. It is mounting successful attacks against the coalition and the Afghan government in the south and east. It is operating in more districts than in 2006 and controls provinces, such as Wardak, close to Kabul. It has a chance of retaking southern towns such as Musa Qala and perhaps even some provincial capitals.
But the Taliban is very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole. Its previous administration provided basic road security and justice
The journalist forgot to put justice in scare quotes.
but it was fragile and fell quickly.
Precisely because it couldn't extend itself beyond Pashtun tribal boundaries. The Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara, etc weren't about to knuckle under to the Pashtuns by anything other than brute force.
It is no longer perceived, as it was by some in 1994, as young student angels saving the country from corruption. Millions of Afghans disliked its brutality, incompetence and primitive attitudes. The Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek populations are wealthier, more established and more powerful than they were in 1996 and would strongly resist any attempt by the Taliban to occupy their areas.
The Afghan national army is reasonably effective. Pakistan is not in a position to support the Taliban as it did before. It would require far fewer international troops and planes than we have today to make it very difficult for the Taliban to gather a conventional army as it did in 1996 and drive tanks and artillery up the main road to Kabul.
Even if -- as seems most unlikely -- the Taliban was to take the capital, it is not clear how much of a threat this would pose to US or European national security. Would it repeat its error of providing a safe haven to al-Qaeda?
Since they are providing a haven for Al Qaeda in their territory in Pakistan, I think we can safely conclude the answer is yes.
And they don't need Kabul to be that kind of threat to us.
And how safe would this haven be? And does al-Qaeda still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks? Could it not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales?
The author misses the need for a terror organization to have a place of safety. Al-Qaeda was able to prosper in Afghanistan precisely because, until after 9/11, it was a place we wouldn't go. They could train their fighters, their terror squads, amass expertise, equipment and facilities, and most importantly, they could have the time to plan. It's hard to plan a great terror caper when you're on the run and living out of a suitcase. You need a place where you can put your head at night and have some assurance that you'll still have a head in the morning. That's why terrorists need a home base.
Furthermore, there are no self-evident connections between the key objectives of counter-terrorism, development, democracy/ state-building and counter-insurgency.
That's just idiotic unless you're a neo-con, in which case the connections are self-evident: one leads to the other and back down again. Build a representative state with enough prosperity and personal liberty and you fix the terror problem: the terrorists no longer have a place to call home. That requires development, counter-terror ops and counter-insurgency ops, along with a big attitude change in the population.
Counter-insurgency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for state-building. You could create a stable legitimate state without winning a counter-insurgency campaign (India, which is far more stable and legitimate than Afghanistan, is still fighting several long counter-insurgency campaigns from Assam to Kashmir).
You could win a counter-insurgency campaign without creating a stable state (if such a state also required the rule of law and a legitimate domestic economy).
No, you couldn't. As soon as you let up on the pressure of your counter-insurgency campaign, the terrorists/insurgents would be right back at it.
Nor is there any necessary connection between state-formation and terrorism.
Yes, there is, in both directions: in places like Somalia, the lack of any viable state structure allows terrorism to flourish. Likewise, the formation of a state that dedicates itself to funding and supporting terrorists (e.g., Saddam, Syria, North Korea) allows terrorism to continue.
Our confusions are well illustrated by the debates about whether Iraq was a rogue state harbouring terrorists (as Bush claimed) or an authoritarian state that excluded terrorists (as was the case).
It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state.
For Britain, yes. The rest of the statement does not follow from that premise, as it was impossible for Britain to succeed in Iraq as well, although they were capable of aiding the American success.
In the end we create the conditions by which a state can be built, if enough Afghans are willing to give up the grounding, governing structure of tribalism and embrace a nation-state.
They have no clear picture of this promised "state", and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives?
What's wrong with a federation of self-ruling provinces, where the federal government is responsible for national defence and international agreements?
Even at the level of 'provincial' rule, the tribes would be giving up substantial authority and autonomy.
How can the tribes give up what they don't have? At the moment nobody really rules at the provincial or national level
#2
One has two wonder if the writer understands the terms "security" and "justice" when he says in one sentence Its previous administration provided basic road security and justice ...... and two sentences later says Millions of Afghans disliked its brutality, incompetence and primitive attitudes.
Beyond that I agree with him. Until Pakistan and Iran are dedicated to a stable Afganistan there won't be one. I don't think either are.
#3
A stable Afghanistan is a significant threat to both Iran and Pakistan. This is just of of several reasons that it's in our interests to promote it.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
07/13/2009 15:10 Comments ||
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#4
I don't know much about about Afghanistan other than what I read here and on M. Yon's site. But M. Yon isn't very optimistic about us succeeding there.
#5
I think I'd be willing to define our goal as denying the country to Al Qaeda and Pakistan and significantly reducing opium poppy cultivation, thus reducing that source of terror funding. We are already getting there. A stretch goal of Afghan stability based on some indigenous economic development, local-level rule of law supported by a competent and professional army and police -- and a working system of roads -- and at least 60% of children reaching adulthood able to read and write is, I think, realistic within a generation, so long as we stick it out. I do not believe we can turn Afghanistan into Britain, with equal rights for all, an industrial revolution, a computer in every pot, 70% graduation rates from high school and a significant proportion of high school graduates receiving tertiary education. I'd venture to guess Afghanistan is at least a century from that, even if all goes well.
/this opinion worth exactly what you just paid for it.
#7
tipover, when I was a reading tutor, back in the 1980s, the statistic we were told was that 205 20% of American adults were functionally illiterate, ie reading at or below a sixth grade level. I imagine, with the number of non-English speaking illegal immigrants in the country today, the percentage is higher. But in my opinion, that sixth grade level is necessary for reading newspapers and filling in health insurance forms; for everyday function, I'd think a third grade level would suffice -- enough to sound out new words and look them up in the dictionary, and grow in reading ability just by reading things. Of course, I'm not a teaching professional, so I could be wrong.
#8
A few days ago, I described Afghanistan as being Lebanon without the shopping.
What I meant by that was it will be in perpetual civil war or at best heavily armed truce for generations to come.
Maybe in 100 years time you could turn Pashtuns, Tadjiks and Uzbecks in happy Afghanis, but I doubt it. I see little progress toward that end in Lebanon - a far more developed country.
The solution is to formalize a system of ethnic de facto or de jure states and pay people to move to the 'right' state.
The reason this isn't done is the howls of outrage from the UN where many multi-ethnic states with governments of dubious legitimacy would see the same future for them. As well as the liberal fantasy of a post-ethnic world.
You would then hold the Pushtun government responsible for fixing the AQ problem, which I assure you they would with some fairly cheap carrots and sticks. Especially when they see the Uzbecks and Tadjiks getting economic development and modern weapons denied to then.
BTW, the solution to the UN problem is to say screwem, but I see no prospect of that. So Afghanistan will fester on, draining blood and treasure for years to come.
Link Please remember to put the link in the appropriate box when posting. Thank you.
Stimulus, stimulus and not a drop...
A "stimulus" of nearly a trillion dollars was proposed, without which we were told, unemployment would skyrocket and credit would tighten further. Six months later -- unemployment having risen even higher than the administration's forecast of what would have been the case had their stimulus package not been implemented -- now the same proponents of massive borrowing demand a second stimulus to accomplish what the first 'successful' borrowing apparently did not. If you fail, then try the same thing to fail even bigger the second time -- while calling for more success to follow the earlier success?
The Larger Agenda
Note here I mean something quite different from the accustomed notion of "accomplish." You see, I think the point was never much to build more bike paths on borrowed money or just bail out GM, but rather more to reengineer the tax code, as part of a grander vision of creating a new equality of result in America.
Soon we will all end up after each April 15 about making the same, driving the same sort of cars and using the same sort of mass transit, living in about the same sorts of houses, and having about the same sorts of "'they' will take care of it for me" philosophies -- all overseen by brilliant, but highly ranked and exempt Platonic Guardians who suffer on our behalf as they jet and limo at breakneck speed ensuring our welfare.
#1
In our area we have a very big black bear that is tearing up the dumpster at a local quick stop. He is making a mess and trash is everywhere. Trash is in a stream next to it and all over the banks. We thought the DNR or local government would do something but they just let him tear up everything he wants. I have given him a pet name of Obama.
The signing ceremony in Moscow was a grand affair. For Barack Obama, foreign-policy neophyte and "reset" man, the arms-reduction agreement had a Kissingerian air. A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage.
Unfortunately for the United States, the country Obama represents, the prospective treaty is useless at best, detrimental at worst.
Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia "Joint Understanding," is an irrelevance. We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into penury, as did their Soviet predecessors, stockpiling weapons that do nothing more than, as Churchill put it, make the rubble bounce.
Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama's intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers -- the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) -- induced the curtailment of anyone's programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong-Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.
The pursuit of such an offensive weapons treaty could nonetheless be detrimental to us. Why? Because Obama's hunger for a diplomatic success, such as it is, allowed the Russians to exact a price: linkage between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons. Rest at link
Posted by: ed ||
07/13/2009 07:02 ||
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Airforce Magazine editorial produced in full since link is not permanent. In response to recent Washington Post smear.
Chicago Rules: Have you noticed the strangely heavy outbreak of bad F-22 news recently? The timing is convenient for F-22 foes; they face a do-or-die Senate vote this week, so any negativity is welcome. The bad news started Thursday, when USMC Gen. James Cartwright, JCS vice chairman, told a Senate panel about a new Joint Staff-led studyheretofore unknownvalidating DOD's plan for 187 F-22s (not 243, USAF's requirement). Next came a punch from US theater commanders; as General Cartwright told it, they didn't want more F-22s as much as they wanted more EW versions of the Navy F/A-18. On Friday came a tiresome Washington Post gut job, titled, "Premier US Fighter Jet Has Major Shortcomings" (more on which below.) Among the storys sources: "confidential Pentagon test results," "Pentagon officials," "internal [Pentagon] documents," "The Defense Department," "a Defense Department critic of the plane," "other skeptics inside the Pentagon," "Pentagon audits," "two Defense officials with access to internal reports." Hmmm. Do you think DOD might have planted this story? Others have watched this spectacle and drawn their own conclusions. Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb on Friday posted a story noting how Pentagon leaders have been spanked by Congress on the F-22 recently. "So what does the White House do?" asked Goldfarb. "It goes on offense." Its what happens when you are not winning the argument on the merits.
The F-22, Bagel and a Smear: The Washington Posts putative exposé of the F-22 and all its shortcomings, printed on its front page Friday (and picked up as gospel by various wires and blogs over the weekend), was riddled with inaccuracies, according to the Air Force, Lockheed Martin, and our own investigation. The Post said only 55 percent of the F-22 fleet is available for missions guarding US airspace, but as we reported recently, the F-22s combat air forces mission capable rates have been climbing slowly but steadily, and inlate June stood at 62.9 percent, according to Air Combat Command. On Friday, Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-22, said in a statement that the MC rate has improved from 62 percent to 68 percent from 2004-2009 and we are on track to achieve an 85 percent MCR by the time the fleet reaches maturity, or 100,000 hours, which should take place next year. The company also said that the mean time between maintenancethe number of hours an F-22 flies before it needs servicerose from 0.97 hours in 2004 to 3.22 hours in Lot 6 aircraft. The Post claimed a figure of 1.7 hours. Direct maintenance man-hours per flying hour have dropped from 18.1 in 2008 to 10.46 in 2009, which exceeds the requirement of 12, the company added. The Post used out of date figures from 2004-2008 when the rates were higher because the F-22 was a new system. The Post also trotted out the old school criticism of stealth that it is somehow vulnerable to rain, but the company noted that the F-22 is an all-weather fighter and has been exposed to the harshest climates in the worldranging from the desert in Nevada and California, extreme cold in Alaska, and rain/humidity in Florida and Guamand performed magnificently. The information quoted by the Post is incorrect, the company said flatly. While the Post led its piece saying that the F-22 costs more to fly per hour than the F-15 it replaces, it didnt say whether it had factored inflation or fuel prices into that cost and neglected to point out that the F-15 has no stealth coatings to maintain. An Air Force public affairs spokeswoman said the Post did not contact the service for comment on the story before publication. The F-22 passed Follow-On Test and Evaluation Testing in 2005, and in FOT&E II, in 2007, USAFs test and evaluation outfit rated the F-22 effective, suitable, and mission capable, despite the Posts claims that it flunked those evaluations. The Post attributed most of its information to unnamed Defense Department sources.
John A. Tirpak
And the Air Forces Take: The Air Force also objected to the Washington Posts loose interpretation of F-22 statistics, and the papers portrait of the fighter as overly expensive, unreliable, and ineffective (see above). Generally, according to USAFs analysis of the article, the Post either used outdated data or exaggerated problems that have long since been corrected. The Post quoted a variety of F-22 glitches from Government Accountability Office reports issued seven years ago, when the F-22 was still in development. In a four-page rebuttal provided to the Daily Report of 23 claims the Post made in its hatchet job on the F-22, the Air Force dismissed the Posts claim that the F-22s stealthy skin maintenance issues are somehow due to rain, and the service said that the Post was wrong in saying the trend is that F-22 has gotten harder and more costly to maintain. Not true, the service said. The rates have been improving. The Air Force said the Raptors cost per flying hour is not much greater than that of the F-15$19,750 vs. $17,465and the F-22 is a far more powerful and capable machine. The Post had claimed a cost of more than $40,000 per flying hour. Likewise, whereas the Post claimed the fleet had to be retrofitted due to structural problems, this claim is misleading, USAF said. Lessons learned from a static test model were applied to production of new aircraft and retrofitted to earlier aircraft; a normal part of the testing and development process. One problem the Air Force owned up to: The F-22 canopys stealth coatings last only about half as long as theyre supposed to. The service said the program has put some fixes into play and coating life continues to improve. The Air Force also confirmed Lockheed's contention that the mission capable rate had risen over the years to 68 percent fleetwide today.
DOD Plays a Card: The Gates Pentagon has been having a tough time showing how a force of only 187 F-22 fighters will support Americas long-standing two-war strategy. Sopresto!OSD has solved that and other force planning problems by cutting the strategy itself. In Senate testimony late last week, USMC Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the JCS, said, the strategy that we are laying out will be a departure from the two-major-theater-war construct. DOD opines that it can get by with forces sufficient for only one big conventional war. The numbers of fighters we have, the general went on, probably does not need to be sufficient to take on two nearly simultaneous peer competitors. We don't see that as the likely; we see that as the extreme. Ipso facto, 187 will be enough. The DOD position is not universally accepted. In a July editorial, AIR FORCE Magazine Editor in Chief Robert Dudney noted the dangers of abandoning the two-war strategy, which has survived every big defense review since 1993. The big problem to be faced can be phrased as a question: Will a President, armed with a force sufficient for only one war, ever take action, knowing that doing so would leave the US naked to a second aggressor in some other part of the world? This is what in the trade is known as "self-deterrence." It would be a huge and perhaps fatal blow to the US practice of global engagement. Every President, Defense Secretary, and JCS Chairman since 1990 thought it was too big a risk to take. Congress will be certain to make its own view known. Stay tuned.
Posted by: ed ||
07/13/2009 06:12 ||
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#1
Of course Obama will abandon it. In his view, the USA is always the bad guy. The less force available to us, the better. The more damage he can do to our defense establishment in his 4 (hopefully 4) years in office, the better it will be for 'world peace'.
#1
No other 'major' power has either the NCO corps of the Americans or the willingness to push authority as low as possible as the Americans. That requires a social change that is incomparable with those in authority in other 'major' powers. That is an advantage that can not be measured in spreadsheets or equipment brochures.
#4
Too bad. Those of you on the periphery of the civilized world who love to spit on Uncle Sam get ready to enjoy licking Ivan's, Panda or Mohamed's ass. It was fun while it lasted, but let's not do it again. AMF.
Posted by: ed ||
07/13/2009 20:16 Comments ||
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#7
While you could make an argument for a relative decline in American military dominance, the 2002 Persian Gulf wargame doesn't really have a starring role in a compelling version of that argument. It was a *WAR GAME*, and furthermore, its lessons were fundamentally grand-tactical, not truly strategic. It was useful in getting planners to stop making assumptions about the indestructibility of overwhelmingly superior assets in the tight quarters of the Gulf.
I'm pretty certain that those lessons have been thoroughly digested by the relevant chains-of-command, because they've been repeatedly humiliated with the very public nature of that wargame, and beaten over the head with the idiocy of the "do-over" in the press. While the Iranians and Chinese may be wargaming their own grand tactics, they are keeping it pretty close to the vest, which probably means that their own over-grown hall monitors are playing their own mirroring games without benefit of the searing scorn of public exposure of self-serving rules-mongering and handwaving.
Hrm. Now I'm wondering about the capacity & capability of the Chinese general staff. They've never really run a naval war of any complexity, and haven't had a large-scale ground war to run since the border scuffle with Vietnam in the late Seventies. Just how professional, and separately, how flexible are the Chinese likely to be in a set-piece like an invasion of Taiwan? Could they handle the swirling sort of multi-theatre naval war that their "string of pearls" Indian Ocean strategy is going to require of them?
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
07/13/2009 20:55 Comments ||
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#8
"Could they handle the swirling sort of multi-theatre naval war that their "string of pearls" Indian Ocean strategy is going to require of them?"
Nope - but they'll get a lot of people killed trying. :-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/13/2009 21:01 Comments ||
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#9
Compare wid CHINESE MILITARY FORUM > LEV NAVROSOV - FIRST TAIWAN, THEN THE "PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF THE WORLD". RUSS newspaper
"Independent" claims that CHINA is preparing/planning to "fight a big war" agz the USA. TAIWAN ISSUE = ONLY A SYMPTIOM [amongst other] OF A LARGER IDEO-GEOPOL CONFLICT + AGENDUM???
#10
The author completely ignores the issue of power projection, and the associated logistics challenge.
All the crap that America (Walmart) buys from China is delivered to the USA by what is fundamentally a non-Chinese logistics system.
Very few countries on earth have the ability to unilaterally project significant power much beyond their borders. The UK struggled to support its Falklands operation. France has occasionally projected perhaps Brigade-sized units to other continents. I thought it pretty significant that Cuba managed to project and sustain a small fighting force in Angola for several years.
But - looking at the big picture, only the US can project whatever military force it chooses to any spot on earth. Case in point: Middle of nowhere Afghanistan. I think it is absurd folly for us to be fighting there - just wall it up, and call it prison hell on earth - and let the Talibunnies have their own good (8th Century) time therein. But - he fact that we CAN sustain a force there - virtually as far away as is possible from the USA - speaks volumes.
The civilian contractor system that the moonbats so enthusiastically savage is itself unique resource. It employs experts from possibly every nation on earth - but it is generally conceived and managed by Americans.
When I watched a documentary about the US wellhead firefighting teams putting out the oil well fires in Kuwait (Red Adair, Boots & Coots and the ilk), my minds eye was drawing the parallel to US military capability. Only the attitude of the US "system" could drop into Kuwait and put out 700 raging inferno fires within a couple of years.
In my respects, America is swirling around the drain - bled white by the Donks, now grievously mismanaged by an utterly incapable senior executive team. The US military has to draw its recruits from an obese, soft, ridilin-saturated population of overindulged flakes. And yet - the system of military indoctrination - and I do not use that word in its perjorative sense - manages to unfailingly produce a strong, dedicated, and professional military.
Worn out equipment, worn out career soldiers on their sixth, eighth, or (soon) tenth combat tours, and all the other stresses and strains - and yet - because of the wealth of recent small-unit combat experience - our military - or at least our ground combat force component - is arguably the best it has ever been. Our military R&D is second to none. We have (at least until the Obamination erodes them) the best network of trustworthy international allies that the world has ever seen.
From my perspective, the US military is likely to be the last significant institution still standing once the full force of Congressional and Presidential malfeasance has run its course.
China can defend its territory - no question about that. But - even Taiwan is a hard nut for Chin to think about swallowing. Taiwan is several orders of magnitude weaker than the US.
The PA will resume violence and terror against Israel when Fatah is "capable," and "according to what seems right," Fatah activist Kifah Radaydeh says in a PA TV interview. She states openly that peace is not a goal for Fatah:
It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.
Radaydeh says that "armed struggle" has not been ruled out and will continue, depending on how "capable" the PA forces are.
Click here to see the PATV interview with Fatah official, Kifah Radaydeh
Transcript:
Fatah is facing a challenge, because [Fatah] says that we perceive peace as one of the strategies, but we say that all forms of the struggle exist, and we do not rule out the possibility of the armed struggle or any other struggle. The struggle exists in all its forms, on the basis of what we are capable of at a given time, and according to what seems right...
What exactly do we want? It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; and the goal is Palestine. I do not negotiate in order to achieve peace. I negotiate for Palestine, in order to achieve a state.
-- PA TV July 7, 2009
It should be noted that when Fatah refers to "Palestine," it is routinely referring to all of Israel.
Some examples: ...
Posted by: ed ||
07/13/2009 09:34 ||
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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.
