#2
...FWIW, when I was there in 1995, we got a visit from CENTCOM, and I got detailed by our squadron commander to make sure the place was reasonably spic and span.
I did, however, point out that he was asking me to sort out an Air Force base with no aircraft in the middle of the Saudi desert so that we could be visited by a US Navy Admiral.
#5
There's a message here. As in, the Navy just about never lets anyone know where a boomer is on patrol. I'm assuming the blue/gold changeover happen at Diego Garcia. Which means there's a sub tender there. Which means there's other subs ...
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/20/2022 12:15 Comments ||
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#8
I mean, no one tells where their boomers go on patrol. In Feb 2009 HMS Vanguard hit an underwater object while on patrol. A year later, while discussing things with the French they mentioned it, and coincidentally, it turned out the Le Triomphant had hit something at the same time.
You guessed it! Fenderbender!
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/20/2022 13:07 Comments ||
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[Khaama (Afghanistan)] In his most recent remarks, Emomali Rahmon, the president of Tajikistan, once again expressed concern over the security threats Afghanistan poses to the countries in the region and stated that a security belt should be built around Afghanistan.
The capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe, hosted a conference on "International and Regional Border Security and Management Cooperation to Counter Terrorism and Prevent the Movement of Terrorists" on Tuesday, October 18, at which the Tajik president delivered a speech.
He reiterated in this speech the growing insecurity, the re-emergence of terrorist organizations, and the enablement of terrorism in Afghanistan and argued for the need to surround Afghanistan with a security belt.
The president of Tajikistan at the sixth summit of the CICA conference held in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan on Friday stated that "thousands of Mujahideen and jacket wallahs" are trained in Afghanistan.
Rahmon asserted that turbans from the Middle East have been transported to Afghanistan and that open dissemination of terrorist content and propaganda also occurs in Afghanistan. He emphasized that Central Asia is threatened by the presence of terrorist organizations in Afghanistan.
The president of Tajikistan is one of many voices in the international community that warns of the security threat posed by the resurgence of terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, particularly in the wake of the killing of the leader of al-Qaeda in the country’s capital.
[AlAhram] The African Union ...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful... pledged in 2016 to "silence the guns" by the end of 2020, an ambitious agenda of ending armed conflicts on the continent. Just two months before that deadline, the deadliest war in years erupted in Æthiopia.
On 3 November 2020, the armies of the Federal Government of Æthiopia and the State of Eritrea
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[RollingStone] The U.S. Is Losing Yet Another ‘War on Terror’: The Pentagon last month quietly released a report revealing that — despite sending forces to at least 22 countries in Africa — the U.S. isn't reaching its objectives.
The security situation in the African Sahel — where U.S. commandos have trained, fought, and died in a “shadow war” for the past 20 years — is a nightmare, according to a Pentagon report quietly released late last month. It’s just the latest evidence of systemic American military failures across the continent, including two decades of deployments, drone strikes, and commando raids in Somalia that have resulted in a wheel-spinning stalemate and an ongoing spate of coups by U.S.-trained officers across West Africa that the chief of U.S. commandos on the continent said was due to U.S. alliances with repressive regimes.
“The western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,” reads the new analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Pentagon’s foremost research institution devoted to the continent. “The 2,800 violent events projected for 2022 represent a doubling in the past year. This violence has expanded in intensity and geographic reach.”
The worsening security situation reflects most poorly on Special Operations Command Africa or SOCAFRICA — which oversees elite U.S. troops on the continent and has played an outsized role in U.S. military efforts to counter terrorist groups or, in military parlance, violent extremist organizations (VEOs), from Jama’at Nurat al Islam wal Muslimin in Burkina Faso to Ahlu Sunnah wa Jama’a in Mozambique.
“SOCAFRICA, by, with, and through African partners must degrade and disrupt VEOs in order to advance U.S. security interests,” according to formerly secret plans, covering the years from 2019 to 2023, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Rolling Stone. “To achieve the greatest gains, SOCAFRICA focuses its efforts on four major areas: East Africa, the Lake Chad Basin, the Sahel, and the Maghreb.”
As a result, the U.S. has consistently sent its most elite troops — Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marines — to such African hotspots. According to a list provided by U.S. Special Operations Command to Rolling Stone, America’s commandos deployed to 17 African nations — Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Tunisia — in 2021.
But that isn’t the whole story.
An investigation by Rolling Stone found U.S. special operators were sent to at least five additional African countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and Somalia — last year. And this is in addition to myriad engagements by conventional U.S. troops across the continent — from Naval maneuvers alongside forces from Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles to National Guard deployments to Morocco, Kenya, and Somalia.
“The U.S. government consistently lacks transparency in disclosing the scope and locations of its military operations across Africa. The Department of Defense does not acknowledge the full extent of its ‘training’ and ‘cooperation’ activities — oftentimes euphemisms for operations that look very much like combat,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, tells Rolling Stone.
The deployments to these 22 African nations account for a significant proportion of U.S. Special Operations forces’ global activity. Approximately 14 percent of U.S. commandos dispatched overseas in 2021 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the Greater Middle East.
Since the early 2000s, U.S. special operators have deployed on missions that run the gamut from training efforts like SOCAFRICA’s annual Flintlock exercise — which is “designed to strengthen the ability of key partner nations in the region to counter violent extremist organizations” — to “advise, assist, and accompany” missions alongside local troops that can involve U.S. Special Operations forces in combat. The latter are conducted in secret, far from the prying eyes of the press. The former, Flintlock, has become an annual PR camo-wash that affords the U.S. a patina of transparency and a plethora of publicity as cherry-picked reporters provide mostly favorable, sometimes breathless cookie-cutter coverage of tough-talking American commandos barking orders at “raw,” African troops or “muscle-bound twentysomethings nervously watching their African protégés” or “regional forces learning from grizzled Western commandos”; all of it “under the pewter sun” in the “suffocating heat” of a “dusty training ground” of “fine Saharan sand” in the “harsh desert terrain” and “vast choking dustlands” of the Sahel.
Despite substantial engagement by American commandos, terrorism trends across the continent are dismal, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center. “Militant Islamist group violence in Africa has risen inexorably over the past decade, expanding by 300 percent during this time,” reads an August assessment of the entire continent. “Violent events linked to militant Islamist groups have doubled since 2019.”
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone’s Kevin Maurer accompanied Green Berets on a training mission in the Sahelian nation of Niger, where four U.S. troops were killed in an Islamic-state ambush in 2017. “It is hard to see how a dozen Special Forces soldiers and roughly 120 Nigérien commandos covering 200,000 square miles make a difference against an estimated 2,500 fighters aligned with either ISIS or Al Qaeda,” he wrote. The numbers bear out his skepticism.
Militant Islamist violence in the Sahel has quadrupled since 2019. The 2,612 attacks by terrorist groups in the region over the past year outpaced even Somalia. And the 7,052 resulting fatalities account for almost half of all such deaths reported on the continent, according to the Africa Center. A quarter of those fatalities resulted from attacks on civilians — a 67 percent jump from 2021.
At the same time, West African officers trained and advised by U.S. special operators keep overthrowing the governments the United States is trying to prop up — including four coups by Flintlock attendees since 2020. SOCAFRICA’s chief, Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands, tells Rolling Stone that the United States was not responsible for the rebellions, was powerless to prevent them, and suggested a major reason for the coups was popular dissatisfaction with U.S. partners on the continent who suppress the will of their own peoples.
#1
Key point in the article, so aside from getting a lot of right shoulder patches and great promotion enhancement awards, what is the point?
“The western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,” reads the new analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Pentagon’s foremost research institution devoted to the continent. “The 2,800 violent events projected for 2022 represent a doubling in the past year."
[IsraelTimes] Judge calls for former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaei’s arrest for ’proven participation’ planning attack that killed 85 and maimed hundreds.
Argentina ...a country located on the other side of the Deep South. It is covered with Pampers and inhabited by Grouchos, who dance the Tangle. They used to have some islands called the Malvinas located where the Falklands are now. They're not supposed to cry for Evita... has asked Qatar
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
10/20/2022 02:45 ||
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[Khaama(Afghanistan)] Pakistain is seeking billions of dollars in loans for ’mega undertakings’ after a record-breaking monsoonal rainfall led a large part of the country to flood through the residentials and farmlands.
Pakistain estimated the total losses from flood could be as high as $40 billion — $10 billion, according to sources, a figure more than the government’s initial estimate.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Islamabad was not trying to reschedule its external debt, worth about $130bn, but it did need "huge sums of money" for "mega undertakings", according to the Financial Times.
"We are not asking for any kind of measure [such as] a rescheduling or a moratorium," Sharif told the Financial Times. "We are asking for additional funds."
Mega undertakings will include rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructure damaged or washed away in a deluge scientists have linked to climate change.
"There is a gap — and a very serious gap — which is widening by the day between our demands and what we have received," Sharif said at his home in Lahore’s upscale Model Town neighborhood.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/20/2022 00:00 ||
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#1
Pakistain estimated the total losses from flood could be as high as $40 billion
The maddening part is the idiocy of the world that they're gonna rush to pour as much of their taxpayers' money as they can into it before the FATF strikes again.
#3
....linked to climate change.
Sheesh, don't monsoons happen seasonally in Pak?
The Monsoon of South Asia is among several geographically distributed global monsoons. It affects the Indian subcontinent, where it is one of the oldest and most anticipated weather phenomena and an economically important pattern every year from June through September, but it is only partly understood and notoriously difficult to predict.Wikipedia
[IsraelTimes] Interior minister has ordered seven Paleostinian residents of East Jerusalem kicked out over familial ties to Fadi al-Qanbar, who ran over and killed four soldiers in 2017
The HaMoked civil rights organization has filed an appeal to the Jerusalem District Court against the decision of Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked to deport seven Paleostinian residents of East Jerusalem because they are relatives of a terrorist.
The organization wrote in its appeal that the Interior Ministry’s justification for the action — that deporting the relatives was a deterrent against terrorism — had no legal basis, adding that deportation would violate their civil rights under Israeli law.
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[NPASYRIA] Delegation of Hamas, the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,, a Paleostinian Islamic group, intends to visit Syria on Wednesday to rebuild relations after years of estrangement on the background of protests, and then civil war, the country has been witnessing since 2011.
Rooters said, in a report, citing two Hamas officials as saying that the group had decided to restore relations with Syria.
Hamas supported the 2011 street uprising against Syrian government and vacated their headquarters in Damascus in 2012, which disturbed their Iranian ally.
"Hamas has eased into the process slowly, fearing a backlash from its mostly Sunni Moslem financiers ... most of the victims of Assad’s crackdown in Syria were Sunnis," according to the officials.
Normalizing ties with the Syrian government may restore Hamas’ inclusion in a so-called "axis of resistance" against Israel.
Rooters said, quoting Mustafa Sawwaf, a Paleostinian politician, as saying, "Hamas’ reconciliatory move towards Syria aims to create new ground for the Islamist faction."
Posted by: Fred ||
10/20/2022 00:00 ||
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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.
