What's Kurdish for "under the bus"?

The Turkish Army appears to be preparing to throw some additional complexity into the already-eleventh-dimension-chess-game that is post-IS Syria by threatening portions of northwest Syria currently controlled by the Kurdish PYD Party "People's Protection Units" (YPG) armed forces.

The Erdogan government, much like the governments preceding it, sees the YPG as functionally indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, and clearly now that the Islamic State is off the table and the endgame for Syria appears to be closing has decided to take action against the perennial bogeymen of the states of the Anatolian and the Fertile Crescent, the Kurds. Or, at least, one faction of that beleaguered people.

The YPG was central to the US drive to reduce the physical "state" of the Islamic State, providing the only really effective infantry for that campaign. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the "US-led anti-ISIS coalition" tossed the YPG in the Afrin region under the Turkish bus, noting that the YPG in northwest Syria were not within the coalition AO.

I'm not sure how this will work, given that the same article linked above claims that the Trump Administration's cunning Syria plan includes supporting some 30,000 "Syrian Democratic Forces" along the Iraq-Syria border, ostensibly to continue to hunt IS fugitives but strategically to interdict Iraqi and Iranian support for proxies inside Syria such as Hizbullah.

The SDF, however, is pretty much the YPG with ash-and-trash. The YPG fielded something like 50,000 troops, while the Arab portions of the SDF consist of two main groups, the Jaysh al-Thuwar that includes some Turkmen and Kurds but seldom put together more than 2-3,000 fighters, and the Jaysh al-Sanadid militia of the Shammar tribe centered in northeastern Syria and Anbar province in western Iraq. The Shammar could assemble 8-10,000 troops. If the YPG decide to grab their A-bags and beat cheeks there won't be enough "SDF" to provide an interior guard on a porta-potty.

And this is beside the whole "The Kurds get screwed again" meme which seems to be a Middle Eastern thing and one in which the U.S. plays it's own shameful part.

Leaving the YPG units in the northwest to be smashed by Turkish tanks after coopting them to help fight for U.S. political objectives would be in the great tradition of American expeditionary war; maybe the Kurds can find some surviving Vietnamese mountain tribe Mike Force guys who can teach them the Nung term for "buddyfucker".

Once again we're reminded, not so much of Trump Administration incompetence (although that certainly plays a role here), but of the fact that describing the United States' Middle Eastern policy as an actual "policy" - that is, as something developed with a thoughtful consideration of regional realities and American national interests - remains somewhere between risible and tragic.

Or, as the Kurds themselves might observe; "Bikime te, Yankee! Ezê kuza dayika te sor bikim!"

Yakla: Arabic for Dieppe? Normandy? Neither? Who knows?

It will surprise no one here that my general opinion of the not-even-a-month-old reign of His Fraudulency is a mixture of disgust and contempt; disgust for the greedy, mulcting brutality of the Grifter-in-Chief and contempt for an "adminstration" that is barely capable of incompetence, let alone anything approaching a grasp of the actual complexity and difficulty of running an immense industrial nation.

But...since this is supposed to be a blog about military affairs and geopolitics...let me concentrate on one specific issue involving one single episode in this farcical miniseries and what is says, not just about the Barely Sentient Administration but about the whole business we've been doing in the Middle East since 2001; the raid on the village of Yakla in Yemen.

And the issue is this: "winning"

Specifically, the new President seems to be furiously irked that anyone questions that this particular operation was a "win" for the Forces of Goodness and Peace (i.e., the United States, by definition the Good Guys, amirite..?)

"...a winning mission..." is the exact phrase that the Tangerine Toddler Twitterblurted out (attributing it to his SecDef, mind you).

Now.

AI have no idea what the actual objective(s) of this raid was or were, and, second, I have no idea whether that objective or objectives was or were achieved. And, indeed, if it was in intel-gathering operation we will probably NEVER know, and rightly so. Whatever intelligence was obtained will be hidden and used to guide future operations, as it should be.

If the intelligence desired was obtained, then, in the strictest sense even a raid that seems to have fallen apart tactically, cost over 100 million dollars as well as dozens of lives - innocent, friendly and enemy - and has provided cause for at least one of the "governments" of Yemen to first revoke and then to request a "review" of U.S. ground operations in their portion of that wretched land can be called a "success".

But..."winning"?

The entire farrago about this mission "winning" or "failing" just point out to me two problems.

First, and specific to this administration, that Five-Deferment Donnie has no more idea of how actual military operations, campaigns, and wars work than a fucking Jersey cow knows about the proceedings of the Council of Trent. The "winning" nonsense is that's just how a simpleminded derp thinks war works, and the orange Amway salesman has never been closer to combat than the concession line where American Sniper was playing, so that's just how he thinks.

But people like Mattis should know better, and tell him so. I suspect that he did, and that the joker didn't listen, or understand.

Second, and worse, generic to our nation and our foreign policy, that we're even debating about whether some piddly-ass little airmobile raid was a "win" or a "failure" points out the degree that ALL of us; the press, the public, the military and civil authorities in the United States have no real fucking clue what the fuck we are doing in the Middle East.

Because, quite simply, this Yakla raid is part of a much larger, much more complex...something. A "(Sort of) War on (Certain Kinds of People Who Use Certain Kinds of) Terror". A "clash of civilizations". A Great Power cabinet war gone out of control. A...well, I have no fucking idea, actually, and what pisses me off is that I'll bet you and Joe and Molly and Steve Fucking Bannon have no fucking idea, either.

The Yemen raid was something of a tactical mess. But, more importantly, we don't know what our actual goals are in Yemen and whether (or how much) this raid got us closer to them, or not.

In August of 1942 the Brits attacked the French Channel port of Dieppe. The raid was a fiasco, thousands of Allied troops were killed or captured, and the Nazi hierarchy exulted in their success. But the Allies learned a ton from Dieppe, so the next time they came ashore in France it opened the road all the way to the Elbe.

Is this raid Dieppe, or Normandy, or what?

We have no context. We can't possibly know.

And that's a huge problem. If you have no idea what your end-state is (or, worse, if your end-state is something utterly impossible, such as "the utter defeat of radical Islamic terrorism") then how the hell do you know when you've reached it. How do you know whether Operation Yemen Derp, or whatever, has gotten you closer, or further away, or sideways, or where the hell you are?

Ewe Made Me Love Ewe...

Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ on a Fucking Pogo Stick, what part about fucking consent don't you fucking understand?

When Rand Paul lets his Inner Libertarian out for a walk that little bastard just goes skipping off pretty much anywhere, don't he?

"I think this is the conundrum and gets back to what you were saying in the opening -- whether or not churches should decide this. But it is difficult because if we have no laws on this people take it to one extension further. Does it have to be humans? I'm kind of with you, I see the thousands-of-year tradition of the nucleus of the family unit. I also see that economically, if you just look without any kind of moral periscope and you say, what is it that is the leading cause of poverty in our country? It's having kids without marriage. The stability of the marriage unit is enormous and we should not just say oh we're punting on it, marriage can be anything."

No, dumbfuck.

Look, I've visited this whole business over and over again. My position is - and, by inference, my opinion that the opinion of any sane human should be - if you're adults, then you should be able to form any sort of goddamn domestic union you want.

Yes, that means polygamy.

And polyandry.

Boys and boys? Yep. Girls and girls? Yep. Boys and boys and girls and girls?

Yep.

Boys and sheep?

No.

Why?

Because a sheep - and a child, or a person who is emotionally or mentally a child, or someone who is comatose, or a corpse, or anyfuckingotherthing that cannot fucking understand the meaning of the emotional and physical intimacy of a personal relationship (call it marriage or bunga or whatever the hell else you want to call it) - cannot fucking consent to that intimacy.

And, mind you, this moron is supposed to be the "Thinking Man's Conservative". This silly fucktard is supposed to be among the Best and the Brightest that the GOP has on sale. This is the 1% of the Intellectual Wing of the GOP, for God's sake.

Can you imagine what the hell Sarah "Somewhere In Alaska My Village Is Missing Its Idiot" Palin thinks on this issue?

I mean, fuckadoodledoo; consent. Consent. Consent as in "consenting adults".

Consent.

How fucking hard is that?

Central Asian Rocket Science

Of all the things that frustrate me about our current adventure in Afghanistan, perhaps the most frustrating is listening to the various D.C. talking heads bloviate about Pakistan.The latest was ADM Mullen, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who laid stick on the Pakistani ISI for supposedly assisting in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. But this has been a constant theme for years. Chris Hitchens gives us a taste of the 180-proof version of this rhetoric, the pure, undiluted, GOP-stillhuse hootch in his latest Slate column, and, yes, I know it's fucking Slate.

Still.

Why does this bug me?

Because I'm a relatively unlettered hairy-knuckled sergeant, a spearcarrying nobody from the Northwest. My entire first-hand geopolitical and global political experience consists of having watched Egyptian border cops and Israeli reservists make fist-pumping gestures at each other across the wire at Taba.

And I fucking know that the Pakistanis care more about their military position with India than any-fucking-thing else in Southwest Asia.Including "terrorism" and the damn Taliban.

The whole POINT behind their coziness with many of the people we're shooting in the hustings of central Asia is that the Taliban regime was anti-Indian, and their remnants are, too. The Karzaites we've installed in Kabul are not, and so the Pakis REAL problem, their single most crucial concern is ensuring that they have a lever to pressure Kabul into having their back if they get into another scrap with India.

So the rule of thumb is; don't bet on Pakistan Facebook-friending your Afghan proxy if that proxy shows signs of "friending" India.

For conventional wisdom that one ranks right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia."

Oh.

Anyway, the frustrating thing is that the rhetoric coming out of D.C. hits the same note; why, why, WHY are you so naughty, Pakistan? What can we do/what must we do to make you stop hugging these nasty terrorists? Why don't you give us more geopolitical love?

Well, duh.The Durand Rule is If You Let Your Afghan Proxy Get Close To India Don't Expect Much Cooperation From Pakistan.

I can figure this out.

Why can't all these highly paid people in D.C.?

I don't know, but every time I run across it it's really frustrating.

You Can't Get There From Here

We'v been spending a good bit of time discussing the current events in Egypt. Jim addresses the specifics of the apparent dissonance between our domestic and foreign policies over the protests there in the preceding post; Jason over at "Armchair Generalist" goes even further, describing our Middle East policy as "broken".But I can't honestly see how the U.S. could have taken a different route than backing the strongmen who have ruled in Egypt since Nasser.

We're caught on the cleft stick of our own making because we want two things that, like matter and anti-matter, don't and can't exist together. We want to:

1) back Israel without serious question; we've been fairly supine on every question of Israeli internal defense. The Israelis make their decisions based on their own analyses, but we have been pretty muted when these analyses end up producing the punitive acts that Israel has used to defend itself from its Palestinian enemies. The cumulative effect is to make us look like Israel's complascent sugar daddy. While Israel is a nice little democracy this is really a luxury on our part, since Israel is strategically worthless, but Great Powers are allowed to have their luxuries and Israel is one of ours.

But we also want (and need):

2) at least some sort of passive neutrality from the Arab states, because they control the REAL geopolitical/strategic assets we need from the region; passage through Suez, petroleum, cooperation against the jihadis.

Genuinely "democratic" Arab states would be unlikely to help with #2 if we insisted that they come with us on #1. You can argue this until the end of forever - I personally think that the Arab states would be well off to get Egypt to absorb Gaza, Jordan the West Bank, accept a whopping cash payoff from the U.S./Israel and get the fuck on with life - but the reality is that to get an Egypt to Camp David you NEEDED a Mubarak (or a Sadat, whatever - a leader who had to be responsive to Abdul and Maryam Lunchpail would have risked his life doing it. Sadat did, and did, remember?).

So I don't see how the U.S. has any real options here. To get an "un-broke" policy you'd need to have different goals. So I think the thing here is that walloping the current U.S. leadership about Egypt is hammering on a symptom. The "disease" - the underlying malfunction that produces things like the current U.S. paralysis on Egypt - is that you can't really design a Middle East policy that gets to have both #1 and #2. And discussing the pros and cons - especially the cons - of #1 are completely and utterly off limits in Washington D.C.

It's worth noting that the fall of a U.S. backed dictator doesn't HAVE to be traumatic or disastrous for U.S. foreign policy. Sure, the post-Marcos Philippines closed Subic (Clark was unusable after Pinatubo, anyway) but in the long run the successor governments have been quite cooperative on many issues; the threat of domestic islamic rebels as well as the loom of the dragon to the west surely has a lot to do with that. Post-Pinochet Chile hasn't really been hostile, and post-Somoza-post-Ortega Nicaragua is relatively quiescent. The real notable outlier is the post-Shah Iran, but Egypt doesn't have anyone like the Ayatollah Khomeni to push it towards a violently islamic state.

So overall I suspect that post-Mubarak Egypt, though possibly not as passive on matters involving Israel, has as good a chance of being willing to cooperate with the U.S. to some extent as it does of becoming a rival. But it IS unlikely to cooperate on Israeli issues, and if the U.S. forces those issues and the Egyptian leaders - whoever they turn out to be - are forced to choose, a democratic Egypt would seem to be much less likely to follow the U.S. policy.

And it seems to me that there's no way to really do much about that.

(crossposted from MilPub)

The Man Who Wasn't There; a Cautionary Tale

As I was walking up the stairI met a man who wasn't therehe wasn't there again todayI wish, I wish he'd stay away“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan
brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the
Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of
the late deceased,And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."

Just tell them that Steiner will show up any day now.

“You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

GEN Petraeus, in Robert Woodward's "Obama's Wars"


What the...the fu'...WHAT??

THIS is the best the theatre commander can do? This from the Warrior-Sage of Mosul, the savior of the Long War? That's IT? A multigenerational, unwinnable clusterfucking landwar in Asia? That's the advice you're giving the Leader?

Christ, I used to get military advice that good from SP4 Denny after a half rack of Natty Lite and a basket of salty chicken wings on any Friday night down at the Yadkin Road Hooters. It came a lot cheaper. And Georgie would even do the "Barbie Girl Dance" after he'd had some Jim Beam, too.

Fuck me runnin'. Does anybody here know how to play this game?

Sunday Morning 11:30am

We've had a lovely Labor Day weekend. Yesterday's morning cleanup yielded a deucluttered house, the trip to Oaks Park was fun, and the planked salmon made a delicious dinner.

This morning we had an "Avatar" sort of morning, enjoyed good coffee and bacon, looked at wedding pictures (again) to sate Little Miss' desire to see Mommy in her pretty dress. And we're getting ready for the Nickel Arcade.

So I had just a moment to stop and read the news. Which is, as always, filled with the most ridiculous crap - it is an ever-verdant source of wonder to me how much bandwidth the three (what, five?) conglomerates that own the news media can cram with worthless celebrity gossip and badly-informed "reportage".

So I pretty much skimmed over most of the "news". But this BBC article caught my eye. It's not really "news" to anyone who a) has been paying attention and b) isn't viewing the world through their "war on terror" goggles. This phrase caught my attention;

"Yet many Iraqis fear that with the Americans no longer here in force, and the Iraqi army and police still lacking sufficient training, the violent extremists on both the Sunni and the Shia sides could start fighting again."

And I paused, for a languid Sunday morning moment and wondered just exactly how many times we will have to hear that phrase again.

The U.S. Army and the various mercenary organizations associated with our mess-o-potamia have been "training" the IA and IP since, when, about 2004? At least since 2007 or 2008. So the senior IA units have at least 2-3 years and possibly as many as 6 years of guerrilla combat time?

And this isn't exactly crossing the Rhine or meeting the GSFG in the Fulda Gap, here. It's your basic light-infantry fight; IMTs, squad-to-company tactics...shoot, move, communicate. Basic trainees get it in 13 weeks. I went from civilian to combat unit in less than a year, expected to perform under fire. Entire armies like the Kitchener battalions of WW1 learn to do it in months, certainly in under a year.

How t'fuck much "training" do these mooks need..?




Just a idle thought for a holiday Sunday morning.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

Steiner ist REALLY nicht fucking angekommen

I came across this over at Armchair Generalist; it seems that some pissant outfit named "Constantin Film AG" has been harassing YouTube into taking down parodies of the now-viral "bunker rant" scene from their movie "Downfall" ("Der Untergang").

Here's a parody of that, courtesy of Zaquery Green, on the much-less well known Vimeo website.

This is actually pretty infuriating. The Copyright Act of 1976 (17 U.S.C. § 107) and subsequent decisions such as Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., Mattel v. Walking Mountain Productions, and Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin clearly lay out parody as a "fair use" of copyrighted material. Not to mention that the damn flick would be scarcely known outside the German-speaking world without these parodies.

My world is a little darker knowing that driftglass' brilliant "Little Richie Daley Reacts to Losing The Olympics" parody can no longer be viewed through his, or my, blog. I know that we're all wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate media and their whores. I know that our modern media culture has no integrity and will bend over for the bemonied, belawyered interests that run the house. But it's nice to forget that for a moment and just have a laugh. Until you're reminded of Who Owns You.

So curse you, snippy and humorless little Constantin Film AG. Curse you, testicle-free YouTube. You are helping to ensure that we are truly living in a debased time.

The End of History?

I nod in passing to my German friends celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall...

...and the end of more than four decades of partition of the land "von den Maas bis an die Memel".

Y'know what's interesting, tho? (and it's me, it IS just me and my woolgathering mind) But what comes to the front of my brain is that it was just this period that inspired Frank Fukuyama to pen "The End of History", that paean to Ayn Rand's panty-sniffers in the Mergers and Acquisition Department as the Big Winner in the Civilization Sweepstakes. In the Showdown the Evil Commies had to turn up a pair of deuces and Capitalist Goodness raked in the big pot of the historical triumph. Or so the story went.

Yet here we are, twenty years on and the Bullpen of Big Business is mired in pointless foreign wars with a ragged band of 12th Century wannabes, her roads, bridges and schools decaying whilst ignorant armies clash on shout-radio and that triumphant "unfettered free market" done went and shat the bed.

Well.

Well, well, well...

I'm sure glad I was wise enough to invest my Peace Dividend in my rock-solid 401K. Who can imagine what would have happened if my country had refused to seize the opportunity to completely reassess itself in the wake of the Soviet collapse and instead chose to embark on a program of self-impoverishment, reckless privatization, social stratification and foolish pseudoimperialism?


Erich Honecker laughs somewhere in Hell.

No Way Out

Every time I read something about Iraq in particular, or the Middle East in general, I realize that for an American such as myself this part of the world often takes on the form of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. And I think I'm as fairly well informed on geopolitical issues and the Middle East as anyone short of being able to speak and read Arabic. It always makes me wonder how this region appears to self-satisfied, incurious dolts like our Bicycle Chief, his evil genius Mr. Cheney and the other neoimperialist drum-beaters trying to hurry our national parade back down Little Brown Brother Street.

So when I read - such as here and here - these fascinating summations of recent news items in the Arabic press that suggest that even the Iraqis are being twisted around by the political machinations in play in this benighted land...

Remember the old Kevin Costner movie "No Way Out" (remember when Costner was an actor rather than a punch line of a Bad Joke..? Remember when Sean Young...oh. Oops. Sorry, Sean, you were ALWAYS a Bad Joke - at least, a bad actress. Sorry.) where you spend the whole movie rooting for Kev to outwit the Bad Government Traitor and save the day? Until the KGB controller steps out from behind the two-way mirror and you realize that dear Kev IS the Bad Guy, the Evil Spy, and the whole damn plot you've thought you were seeing is backwards, an immense deception, a farrago of lies that you bought and believed and were invested in?

Yeah, it's kinda like that.

WASF

I won't apologize for the cheescake illustration. Bad Actress as she is, Sean is a hell of a lot more scenic than Iyad Allawi or Mookie al Sadr.

Everyone out at once!

On the stunningly unexpected Scottie McClellan revelations that the Bush Administration is characterized by an insanely partisan, uninformed, propagandistic conviction of its own destiny unswayed by events, facts or other intrusions of the reality-based world outside, that insulates the simplistic Decider from the regrettable consequences of his frequent lapses in judgement, and was crafted from the start to put its own goals ahead of protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States as well as the best interests of the American public?Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud] Everybody out at once!

20,000 Years in Sing-Sing

Now there's a smart idea.

Uh. Yeah.

I can see it now:

U.S. interrogator: "OK, Hamid, do you see now how it's in your best interests to work with the government in Kabul?"

Hazara Interpreter: [Pushtu] "Are you ready to rally to us, noseless son of a Waziri dog, or shall I tell the boys in the back room to warm up the testicle clamps for when this clueless get of a Chicago gangster and a Hollywood whore departs?"

Prisoner: [Pushtu] "Go ahead, apostate boot-licking scum of the Yankee heretics. My sons will toast your testicles on your own torture implements."

Interpreter: "The Taliban says that he will speak with my commander later this evening about cooperation with our government, sir."

Interrogator: "See what I've been telling you, Abdullah? Fair treatment and humanity will always work better than stuff like putting some guy's nuts in a vice. I'll go tell Captain Amir."

[he leaves]

Interpreter: [Pushtu] "Farewell, testicleless one... [turns out the light] ..we will be waiting."

Thug Life

So there's a "truce" between the Sadrist Mahdi Army and the Dawa/ISCI "government" of the Maliki trend.Or maybe not.

The real question to me as an American is what the hell our armed forces are doing in Sadr City and elsewhere in Iraq with regards to this Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence.

Keep in mind that this isn't "Al Qaeda" we're talking about here. This isn't an Iranian proxy. Take away the Twelver Shiite religion and Sadr is basically Juan Peron in a turban. He's the front man for the poor crapped-out Shiites that first Saddam and then the middle-class Shia of the Dawa party and the Iranian-friendly ISCI have persistently shat upon.

So far no one on either side of the political aisle seems to be asking the most critical question about U.S. participation in this sectarian squabble:

WHY?

Why is this a must-do operation? This isn't mostly empty desert and mud-hut villages. This is Fallujah writ large. We might have to "destroy it in order to save it".

And this is because...we want to disarm the JAM?

(And why is disarming the JAM so much more important than disarming, say, the Iranian-affiliated Badr militia? Or the ex- and maybe-not-so-ex-AQ-subsidiaries now going under the moniker "Sons of Iraq"?)

Because...Sadr and the Sadrist trend are Islamists?

(And the gang we're supporting are called the "Rotarian Supreme Council of Iraq"?)

Because...the Sadrists are Iranian allies?

(And our boys the Malkists, Dawa and their ISCI pals are...ummm...not?)

If we were asked to intervene in Sri Lanka to fight the Tamil Tigers we'd laugh. We have no dog in that fight, and, frankly, the Sri Lankan "government" is less vile but no more democratic and no more an ally than the LTTE. If the British asked us to bomb the Provos in Belfast we'd scoff. This isn't the U.S. as the LAPD fighting the Eight-Trey Crips - this is the Crips versus the Bloods only with U.S. airpower backing one group of homies against the other. Making them part of the "Iraqi Army" doesn't turn Badr Corp thugs into Audie Murphy. It just puts the stamp of officialdom on the thug life.Plus, why is it suddenly so bloody critical that NOW we fight our way into a Shiite slum so that our Shiite "allies" can eliminate one of their sectarian rivals?

Looking at this from the "power politics" perspective I can see how the defenestration of the Sadrists serves three objects for three different groups:

1. For the Maliki kleptocracy it allows them to use their U.S. ally as a proxy to eliminate an internal rival without being the "bad guy" having to trust their own troops who may or may not be happy about fighting Maliki's gang war (the heavy lifting in Basra, Baghdad and Mosul seems to have been done by foreign troops and fire support). It eliminates the JAM as a potential counter-state enemy of the Malikist trend like Hezbollah in Lebanon. It also makes the point to the Sunni muj that the Shia government isn't "sectarian" (See? We're not JUST killing y'all - we kill other Shiites, too!)

2. For the U.S., it eliminates embarassing evidence of unrest in the form of daily barrages into the Green Zone, and (for a certain GOP faction in our government) continues the original "strategy" that got us there - the pursuit of long-term basing rights and a Status of Forces Agreement that secures a "central position" for U.S. forces in the Middle East.3. For Iran, it eliminates Sadr as an Iraqi political power and especially an Iraq-for-Iraqis irritant, while keeping him alive and in place as a potential anti-U.S. influence.

For me, the downside of all this is for my nation as a whole: it welds us to ONE faction in the dysfunctional Iraqi "state". We now cannot ever allow a Sadrist to be elected, or if elected, to serve - they will be even more committed to ejecting us from Camp Victory et al. We make this mistake over and over: Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, Karzai in Afghanistan. We buck these tigers and then have to keep them in power, becoming the props for dictators and earning the justified loathing of every local outside the ruling elites. In pursuit of...what? Petroleum? Influence? Great power props?

We have become what our Founders despised - just another Big Power stomping about the less-paved parts of the world. Just another playa in the global Thug Life, using guns to get the bling and the ho's. Just another gangsta, thuggin' it on the mean streets of Baghdad.Somewhere in Elysium, Thomas Jefferson just threw up a little in his mouth.

Like a Football Bat

Clausewitz talked about the four types of officers.

The bright and lazy, he said, made the Great Captains, because they wanted an easy victory and were smart enough to figure out how to do it.

The bright and energetic made good staff officers, doing the hard work of translating the Great Captain's vision into fifteen page operations orders.

The dull and lazy were easily enough shunt into dead-end jobs and kept out of the way.

But the stupid and energetic, he warned, should be shot out of hand before embarking on campaign. Because they were going to be A Problem.

Would that someone had remembered that maxim before letting Dick Cheney out of the Naval Observitory.

I've gotten to the point where I'm no longer amazed when a Bushite foreign policy plan floats belly-up like a carp in a crapper. The wonder is that anything these idiots plan works out, given what we now know about their moronic cronyism and faith-based policies. But this week's fiasco in Beirut seems impressive even for the sort of people who consider Darth Cheney a "statesman".


Pat Lang sums it up: "We Americans (well, the Bushies) brought this on with our insistence that Shia numbers and electoral success would not be reflected in the division of power within the government of that sad little country. Did we encourage the Sonorans to think that they could demand the self-disembowelment of Hizbullah? Did we really think the Government of Lebanon actually could do that. We may well have. It would be of a piece with the fantasy driven policy of the last eight years. Any gamble, no matter how absurd and improbable of success has fit the pattern of desperate longing that has driven American policy this last decade."

The demographic reality on the ground in Lebanon has been that the Shiite Arabs there have a plurality of both the numbers and politco-military power. The were always going to win out eventually. When you insist that the pit bull defer to the chihuahua you're livin' in a dreamworld, Sparky. But that's BushWorld, where we'd rather be "right" and lose than deal with the devil and win.

Yes, they are allied with Iran. No, they do not have to be enemies of the U.S. They hate Israel and will use whoever they can (Syria, Iran, us...) to get the wherewithal to fight the jewish state. Once we start to understand that Israel's policies do not have to be ours we will be on the way to getting our head out of the quagmire-ass that is the Middle East.

Honestly. These people could fuck up a hot oil foot massage.

Arithmatic on the Frontier

I got a certain amount of cynical amusement at reading that Our Man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai (the "President" of Afghanistan) dodged his fourth assassination attempt last Tuesday during some sort of celebration of the resistance to the Soviet occupation of the Eighties.Not so much because the poor bastard was shot at, although that's part of the job description of being our U.S. sock puppet in Kabul. Or the fact that Kabul is still dicey enough that he could be shot at, although that's not entirely unexpected.

No, what makes me chuckle is the picture of "President" Karzai, the "Gucci guerilla", getting sniped during a celebration of the mujeheddin's anti-Soviet jihad. I'd bet a couple of afghanis that the boys who looked down the barrel of the Kalashnikovs at their purported Chief Executive last Tuesday were the ones who had been freezing their asses off in the Panshir Valley in 1981, dodging Hinds while Hamid Baby was dodging nothing more lethal that a misjudged ball of kibbi or an occasional sharp sliver of ice in his gin and tonic at the Raffles Club in Peshawer.

If that's not a perfect metaphor for our Afghanistan "policy" I can't think of a better one.

Much was made of the recent move of GEN Petraeus, the Savior-General of Iraq, to CENTCOM where he will presumably bring his water-walking brand of counterinsurgency to Afghanistan as well to ensure accomplishment of the mission there.

And...while we're at it...what IS the mission there?

Well, the ISAF website says that the purpose of the fighting there is "assisting the Afghan Government in extending and exercising its authority and influence across the country, creating the conditions for stabilisation and reconstruction."

"...the Afghan Government in extending and exercising its authority and influence across the country." Got it?

This is where it's hard to type for the laughter.

Sun Tzu says that a victorious army decides on the victory and then fights, while a defeated army fights and then tries to figure out the victory.

So what do you call an army fighting for a victory that is not only not possible, but one that has NEVER been possible, ever, in the history of the tribes-with-flags that is Afghanistan.

This week, as I was reading the usual bluster and posturing from the usual Western sources about the Karzai shooting I was also rereading Byron Farwell's "Queen Victoria's Little Wars", a delightful little book and an invaluable primer for those of us military history buffs in search of a little recreational wog-bashing to while away the idle hours watching other people building retaining walls.

For Victorian England was perhaps the most effective, most ruthless imperial power since the fall of Rome. Probably a full third of the less-pale inhabitants of the globe felt the British ammunition boot up their ass at some point between the late Seventeenth and middle Twentieth Centuries. I was curious about what Mr. Farwell had to say about how the Brits had done with the irascible tribesmen of the Hindu Kush. Shall we see?

1839 The First Afghan War was a bloody disaster for Victorian Britian - a single survivor of the expeditionary force of 4,500 troops staggered back to India in 1842. The British, never one to suffer insults back in those bloodyminded days, proceeded to whistle up an army and march back to burn Kabul, set up a puppet (who lasted through the afternoon the last sepoy marched off) and left.1842 Expedition against the Shinwaris
1844 Campaign against hill tribes in Sind
1849 Expeditions against the Baizai and Afridis
1850 Expedition against the Kohat Pass Afridis
1851 Operations against the Umarzai Waziris
1852 Expeditions against the Umarzai Waziris, Ranzanis and Afridis
1852-53 Expedition to punish Hasanzais
1853 Expeditions against Masranis, Shiranis and Jowaki Afridis
1855 Expeditions against Aka Khel Afridis, Miranzais, Rubia Khel Orakzais
1857 Expedition against villages on the Yusafzai border
1858 Expedition against the Khudu Khels
1859 Expedition against the Kabul Khel Waziris
1860 Expedition against the Mahsud Waziris
1864 Expedition against the Mohmands
1868 Expeditions against the Bizoti Orakzais and Black Mountain Hazaras
1869 Expedition against the Bizoti Orakzais
1872 Expedition against the Dawaris
1874 Expedition against the Daffla
1877 Expedition against the Jawaki Afridis
1878 Expedition against the Zahka Khel Afridis
1878-1880 Second Afghan War: after a bloody and indecisive first phase, General Roberts marches from Kabul to Kandahar and defeats the main Afghan leader, Ayub Khan. The British march back to India and within a year the political situation deteriorates again.
1881 Expedition against the Mahsud Waziris
1884 Expedition against the Zhob Valley
1888 Expedition against the Black Mountain Hazaras
1891 Expedition against the Hazaras
1892 Isazai expedition
1894 Punitive expedition to Waziristan
1895 Chitral campaign
1897 Punitive expedition to the Tochi Valley, Tirah campaign
1899 Bebejiya expedition

And that was that. Not because the Afghans stopped being a pain in the arse; it was because poor Victoria finally died, and the wars became Edwardian wars. Or Georgian Wars: there was a "Third Afghan War" in 19 freaking 19, for God's sake. All these people do is fight - foreigners for choice, each other if there's no other option.

During a discussion about this over at Phil Carter's new Intel Dump one of the commentors posted what I consider to be a "typical" justification for why we're still in Afghanistan six years on trying to make a nation where there has never been one. Here's his comment:

"Afghanistan is a case in point. It certainly could have been conducted as a punitive operation, as you suggest. However, that would not have accomplished anything, strategically speaking. It would have quickly regressed into a failed state and again become a sanctuary for terrorist organization to train and grow. More importantly, such a "punitive operation" would have provided fertilizer to a whole crop of young muslims who had once again been humiliated by the west and who would be hungry for a way to strike back. Once again, we would have gone into an area, caused a whole bunch of damage and chaos and left without any effort to clean up the mess. Not exactly a great strategy for winning friends, or at least avoiding making new enemies."

And here's my response.

"Not sure how you regress a failed state into a failed state. More to the point, how do you regress a failed state that never WAS a state other than in the fantasies of imperial cartographers. The British tried every option to change this collection of tribes with flags: war, peace, bribery, threats, subversion...it didn't work for them, and they were the best imperialists since the Romans. Why - in the name of God - WHY! - do we think we can do better?

Afghanistan will remain what it is until the Afghans, or AN Afghan, decide differently. To send our soldiers to fight and die for this impossible, fruitless chimera of a mission is to forget that a truly wise geopolitical policy realizes that there are some aims, however laudable, that are simply not achievable, or at least worth the blood and treasure needed to attain them."Or, as the Afghans themselves might sing: "There's a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach. But, alas, I cannot swim."

The stupid...it burnssss!!!

So it turns out that the "defining moment" in Iraqi political history was just another clusterfuck; something that our occupying Army and politico-military leadership didn't know about, had no hand in planning and are shocked by the results of.

Here's the sentence I enjoyed the most, in a richly sardonic way: "But the Basra offensive has some in the U.S. military fretting that Iraq's forces, while better than they were six months ago, cannot fully defend their communities."

Okay, let me get this straight. The Malikists invaded much of Basra to oust the local Sadrist Shia militia from their "community". The Sadrists defended "their community" and who pretty much fought them to a standstill. And yet we're supposed to believe that this shows that the "Iraqi Army" (i.e. the Badr Corps and Malikist militia) can't "defend their communities"!!??


Words fail me.

The truly sad part is that it is this tidy, American-centric message - not the confused, sectarian, chaotic reality - that will get through to us here in the U.S., demonstrating not that we have wasted three years of blood and treasure to recreate Marvin the ARVN in Iraq; but that we need to continue this wasteage, since our new Marvins are so fucking incompetent.

We. Are. So. Fucked.

Tuesday Thirteen: you want some JAM with that?

With the understanding that the shooting will probably go on for a while, it looks like the endgame is shaping up for the clusterfuck in southern Iraq. All the shouting for winners and losers, I think, overlooks the pre-modern and tribal character of this whole farrago. The endgame appears to let me make Tuesday's Thirteen "Things You Wanted To Know About Operation Freedom":1. It was the Maliki faction and its militia (the Iraqi Army or "IA") that began this mess by trying to push the Sadrists in Basra.

2. The Sadrist militia, the "Jayish-al-Mahdi" or JAM, under pressure in the south, opened the Big Dance by widening the fighting to places like Kut and Diwaniya as well as reminding the Malikists that he has a big salient - Sadr City - right in their heartland in Baghdad.

3. So the "extreme" victory conditions for the two sides were:
a) the Malikists would rout the JAM in the south while easily snuffing out fighting in the smaller theatres elsewhere: in the government's best case the Sadrists are routed in Basra and elsewhere and the local people welcome the government militias,
b) the Sadrists would hold Basra, while causing paralysis across the south as far north as Baghdad, and in doing so expose the fragility of the "IA" and its dependence on the foreign invaders: in the Sadrists best case the government falls.

4. It was NEVER likely that either side was going to achieve their extreme victory conditions. Remember, this isn't the Battle of the Bulge. This is tribal warfare, where it's more important to count coup and fight again another day. An indecisive result was nearly foreordained from the beginning, because
a) the government would have to harrow the poor Shia neighborhoods for their victory conditions, leaving a swath of dead and injured civvies. Done with sufficient ruthlessness this might, in fact, work; but the Malikists knew that their patron can't be seen to be backing the Roman way publicly. And if done poorly terror methods would simply leave an angrier group of poor Shiites to remain a headache for the Maliki faction until the next time.
b) the JAM simply doesn't have the military power to defeat the government's militia backed by the American supermilitia's land and air power.5. The actual fighting appears to have exposed several attributes about the factions involved:
a) After two to three years of "training" the "IA" (which in this case read the Badr Corps and Dawa-aligned groups - rather pointedly this move did NOT involve any of the predominantly Kurdish units) is about as effective as the fucking Sheridan, Oregon police force. The actual Iraqi national police or "IP" appears to be even less competent. With the advantage of initiative, armor and tac air the Malikist attacks appear to have stalled within a day or two and made little headway until the Sadrists melted away yesterday.
b) Conversely, the JAM appears to have come up a little way from their "beat-you-to-death-with-my-forehead" style tactics of 2005 and 2006.
c) our people on the ground don't seem to have helped the Malikists much. Dunno if that means we didn't want to, or our intel in the Sadrist areas was that poor.d) what the fuck is wrong with my goddam Army? When will we get it through our heads that when you're occupying a foreign land you have three choices: go soft, go Roman or go home. You either do your killing with a knife, or with ruthless blood and fire, or you give it the fuck up. Bombing civilian neighborhoods - no matter WHY you bomb civilian neighborhoods - in a country you own - is a fucking loser strategically and politically. After five years you'd think we'd have gotten that. But you'd be wrong. Fucketty fuck fuck!!

6. Maliki either couldn't or didn't want to push his people into a war to the knife. His brief career as "Iraqiturk" appears to be over. No one at this point seems to be willing to die for Mr. Maliki.

7. Neither side won a tactical victory, although the JAM held most of the ground it fought over, and (as the continued fighting suggests) proves that it can be sufficiently dangerous to be an irritant to be respected if nothing else.

8. On the political scale, it appears to me (the casual observer) as well as the folks at Reuters that the Malikists come away looking the more hangdog. They are the "government": imagine this as the 40th Division of the California National Guard versus the Eight-Trey Crips. You'd expect the guardsmen to go through South Central LA like a dose of salts, wouldn't you? You'd be pretty shocked if the gangstas still held the barricades outside the People's Drug on Ventura Blvd. after two days of ground assault, no? Same deal here. The JAM comes away looking slightly more competent than its last roll of the dice - of course, it would (The Badr Corps ain't 1st ID)...9. Casualty rates are meaningless here: this isn't the U.S. Third world armies still fight with people instead of weapons and in that kind of fighting people die and are expected to die by the partisans involved. Assuming that the JAM-to-IA kill ratio means anything is to shove your head up your own ass in the same way we did for a dozen years in Southeast Asia: it's gonna be dark and smell bad and it's likely to decrease your situational awareness.

10. The biggest "winner" here? Iran. By proving to the Malikists that their Yankee patron hasn't given them the ability to crush internal rivals unaided; by degrading the Sadrists slightly (and reminding them of their vulnerability); by showing their power as a broker in Iraq.

11. Runner-up? The Bush Administration. Continued factional fighting combined with poor reporting and geopolitical cluelessness produce the results of reinforcing the notion that Iraq is still besieged by "criminals" and "terrorists" and is unstable because of a lack of armed force - rather than a chaotic failed state fucking awash in armed force that lacks the civil mechanisms to subordinate conflict to compromise and will for the forseeable future. Result? Mr. McCain's Thousand Year Occupation.12. The biggest "loser"? The average Iraqi, who gets to be the grass in the elephant fight. Unfortunately for him, no one really gives a rat's ass about him except to kill him when he's thought to be "the enemy".

13. Runner up? The average American, whose treasury is being looted to support this imperial adventure unlikely to produce more than corpses and continued instability. Fortunately for him he doesn't give a rat's ass and won't until the bill comes due - at which point he'll be too busy lookng for a dry place to sleep and something tasty in the dumpster to care.

My opinion on this whole farrago?

Eenh.

I'm with the guys over at Defense and the National Interest: I fail to understand how a defeat for Maliki needs to be a defeat for my country. I don't think Maliki is any more our friend than I really do Sadr or al-Jaafari or al-Hakim of ISCI. I think we're being foolish targeting Sadr because he's a rabble-rouser who wants us out. Hell, I want us out, and if Sadr can hang on to power, finesse the Iranians and discourage the Al Qaeda-type takifiri jihadis, then I'm all for him. Or Jaafari. Or whoever. The notion that we need to get all swoony with these Middle Eastern despots - whether they're named Maliki or Mubarak or Musharraf - seems moronic to me. They're foreign heads of state. Back 'em when they help us, forget 'em when they screw us, their own people and generally act like bastards.

We appear to have learned nothing from our idiotic fling with the Shah.

WTF??!!

Did he really say this?!?

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Fantastic?

Romantic???

I've always understood that part of Commander-in-Chief Codpiece's enthusiasm for war and killing had to do with the his lack of the most distant experience of it. But this...this...adolescent fantasyland he's describing, where the hard, grinding, thankless and brutal work of hunting some of the world's most vicious tribesmen for a chimera of "democracy" and "development" is transformed through some wierd conservative magic into romance and adventure? This, more than anything I've heard him say, exposes him as a hypocritical Blimp of the most revolting sort, a Vietnam draft dodger who now talks of "service" and Sacrifice" from his heavily guarded office, where he eagerly speeds glum heroes up the line to death.

If this is what he believes - and it does - we as citizens have no business trusting him being senior private in a two-man guard post at the far edge of the ass-end of an abandoned ASP, much less the CINC of the most powerful military in the world. If military life is his idea of romance and adventure I'm sure we should look further into why he missed out on all the fun back in the Sixties and Seventies...hmmm?

Or, better yet, Fred Kaplan has the right idea:

"He won't be employed in the White House for much longer. He is 62, too old, alas, to join the military. But a spot could probably be found for him on an A.I.D. mission, a Provisional Reconstruction Team, or, perhaps through his vice president, some contractor's expedition. He put our soldiers over there, and, as we all know, there aren't enough of them. If he pines for a taste, let him have one."

Men, muj and mountains

I mentioned the other day that I wanted to talk about the geopolitical prospects for our current wars in the Middle East. I do, but on reflection I wanted to concentrate on the lesser known of the two. We've talked a lot, here and all over, about Iraq. Afghanistan, when it's mentioned at all, is usually conceded to be the "better" of the two; many of my fellow liberals who will rain down curses on Dubya and his cabal of idiots for the Iraq misadventure will pull up short on the 'Stan. "Well...it really needed to be done...it was just that we lost our focus when that dumb bastard Cheney started pushing "Iraq, Iraq..."

You've probably heard something similar. It's become the CW of Afghanistan: the noble project that failed because Dougie Feith ("the stupidest fucking guy on the planet"), Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's OSP ginned up a war based on nukes that weren't there.Well, I want to disagree.

Not that we should have hammered the guys who planned the attacks of 2001, or the Taliban state that harbored them. In fact, that sort of thing is practically tradition in Afghanistan - the British made punitive exeditions into Afghanistan the "most popular Central Asian outdoor sport of the Nineteenth Century" - and even the bombed and strafed Afghans seem to find them more a violent and nasty sort of diversion than "total war".

But spending years, lives and billions occupying and "building" a "democratic" Afghan government and the Afghan state?

This is foolishness.

What's more than foolish, this is a "foreign occupation" mission that probably has not been accomplished since the last Macedonian hoplite left in 323 BC and not well even then.

It boggles my mind that were are trying to "secure" and "democratize" the place. Do we think the locals will thank us? That with a few hundred years of occupation they will turn into Framingham, Mass., only with goats and Chitrali caps?

Everyone who talks about Afghanistan (except the wingnut Dick Cheney branch of the GOP, but they're still hoping that if we kill enough wogs one at a time that Usama & Co. will show up on the foredeck of the U.S.S. Missouri in morning coats and surrender - good luck with that one, Dick) pretty much accepts two broad facts-on-the-ground about it:

1. It's an unreconstructed tribal shithole where smuggling, skulduggery and intra- and intertribal warfare are pastime, hobby and career and have been since Philip of Macedon was a kid.

2. No military social or political force since Philip's time has had any significant, long-term effect on Fact #1.But the reactions to these facts seem to fall into two general types as well:

A. People - like me - who look at this stuff and say, sweet baby Jesus, trying to "establish government authority" or "keep these guys neutral" is gonna take forever and a day and is gonna last until the first GI turns his back, or the monthly bribe gets cut off by Congress to fund some fucking porkbarrel project in West Cornhole, Tenn. Why would we want to try and do what Alexander, the Mughals, Mongols and Soviets couldn't do back in the day when wholesale slaughter did nothing worse than get you on the cover of "Modern Genocide" magazine?

B. People like John McCain and Hillary Clinton (and so on...), who straightout admit all the above...but then end the sentence with "...so we'll just have to try harder/smarter/longer/more cunningly."

It's not that those of us in column A disagree with the folks in column B about how terrific this would be if we could do it, or the connection between the lawless shithole parts of the world and the hard men who emerge from them ready to do dirty deeds dirt cheap. It's just that we look at all the times that OTHER smart guys have said this - I'll bet that Lord Auckland and Bill Macnaghten thought they had it wired, too - and ended up in bits all over Kabul bazaar and wonder, OK, are we that much smarter, faster and stronger? Or have we just forgotten all the other nifty schemes that came before us.

If what we heard back was something truly inspired; some really innovative ideas of how to turn this clusterfuck into something else it'd be a worthwhile conversation. But instead we read about the boys from Battle Company and the supporters of their efforts describing the same process that took Elphinstone and Co. to their doom - except with tac air - and wonder...

...why?Any fool can invade - it takes a real fool to try and occupy incoherant, semivicious, impoverished Third World "countries" whose history, pastime and primary entertainment is either dictatorship or tribal warfare.

I have no doubt that most people in Afghanistan don't want to live under a repressive theocratic dictatorship, any more than I want to live in a Benedictine monastery. Not wanting to be a takifiri jihadi does NOT mean that they want to be an Enlightenment Western liberal OR an American ally, which seems to be the point of all this standing around playing whack-a-muj in Central Asia, any more than not wanting to pray at midnight makes me want to be a porn star.

I'm sure that the inhabitants of Central Asia want to be as modern and First World as they can be. What I'm also sure of is that they are unlikely to become intellectual heirs of Western Enlightenment irreligious political liberalism. Or fans of Israel. Or forget that Europeans (and now Americans) have tromped around their countries in seven league boots. The point of "nation-building" and "democratization" seems to be that if these people can just get the vote, Blu-Ray, Cosmo and Wal-Mart they will become free-trade globalists and stop attacking us.

Since our politial elite decided that the end of the Cold War meant that America's new calling was to bucket around solving the world's problems we've spent a great deal of cash and more than a couple of young lives fucking with places like Kosovo, Somalia, the 'Stan and Iraq. We seem to have managed to avoid the lessons of them all, which boil down to; no, they won't be grateful for your good intentions; yes, there will be some form of blowback eventually, and; yes, you can mortgage your treasury to the Chinese and get your young people killed and still come out with little or nothing twenty or thirty years down the road. The Talibs are in the mountains and our boy Karzai has the keys to the executive bathroom in Kabul. Time to give the logbook and lock key to the Humvee to the Afghan Army and return home...

...to try and develop our OWN country for a change.