Quotulatiousness

September 30, 2010

Inter-service rivalry now compromising SAS training

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Of all the various famous units the British have to boast of, surely the Special Air Service (SAS) is the top of the list. That status still doesn’t exempt the SAS from being a pawn in the ongoing battle between the Army and the RAF:

For five years now, the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the British Army have been feuding over the lack of aircraft for parachute training. The latest row involves Britain’s SAS (Special Air Service) commandos, who have been unable to train all their operators in complex parachuting techniques, because the RAF has been unable to provide transports to carry the SAS personnel into the air. This is considered a more serious matter than previous problems with not having enough transports to train members of the Parachute Regiment. The SAS threatens to send their operators to the United States for training, relying on long standing ties with their American counterparts (the U.S. Army Special Forces and SOCOM). This would be embarrassing for the RAF, and that would be the point.

This sort of feud has been going on for a long time. For example, four years ago it was revealed that the British Army had to decide between supplying its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and providing aircraft for its paratroopers to complete their training. As a result of this shortage, in 2005, only about 25 percent of paratroop trainees were able to make the required jumps, to become qualified parachutists. Back in 2003, 93 percent were able to successfully make their jumps. In addition to the morale boost, being a qualified paratrooper also gets you an extra $3,000 a year in bonus pay.

The RAF, rather like the US Air Force, has different priorities than the other services, and clearly doesn’t value their inter-operational harmony as highly as controlling the equipment and doctrine to support their own mission (as defined by air force commanders). This isn’t a new thing: it’s been going on since the first world war. It also shows a failure of leadership on the civilian side — the civilian bosses should be much more insistent on getting the overall mission done properly than in allowing these turf wars (cloud wars?) to interfere.

September 8, 2010

Another side effect of Afghan cultural preferences

Filed under: Asia, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Rural Afghans (especially Pushtuns) have very unusual views on the role of women (mentioned here last week). Human nature being what it is, there are substitutes:

It’s after midnight. I’m at a wedding party in a remote village in northern Afghanistan.

There is no sign of the bride or groom, or any women, only men. Some of them are armed, some of them are taking drugs.

Almost everyone’s attention is focused on a 15-year-old boy. He’s dancing for the crowd in a long and shiny woman’s dress, his face covered by a red scarf.

He is wearing fake breasts and bells around his ankles. Someone offers him some US dollars and he grabs them with his teeth.

This is an ancient tradition. People call it bachabaze which literally means “playing with boys”.

The most disturbing thing is what happens after the parties. Often the boys are taken to hotels and sexually abused.

The men behind the practice are often wealthy and powerful. Some of them keep several bachas (boys) and use them as status symbols — a display of their riches. The boys, who can be as young as 12, are usually orphans or from very poor families.

September 7, 2010

A different kind of “outreach”

Filed under: Asia, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:42

Looks like Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center got exactly the level of attention he was looking for:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the planned burning of Qurans on Sept. 11 by a small Florida church could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.

Gen. David Petraeus said the Taliban would exploit the demonstration for propaganda purposes, drumming up anger toward the U.S. and making it harder for allied troops to carry out their mission of protecting Afghan civilians.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

Over at Fark.com, they have a highly appropriate term for people like Mr. Jones: they call them “attention whores”. Seems to fit.

On the other hand, wouldn’t an appropriate counter-protest involve a small mosque in Kabul burning some Christian bibles? I wonder why nobody’s doing that instead of the mass protests being threatened? It should probably be noted that this church has fifty members: hardly the mainstream of American religious belief.

September 2, 2010

“How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face?”

Filed under: Asia, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Along with the manifold military problems facing the troops in Afghanistan, there are some social issues that tend to boggle the minds of the western soldiers:

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy’s father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to “touch and fondle them,” military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. “The soldiers didn’t understand.”

[. . .]

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can’t even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

“How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face,” 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. “We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.”

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli’s team “how his wife could become pregnant,” her report said. When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?”

It’s a telling point that western troops were committed to Afghanistan without being fully briefed on the social customs of the people for whom and among whom they’d be doing their jobs. Ignorance isn’t a solid basis for any kind of trust, and without gaining the trust of locals, the troops will always be at a severe informational disadvantage.

August 23, 2010

How to become an instant expert on Afghanistan

Filed under: Humour, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

P.J. O’Rourke had a few days to visit Afghanistan and managed to become an expert on the nation, its people, and the problems they face:

Women cover themselves in public but not more than my grandmother did at Mass. An occasional down-to-the-ground burka is seen but not as often as in London. In the malls, clothing shops predominate. Men’s and women’s clothes are shinier and more vividly colored than those seen in a traditional society such as New Hampshire.

Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.

The Pashtun tribal leader was one of a number of people that Amin arranged for me to interview. Tribalism is another thing that makes Afghanistan hard to understand. We Americans are probably too tribal to grasp the subtlety of Afghan tribal concepts.

The Pashtun tribal leader was joined by a Turkmen tribal leader who has a Ph.D. in sociology. I asked the Turkmen tribal leader about the socioeconomic, class, and status aspects of Afghan tribalism.

“No tribe is resented for wealth,” he said. So, right off the bat, Afghans show greater tribal sophistication than Americans. There is no Wall Street Tribe upon which the Afghan government can blame everything.

Even the worst of Afghan governments never acquired the special knack of pitting tribe against tribe that is vital to American politics — the Squishy Liberal Tribe vs. the Kick-Butt Tribe; the Indignantly Entitled Tribe vs. the Fed-Up Taxpayer Tribe; the Smug Tribe vs. the Wipe-That-Smirk-Off-Your-Face Tribe.

There you have it: the reason we all find Afghan politics so hard to unravel!

August 10, 2010

Travel advice for unsettled times

Filed under: Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:54

“Gulliver” offers some useful travel tips for people going to dangerous cities:

The first concerns how not be blown up when in Kabul, and comes courtesy of an American TV journalist who was on the course with us. You do not need Kevlar, or night-vision goggles, or an armoured car to evade the Taliban, he said: your secret weapon is to have a jolly good long lie-in every morning. In Kabul, at least, suicide bombs apparently almost always go off early in the morning. Have a leisurely breakfast and, once you venture out after 11am or so, your chances of being killed are drastically reduced. The explanation given was that the bombers spend all night psyching themselves up, then say their prayers at dawn, and go off to murder. A second helping of Corn Flakes could save your life.

The second tip is useful even for those of us who don’t travel to warzones. When booking a hotel, we were told, try to get a room between the second and sixth floors. Being on at least the second floor means you’re a little further away from whatever dangers may lurk near reception: opportunist robbers won’t venture deep into the hotel, and if things get nastier — car-bombs, shootouts and so on — you’re a little further away from the action. So far, pretty obvious.

But why not go above the sixth floor — wouldn’t that be even safer? Apparently not. More likely than a bomb or a shootout is a plain old fire, in which case you will want to make a hasty exit. More storeys mean more stairs and more delay, of course. But the killer, literally, is this: if the stairs are blocked, you will need rescuing from your window by a ladder. And in many parts of the world, the sixth floor is as high as the local fire-engines can reach.

August 7, 2010

Protip for British troops: don’t wear your uniform to the Co-op

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 21:02

Apparently, British soldiers (in uniform) are considered “untouchables” by the Co-op grocery chain:

A soldier who had just arrived home from Afghanistan was refused service at a supermarket and told they didn’t serve people in Army uniform.
Sapper Anthony Walls called into a branch of the Co-op for some beers after a gruelling 34-hour journey from Kandahar.

[. . .]

The manager told Mr Walls he ‘couldn’t do anything about it’ and refused to serve him while he was in uniform. The soldier — who was on his way to his three-year-old nephew Jack’s birthday party — walked out of the shop in New Addington, Croydon, in a daze.
‘I was deeply hurt,’ he said yesterday. ‘All I was thinking about was getting home to Jack in time to wish him a happy birthday.

‘It was great to be home after a difficult journey and I just thought I’d grab a couple of beers — a luxury I hadn’t had in a while.

The good news is that it was all a misunderstanding: the Co-op won’t sell beer to Policemen in uniform, and the cashier and her manager misunderstood that the chap in military-style kit wasn’t actually a police SWAT-team member on a break from bashing EDL protest marchers. They’ve apologized (but there’s no indication that Sapper Walls got his beer before flying back to Af’stan).

July 28, 2010

USMC learns from LEGO

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:57

Not the actual toy, but the interlocking and standard size ideas applied to real world training grounds:

Over the last five years, the U.S. Marine Corps has built the world’s largest urban warfare training area at their 29 Palms base out in the Mohave Desert of California. There are currently some 400 structures, from private homes, to large government building complexes, operational in the training area. When development of the center is complete, there will be over 1,200 structures to train in.

[. . .]

Many of the buildings are really shipping containers, equipped with doors, windows, some paint and contents, are being used to represent the buildings. Like Legos, the containers can be joined together, or stacked, to make larger buildings. More importantly, the entire “town” can be rearranged to represent a different kind of environment. The training towns now being built represent what the marines are currently encountering in Afghanistan. But in a few years, the marines may be fighting somewhere else, and they want their training town to reflect that, quickly, when the need arises.

July 23, 2010

The fully networked infantry comes a step closer

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Strategy Page reports on the US Army’s Rifleman Radio project:

The U.S. Army recently conducted a successful field test of their new Rifleman Radio (RR), a 1.1 kg/2.5 pound voice/data radio for individual infantrymen. By itself, the two watt RR has a range of up to five kilometers. But it can also automatically form a mesh network, where all RRs within range of each other can pass on voice or data information. During the field tests, this was done to a range of up to 50 kilometers. The RR can also make use of an aerostat, UAV or aircraft overhead carrying a RR to act as a communications booster (to other RRs or other networks.) The mesh network enables troops to sometimes eliminate carrying a longer range (and heavier) platoon radio for the platoon leader.

The RR has just gone into production, for use as basic communications for individual troops. But in the next 5-10 years, the mesh and data (pictures, maps, at about ten times the speed of dial up Internet) capability will be phased in. During the recent field test, company commanders were able to take a video feed from a UAV, extract a single frame (basically showing where the enemy was), and transmitting this to troops using RRs.

Somewhat surprisingly, the British were pioneering this kind of kit for the troops in Afghanistan in 2002:

Six years ago, the marines bought a thousand Personal Role Radios (PRR) used by British troops since early 2002. These first saw combat use in Afghanistan later that year. The $670 radio set allows infantry to communicate with each other up to 500 meters (or three floors inside a building). The earpiece and microphone are built to fit comfortably into the combat helmet. The radio set itself, about the size and weight of a portable cassette player, hangs off the webbing gear on the chest. Two AA batteries power the radio for 24 hours. The users have 16 channels to choose from and a form of frequency hopping is used to make it very difficult to listen in on transmissions. A small, wireless, “talk” button is affixed to the soldiers weapon so that operation of the radio is hands free. The British have since adopted an improved, and more expensive, version.

Being able to communicate directly with fellow troops in combat is a huge advantage, but the weight and relative delicate nature of earlier radios meant that only platoon leaders and above were routinely provided with radios in the field (usually carried by someone else, not the commander himself).

July 19, 2010

Canada well known to Afghan would-be refugees

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Strategy Page updates the story about the 17 Afghan military trainees who disappeared from their assigned quarters in Texas while on a language training course:

Now the air force has carefully checked their records and found that at least 46 foreign troops had walked away from their training courses in the last five years. All but two (one from Iraq, another from Djibouti) were Afghan.

These men had disappeared from a U.S. Air Force language school, where they learned enough English so they could attend U.S. military training courses. The media coverage implied that some of these guys could be terrorists, who joined the Afghan military, qualified for training in the United States, and then disappeared once you got there, so they could carry out attacks. But it appears the reason behind the disappearances was economic, rather than ideological or religious.

That does make a lot of sense, from their point of view: going from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest, the temptation to stay must be considerable. Of interest to Canadians:

After the first 17 missing Afghans was revealed, American immigration officials went looking for them. They soon reported that they had tracked down at least eleven of the missing Afghans, using just Facebook. These men had gone to Canada, using the military ID the U.S. provided them while in the United States. It’s easier to claim asylum in Canada, a fact widely known in Afghanistan (and often exploited by those leaving the country for a better life in the West.) U.S. officials believed they had located all but two or three of the missing seventeen Afghans, and expected to track down the rest soon.

In spite of the fears of pacifists in Canada, apparently our “warmongering” hasn’t seriously damaged our pre-existing reputation as a soft-touch for refugee claimants.

June 26, 2010

The ungentlemanly art of reporting

Filed under: Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Paul Wells looks at the methods employed by now-famous reporter-to-the-generals Michael Hastings:

Hastings is blunt about the fun a reporter on short-term assignment can have when he doesn’t have to worry about the repercussions of what he writes. “My job was basically: Ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners on the expense account, get sources drunk and singing, then report back the behind-the-scenes story.”

Then there is this paragraph. The sentence with the bad word is the most interesting to me as it will be to you, but the whole paragraph, with its tensions and contradictions, is worth considering:

   The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You’re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you “build trust,” which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to fuck them over; and they’ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this fluff piece now; we’ll give you something good later. No, don’t write it this way, write it that way. We’ll give you something good later.

This deserves to stand as one of the great bits of journalistic self-flagellation and revelation, only a notch below Janet Malcolm’s famous confession that “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

H/T to Taylor Empire Airways for the link.

June 18, 2010

A “new chapter in U.S. history”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Ron Hart congratulates President Obama for delivering on his promised change:

We are so in debt to China that President Obama had to visit their president in his first year in office. It was an important meeting between the most powerful communist leader in the world and the president of China.

Obama is so popular in China that a nightclub named after him opened in Beijing. In keeping with the Obama theme, the club opened with $10 trillion in debt. It will, hopefully, close in just four years with $15 trillion in debt and no apologies to its “hope-based” investors.

[. . .]

To sum up our situation just short of two years into this Obamanation of an administration: Our debt is much higher, an unwanted ObamaCare bill that will cost us at least $2 trillion more than predicted was rammed through Congress, more troops are in Afghanistan, unemployment is much higher even after a union handout “stimulus” bill, and the biggest tax increase in American history is coming in 2011. So yes, Mr. President, technically I guess you can say you have brought about “change.”

As for your assertion, Mr. Obama, that you are going to usher in a “new chapter in U.S. history,” it looks like you will make good on that too. Unfortunately, it will be Chapter 11.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord.

June 14, 2010

Deadly would-be killers, or incompetent bumblers?

Filed under: Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

An interesting article in The Atlantic points out that the formidable image the media has bestowed upon Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations belies much of the reality:

To be sure, some terrorists are steely and skilled — people like Mohamed Atta, the careful and well-trained head of the 9/11 hijackers. Their leaders and recruiters can be lethally subtle and manipulative, but the quiet truth is that many of the deluded foot soldiers are foolish and untrained, perhaps even untrainable. Acknowledging this fact could help us tailor our counterterrorism priorities — and publicizing it could help us erode the powerful images of strength and piety that terrorists rely on for recruiting and funding.

Nowhere is the gap between sinister stereotype and ridiculous reality more apparent than in Afghanistan, where it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the five years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks — or attempted attacks. In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honored tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests. According to several sources at the United Nations, as many as six would-be suicide bombers died last July after one such embrace in Paktika.

Many Taliban operatives are just as clumsy when suicide is not part of the plan. In November 2009, several Talibs transporting an improvised explosive device were killed when it went off unexpectedly. The blast also took out the insurgents’ shadow governor in the province of Balkh.

In the early 1980s, I remember reading a book (possibly Dean Ing’s Soft Targets), which made a strong case for the use of a very different anti-terrorism tactic: ridicule. Instead of investing these shadowy enemies with mystique and cunning, point out their all-too-human failings and poke fun at them for these weaknesses. An attribute of many fanatics is a total lack of any sense of humour or irony: this makes them very attractive foils for this kind of media counter-attack.

It’d be hard to come up with anything to make the Taliban appear more ridiculous than what they’re doing themselves:

If our terrorist enemies have been successful at cultivating a false notion of expertise, they’ve done an equally convincing job of casting themselves as pious warriors of God. The Taliban and al-Qaeda rely on sympathizers who consider them devoted Muslims fighting immoral Western occupiers. But intelligence picked up by Predator drones and other battlefield cameras challenges that idea — sometimes rather graphically. One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey. Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow.

June 7, 2010

Suddenly, the decision makes less more sense

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Kelly McParland connects the dots on Mayor Miller’s surprising conversion to honouring the fallen (original post here):

As Sun columnist Joe Warmington points out, there’s already a Highway of Heroes: It’s the route along the 401 that leads from CFB Trenton, where the bodies of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan are brought home, to the coroner’s office near Queen’s Park in Toronto. Canadians spontaneously line the route each time a fallen soldier is returned. It’s not officially organized or directed — it’s just patriotic people showing their respect for the men and women who gave their lives to serve their country.

David Miller is about eight years late in recognizing that. Choosing a name that is similar but slightly different from the Highway of Heroes just confuses the issue: why does the route have to change names once it enters Toronto? Toronto is the city that couldn’t bring itself to allow fire trucks and ambulances to carry decals saying “Support our Troops”, and Miller was among those who wanted them taken off, in case someone got the mistaken impression Toronto actually supported the mission in Afghanistan.

June 4, 2010

Toronto finally accepts DVP “dual name” proposal

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

I thought that this proposal was finished when the current Toronto city government turned it down a few years back, but according to this article by Adrian Humphreys, the Don Valley Parkway will also be known as the “Route of Heroes.”

In a sweeping gesture to honour veterans and fallen soldiers, the city of Toronto is designating the Don Valley Parkway — where the flag-draped caskets of all soldiers killed in Afghanistan travel when returning to Canada — as the “Route of Heroes.”

The city-owned, six-lane expressway will be dotted with prominent signs featuring the ceremonial name, other signs reading “Lest We Forget,” and pictures on exit ramps of the red poppy [. . .]

The move comes three years after Mayor David Miller rebuffed veterans who asked to rename the DVP. The new plan, supported by the Mayor, keeps the DVP designation in a “dual name” system.

The ceremonial change is similar to the provincial designation of “Highway of Heroes” to the portion of Highway 401 stretching from the military base in Trenton to the top of the DVP.

Given the strident portion of Toronto’s political class who are against the mission in Afghanistan in particular, and the military in general, I’m surprised and pleased that this gesture is being made.

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