Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2012

Corruption in Afghanistan reaches new heights

Filed under: Asia, Government, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

From Strategy Page:

A major obstacle to improving security in Iraq and Afghanistan was not equipment, training or leadership, but corruption. No matter how well led, trained and equipped the troops were, if they could be bought they were worse than useless. But the corruption went beyond the troops themselves. Government officials had to be carefully monitored to prevent the money for equipment, training and pay from being stolen before it got to the troops. More fundamentally, corruption was the reason Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other nations are poor and full of unhappy, and often violent, people. Corruption is why these places are chaotic and so often in the news. Corruption is the major cause of Islamic terrorism. Corruption does not get the recognition it deserves.

But in Afghanistan corruption has recently risen to new heights; literally. Several recent attacks in Kabul have made use of unfinished high-rise buildings, where terrorists used the height advantage to do more damage. American advisors noted that there were a lot of unfinished tall buildings in Kabul, and many had apparently been abandoned. The Americans asked the local government who owned these high-rise structures and was told that the government didn’t know. Kabul has undergone a construction boom in the last decade, and many of the builders (or their backers) didn’t bother with getting construction permits. If the cops or officials came around asking questions they were offered a bribe, or a death threat, or both. Inquisitive journalists were handled the same way.

April 18, 2012

A guerilla war is fought in two primary theatres: in the field and in the media

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

A survey of US experiences in guerilla fighting over the years at Strategy Page:

After a decade of fighting Islamic terrorists the U.S. Department of Defense finally realized, at the most senior levels, that the nature of, and progress in this war was being poorly presented to the national leadership and the public. Actually, from the very beginning, there was a reluctance to reveal the masses of data collected and how it was analyzed. Partly this was to prevent the enemy from realizing how much information on terrorist operations it possessed. But another reason was the fact that such a large mass of data could be interpreted many different ways, some of them unfavorable to the United States. Thus there was no “body count” or any other type of measure released by the Department of Defense. Internally, there were various metrics (measurements) presented to senior military and political leadership. The big problem was the use of aggregation (combining a lot of data together that should not have been combined). That was a problem that slowly became obvious over the last decade.

It’s now recognized that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere, like Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and so on) were all somewhat different and that context for each of them was crucial if you were going to analyze them. For example; al Qaeda is more of an idea than a centralized organization. Thus the al Qaeda found in each country, or part of a country, usually has different means and motivations. The war in Iraq was actually several separate wars going on at the same time, and occasionally interacting with other “wars” nearby. Same thing in Afghanistan and places like Somalia. Measuring progress is more accurate if you show the unique trends in all the different wars. Some of them ended early, some escalated and some are still in progress while others evolve into new kinds of conflicts. In other words, the military should use contextual assessment in reporting what is going on with guerilla conflict (or “irregular warfare” in general.)

[. . .]

When the United States first got involved with Vietnam in the late 1950s, there was good reason to believe American assistance would lead to the defeat of the communist guerilla movement in South Vietnam. That was because the communists had not been doing so well with their guerilla wars. In the previous two decades, there had been twelve communist insurgencies, and 75 percent of them had been defeated. These included Greek Civil War (1944-1949), Spanish Republican Insurgency (1944-1952), Iranian Communist Uprising (1945-1946), Philippine Huk War (1946-1954), Madagascan Nationalist Revolt (1947-1949), Korean Partisan War (1948-1953), Sarawak/Sabah “Confrontation” (1960-1966), Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), Kenyan Mau-Mau Rebellion (1952-1955). The communists won in the Cuban Revolution (1956-1958), the First Indochina War (1945-1954) and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). The communists went on to lose the guerilla phase of the Second Indochina War (1959-1970). Guerillas make great copy for journalists. You know, the little guy, fighting against impossible odds. What we tend to forget (and the record is quite clear, and easily available), is that these insurgent movements almost always get stamped out. That does not make good copy, and the dismal details of those defeats rarely make it into the mass media, or the popular consciousness.

April 13, 2012

“Brzezinski[‘s] … realpolitik approach … is actually refreshing in today’s age of flippant air-bombing humanitarianism”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

Sean Collins reviews a pair of books that — rather than signing on to the idea of America as terminal-phase western Roman Empire — perhaps go too far in the other direction. The books are The World America Made by Robert Kagan and Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski:

It is clear that the US faces a number of challenges, especially with regard to its stagnant economy and gridlocked politics. But more and more, the country’s specific problems are overshadowed by creeping fears of national decline. This backdrop of decline extends beyond domestic economics to contemplating whether America’s influence in the world is diminishing, in particular relative to emerging powers like China.

[. . .]

Brzezinski is not only old, he’s old-school, too. His realpolitik approach, which includes Cold War concepts like containment, is actually refreshing in today’s age of flippant air-bombing humanitarianism. For example, he quite baldly comes out and calls for the US to lead an effort to expand the West (via NATO and the EU) to include Russia and Turkey. This, he says, is necessary to prevent Russia from striking out on its own, or allying with China. Brzezinski is also still very mindful that great-power politics have not disappeared, and could re-emerge more forcefully. More than once, he speculates that Asia today resembles Europe before the twentieth-century world wars, and argues for care to ensure that a new conflagration does not break out.

The two authors’ respective approaches to American relations with China illuminate their differences in approach. Kagan is blunt, arguing for an antagonistic stance. He calls on the US to ‘press for greater democratic and liberal reforms’ in China (and in other authoritarian nations), and to promote free trade and markets, and thus ‘push back’ against state capitalism in China. In contrast, Brzezinski urges a diplomatic approach, one that attempts to reach mutual agreement while preventing China from becoming a too-dominant regional power. He is opposed to the Obama administration’s recent ‘Asia pivot’, which calls for more US troops in the region. In an interview with Edward Luce in the Financial Times, Brzezinski warned: ‘We have to focus on Asia, but not in a manner that plays on everyone’s anxieties… It becomes very easy to demonise China and they will demonise us in return. Is that what we want?’

[. . .]

This is illustrated by their treatments of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the surface, the two seem to take very different lines. Kagan was bullish at the outset of both wars and, consistent with his general style in the book, he quickly skates right past such awkward issues. Brzezinski, in contrast, is damning, highlighting how the wars have undermined America’s ability to project its power. But the fact is that neither author really spends much time thinking about them. This is telling: both prefer to speculate about the future rather than face up to the reality of recent foreign-policy moves. Oddly, neither author examines either President George W Bush’s record or President Obama’s record. When Brzezinski does address the Bush administration’s foreign policy, his analytics go out the window and he just sneers. We are left believing that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing more than purely subjective mistakes made by Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney.

March 12, 2012

The role of narcissism in calls for military intervention in Syria

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Brendan O’Neill says that one of the driving factors for those demanding military action in Syria is narcissism:

Failed Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff recently made waves with an op-ed in the Financial Times calling for Western intervention in Syria. Revisiting some of the themes of his 1990s writings (Ignatieff made a living championing ‘humanitarian interventionism’ before he led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst electoral defeat ever), Igantieff said the West should impose a ‘comprehensive quarantine of Syria’ in order to ‘force [Assad] from power’.

Yet the most startling thing about his piece was not its extreme short-term historical amnesia, its ignorance of the disasters unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan following Western meddling, but rather its exhibition of self-regard and self-concern, even of that most malignant form of self-love: narcissism. Ignatieff mentioned his own feelings about what is happening in Homs six times and the possible feelings of the people of Homs themselves only three times. His short op-ed mainly focused on the ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ felt by people like Igantieff — that is, Western observers possessed of a good, caring, Sarajevo-informed ‘international conscience’ — while the ‘fear’ and ‘desperation’ of the people of Homs were given far briefer treatment.

This ratio of 2:1 between Ignatieff’s feelings of guilt and Syrians’ feelings of desperation not only suggests that modern Western interventionists are two times more obsessed with themselves than they are with the victims of foreign conflicts they claim to care so much about — it also reveals that what is really motoring the demands for Western intervention in Syria are the emotional needs of Western observers rather than the practical needs of Syrians. This kind of narcissism is now widespread among those who desperately want the ‘international community’ to intervene in Syria. These people are so amazingly vain that they see the bombing of Syria as a kind of balm for their guilt-ridden consciences, a physical act that might help to make their own emotional turmoil that bit more bearable. Their rallying cry should be: ‘Bomb Syria so that I can sleep at night.’

March 8, 2012

Army training simulators have come a long way from blanks and oversized firecrackers

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

Back in my day, we trained with blanks and “arty simulators” which were just oversized firecrackers with an attached whistle (simulating the fall of shot before it exploded). Today, the market for combat simulation is huge and growing fast:

Towards the end of the Gulf war in 1991, an American armoured scout unit in Iraq’s southern desert stumbled upon a much larger elite force of dug-in Iraqi armour. Rather than retreating, the nine American tanks and 12 Bradley fighting vehicles attacked. When the battle ended about 25 minutes later, the Americans had destroyed, by one tally, 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 armoured vehicles and 39 trucks without suffering a single loss. The Battle of 73 Easting, named after a map co-ordinate, is now considered a masterpiece of American tactical manoeuvring. It prompted America’s Department of Defence to build a digital model of the battle for training.

Neale Cosby, the retired army colonel who led the project at the Institute for Defence Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, says it let commanders watch the action on panoramic screens, select alternate points of view and identify potential improvements in weaponry and tactics. The software was then upgraded so that it could be played like a video game in which “what if” circumstances — foggy night-time fighting against upgraded vehicle armour, say — could be tested. Widely demoed in Washington, DC, during the 1990s, the model kick-started “heavy-duty funding” for combat simulators, says Timothy Lenoir of Duke University, and began a technological revolution that has transformed training and changed the way war is waged.

[. . .]

Motion Reality, a firm based in Marietta, Georgia, that provided some of the technology used to animate “Avatar”, “King Kong” and the “Lord of the Rings” films, has built a mixed-reality “fight simulator”, called VIRTSIM, in conjunction with Raytheon, an American defence contractor. America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation began using the system in January at its academy in Quantico, Virginia, and it has also been sold to a Middle Eastern country. Training in an area the size of a basketball court, 12 commandos wear goggles that display high-resolution 3D images delivered wirelessly […]. Real objects in the training area commingle with computer-generated ones such as buildings and enemies. A virtual insurgent can be realistically displayed in the goggles of trainees who look in his direction — even if everybody is running. Trainees wear electrodes that deliver a painful shock when they are struck by a virtual bullet or bomb blast.

March 5, 2012

US Army to retire the M-2 Bradley IFV

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

The M-2 was the primary infantry fighting vehicle for the US Army intended to replace the Vietnam-era M-113 armoured personnel carrier. It was designed to protect infantry in a high-intensity battlefield from bullets and shrapnel. It wasn’t designed to protect them against mines and improvised explosive devices:

One of the little-known casualties of the Iraq war was the American M-2 Bradley IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle). Five years ago, the U.S. Army stopped using the M-2 in combat. By then it was clear that the enemy was intent on using mines and roadside bombs in a big way, and the M-1 tank, Stryker and MRAP vehicles were much better able to handle these blast weapons than the M-2.

This was a hard decision to make, because up until then it was believed that the M-2 could be made competitive with upgrades. For example, the BUSK (Bradley Urban Survival Kit) has been applied to about 600 M-2s. [. . .]

All this added about three tons to the weight of the vehicle. Because of his, a major upgrade of the M-2 was planned, to include a more powerful (800 versus 600 horsepower) engine, a more powerful gun (30 or 40mm) and lighter armor (or protection systems that shoot down anti-tank missiles and RPGs). Improved sensors were planned, plus vidcams to give people inside the vehicle a 360 degree view of what’s outside.) More electronics, including one that would allow variable power, and fuel consumption, from the engine were in the works. More safety features were planned as well, including an improved fire extinguisher system. The new version was not expected to show up until 2012. It did not happen, mainly because there was no way of getting around the M-2’s vulnerability to roadside bombs. The M-1 was too heavy (60 tons) to be hurt by bombs or mines, and Stryker and MRAPs were designed to cope with the close range explosions.

January 22, 2012

Transitioning from “shithole specialist” to ordinary journalist

Filed under: Humour, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke, have to cope with wrenching career changes:

After the Iraq War I gave up on being what’s known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for 21 years, in 40-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq.

Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I’d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I’m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you’re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport.

[. . .]

Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don’t seem to own any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. “Halt!” say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.

I say, “Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.”

“We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,” they reply.

This doesn’t work worth a damn with the TSA.

Then there’s the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he’s had. Personally — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It’s worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I’m annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I’m being crabby about it. Writers of travelogues are most entertaining when — to the infinite amusement of readers — they have bad things happen to them. I’m afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.

January 21, 2012

A surprising admission in Conrad Black’s survey of the Muslim world

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:29

The surprise? The unexpectedly nice words for, of all people, former prime minister Jean Chrétien:

All this toing and froing begs the question of why the West has expended such time and resources in Afghanistan, where Pakistan is the chief backer of the main killer of NATO forces (the Haqqani faction), and the chief supplier of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in anti-personnel bombs used against Western forces.

We all started into Afghanistan in 2001 in solidarity with the Americans after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Americans largely decamped to Iraq after a year, became mired in the quicksand of nation-building, and then in the even deeper and more hopeless morass of trying to make something out of the gigantic, murderous cesspool of Pakistan. It is time this country recognized its debt to Jean Chrétien for taking a pass on the Iraq debacle — and I was one who disagreed with him at the time (though I then had no idea the U.S. would try to take over the governance of the country and try to turn it into Oklahoma).

Although he may have been right in hindsight, he was right for the wrong reason. Prime minister Chrétien “volunteered” Canadian military support in Afghanistan to ensure that we could not be expected to help in Iraq (because in the parlous state of the Canadian Forces, it was impossible for us to support more than one overseas campaign). The Canadian troops did magnificent work in Afghanistan, and certainly raised Canada’s stock with our allies, but we were there — politically — to avoid being in Iraq.

January 11, 2012

Reason.tv: Three reasons conservatives should cut defence spending now

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

January 6, 2012

Ten years later: Ron Paul’s 2002 predictions

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

September 14, 2011

The risk of terrorism doesn’t justify current US military spending

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

September 3, 2011

US troops allegedly handcuffed and executed children in 2006

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Wikileaks may have been sitting on a particularly disturbing report:

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks suggests that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Claims of American troops committing atrocities were very common, but few of them appear to have been anything other than Al Qaeda propaganda exercises. This may well be another case of this, but the initial investigation implied otherwise:

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination centre, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an Al Qaeda in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople’s claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

August 27, 2011

QotD: Consistency

Filed under: Africa, Middle East, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

We are all glad that the Gadhafi regime is purportedly on its last legs. When I visited Libya in 2006, tragedy was what I saw—and a friendly population under the yoke of a psychopath. But I don’t think we have had much idea of what we were doing in Libya—a sort of diplomatic pastime secondary to presidential jet-setting and golfing. Moreover, I don’t see any hypocrisy in critiquing our confusion over Libya, as a supporter of the removal of Saddam Hussein. Wanting to use American power and influence to its fullest extent when going to war is preferable to not wanting to use all our power and influence when going to war. The hypocrisy is rather on the Left, which once damned the principle of intervention against an Arab Middle East oil-exporting nation that had not recently attacked us, only to support intervention against an Arab Middle East oil exporting nation that had not recently attacked us. In the Left’s defense, one could argue their consistency is that it’s OK if you have a UN vote, but irrelevant whether you have consent of the U.S. Congress.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the object of 23 different Congressional authorizations (one should go back and read that October 2002 long list of “whereas”es), had been in hot and cold wars with us since 1991, attacked four neighbors, and in the heart of the ancient caliphate was hosting all sorts of terrorists. In a post-911 climate it made sense to reckon with him. Indeed, I think one of the great untold stories of Iraq was the carnage of Islamic terrorists who by volition promised that Iraq would be the central theater in jihad, flocked there, were killed and wounded in droves, and lost—and vastly weakened their cause. But in contrast, the West was apparently in the middle of a weird charm offensive with Gadhafi (one advanced by bought-and-paid-for American academics, European oil companies, and multicultural elites), and the result by 2010 was that Libya was considered no longer the 1986 Libya that Reagan had bombed.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Middle East Mess”, Works and Days, 2011-08-24

May 2, 2011

Radley Balko: “He won”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:58

A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

The list, unfortunately goes on.

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.

March 18, 2011

Tim Harford: The management lessons from the war in Iraq

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

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