Quotulatiousness

September 12, 2023

Why Mark Steyn stopped marking the 9/11 anniversary

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

His reasoning makes a lot of sense:

For most of the last two decades we have observed the anniversary of 9/11 by re-posting my columns from the first few days of the new era. We ceased to do so after September 11th 2017 when “a president who, on the campaign trail, mocked his predecessor’s inability to use the words ‘radical Islam’ himself eschewed all mention of the I-word” — and a defense secretary laughably hyped as Mad Dog Mattis turned out to be just another dribbler from the Washington Generals and retreated to the madrassah wing of the Pentagon to explain that it was all just a theological misunderstanding.

We shall not resume our anniversary observances today. The war is lost, at home and abroad. On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam’s strictures on freedom of expression and the like. The decade-and-a-half since the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been one long remorseless surrender on core western liberties. When a school teacher gets beheaded in the street, there is no outrage at the act, just a mild regret that he should have been foolish enough to provoke his own fate. Even the milder jests from the immediate post-9/11 era — the cartoon of the woman trying on new burqas in the changing room and wondering, “Does my bomb look big in this?” — would not be published today.

In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies. The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the ChiCom-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.

As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 — and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.

The position of the United States is far weaker than it was twenty years ago. Around the planet, the assumption of friends and enemies alike is that the American moment is over and the future belongs elsewhere. They are making their dispositions accordingly. It is not a question of wishing “the post-American world”, but of accepting the known facts.

September 14, 2022

“Americans, particularly the kind of Very Serious people who make up our intelligentsia, are desperate for a good war”

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer thinks he’s sussed out the reason so many Americans are so very, very pro-Ukraine in the ongoing fighting between the Russian invaders and the Ukrainian defenders (beyond the normal desire to “root for the underdog”):

Approximate front-line positions just before the Ukrainian counter-attack east of Kharkiv in early September 2022.

It was not until I was an adult that I realized that the absurd fervor for Desert Storm was in fact about Vietnam. Fifteen years earlier, American helicopters had fled in humiliation from Saigon, and nothing had happened to take the sour taste out of the mouth of Americans since. There was plenty of power projection in that decade and a half, but no great good wars for the United States to win in grand and glorious fashion, unless you worked really hard to talk yourself into Grenada. America had been badly stung by losing a war to a vastly poorer and less technologically-advanced force. Americans had been nursing their wounds all those years. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the “international community” rose to expel him, the country was ready. We were ready for another righteous combat of the Goodies vs. the Baddies. We were ready for the good guys to be the winners again.

This dynamic, I’m certain, is the source of American bloodlust over Ukraine.

We have now spent twenty years without good, noble wars against the Baddies ourselves. Afghanistan was a war effort undertaken in rage and terror, and was accordingly never intelligently conceptualized at the most basic level. The war aim of finding and capturing bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda gave way to a war on the Taliban that ensured an endless occupation. The Potemkin government we installed was never popular with the people of the country, entailed comical levels of corruption, and showed no ability to train a loyal and effective Afghan army. After 20 years our country tired of spending hundreds of billions on that failure, we left, the government collapsed almost without resistance, and the Taliban are in power again. In Iraq, the basic arguments for the war (WMDs and a Hussein-al Qaeda connection) were swiftly revealed to be bullshit. Saddam’s army fell quickly and he was dispatched after a show trial, but a persistent insurgency inflicted thousands of American casualties. The chaos enabled the rise of ISIS and its various horrors. The new Iraqi government we’ve installed is impossibly corrupt and scores a 31/100 on Freedom House’s ratings of a country’s dedication to political rights and civil liberties. That’s what the United States has gotten for $8 trillion spent on warmaking since 9/11.

America loves a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. So I once heard. Americans, particularly the kind of Very Serious people who make up our intelligentsia, are desperate for a good war. A just war. A war where we win. They’re sick of wars that feel morally complicated, sick of wars that they have to feel queasy about, sick of wars that aren’t just Goodies and Baddies. They are very, very hungry for good war. I think Ukraine is the Desert Storm a lot of people have been waiting for: a war with (they insist) perfectly simplistic moral stakes, an impossibly noble (they assume) set of Goodies, a marauding and senseless (they demand) set of Baddies. All they’re waiting on is victory. And it’s for this reason, this view of war as one big cope, that the pro-Ukraine position is the single most rigidly enforced consensus in our country since 9/11. There is no other issue on which the majority has more vociferously demanded total consensus or more viciously attacked any who dissent or even ask questions. Because America needs a win. People need to believe in a Goodies and Baddies world again.

There are, of course, all manner of hard questions that we could ask, even if we were supportive of Ukraine in this war. That this is a conflict that has constantly inspired left-leaning people to literally say “well, yes, there’s Nazis, but …” might be seen as a matter of some concern. Perhaps, we might just say, isn’t that a little disturbing? But not in this discursive environment. Or we might consider that a total loss for Russia could be one of the most dangerous outcomes for the world even if you support Ukraine. What do you think happens, with a wounded and isolated Russia? Let’s say people get what they want and Putin is deposed. What do you think happens next? We finally get that shining city on a hill in Moscow that we were promised with the collapse of the Soviet Union? That we’ll get the world leader we expected Bagdhad to be in 2003, that a foreign country with foreign people and foreign concerns will suddenly become a docile member of the liberal-capitalist order? Maybe the best post-Putin outcome would be for a similar corrupt autocrat to take his place; at least then there might be stability. A far more likely and more frightening outcome is that leadership is splintered, you have in effect a set of rival warlords squabbling over the spoils, and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal is exposed in a terrifying way. Seems like something to worry about.

But, no. To a degree that genuinely shocks me, hard questions have been forbidden. Complications have been denied. Comparisons to previous conflicts have been forsaken. And this from Democrat and Republican, liberal and leftist, neocon and Never Trumper. It’s constant, everpresent, and relentless, the denial of any complication in the case of Ukraine and Russia. The glee and the gloating and the urge to ridicule anyone who takes even a single step outside of the consensus is remarkable, unlike anything I’ve ever really encountered before. And I find that I can’t even get people to have a conversation about that, a meta-conversation about why the debate on Ukraine is not a debate, about why there are many people who will consider any political position except one that troubles the moral question of Russia’s invasion, about why so many people who learned to speak with care and equivocation during Iraq now insist that there is no complication at hand with this issue at all. I can’t even get a conversation about the conversation going. People get too mad.

April 27, 2022

“We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.”

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray has a bit of fun at David French’s expense:

In the 1830s, British merchants with trade routes from India had forced open an enormous market for opium in China, and were pouring the product into the country, producing a lucrative addiction crisis. (Queen Victoria, the first Sackler.) But the Qing Dynasty had run China with a firm hand since the first half of the 17th century, and the emperors of the dynasty had long regarded themselves as, to use an academic term from the field of political science, The Shit. In 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu sent a huffy letter to the British monarch, warning her that her tedious little pissant country over there in Nowhereville was trifling with a vast and dangerous power:

    Our celestial empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms! Most surely do we possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom! Still we cannot bear to slay or exterminate without previous warning …

The British responded with naval artillery, and the limits of the Qing Dynasty’s power were revealed with the greatest possible clarity. Commissioner Lin had an image of himself, an understanding of his place in the world and the meaning of his nation’s power, that couldn’t survive an encounter with reality.

So: David French. In his own version of Commissioner Lin’s letter, French warns this week that American institutions most surely do possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom, yet ye weak and depraved subjects of these potent institutions offer not thine gratitude. It’s insane. He doesn’t see the world he’s describing, so his description doesn’t have anything to do with the people he’s talking to, and he has no idea.

Before I say anything else, though, I have to point out that I recently described the American crisis like this: “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.” French does the opposite, describing institutions that are undermined by the dreadful human material beneath them: “Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame.” Wreckers and saboteurs have undermined the otherwise successful five year plan, you see. The problem is bottom-up.

This is exactly the same beat patrolled by “real conservatives” like Max Boot and Tom Nichols, who endlessly warn that the fat dumb peasants lack the sense to lick the hands of their capable superiors. These are very strange men.

Here, watch French do his thing:

    The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

    It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

Tell me the comparison to Commissioner Lin isn’t perfect. Does not our wealth and power astonish you!?!?

As French writes about the privileged creatures who live “under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet,” the Taliban rules Afghanistan. A reminder: The Taliban controlled about half of that country in September of 2001; then the most powerful military in the history of the planet invaded, and fought the Taliban for two full decades, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, the result of which is that the Taliban now controls … all of the country. The implosion of the American effort in Afghanistan happened last fucking year, and we’ve somehow already taken care to forget the details of that goat rodeo. What was the plan?

September 6, 2021

Arms for the Taliban

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn points out an absolutely unbelievable statistic about the military equipment windfall the US military presented to the Taliban in their rush for the exits out of Afghanistan (in bold, below):

Denyse O’Leary, whom I always read with great interest in our Comments section, chides me for diagnosing our present woes but not proposing solutions.

That ought to be easy. In Afghanistan what needed to be done is almost as old as man. As Victor David Hanson pointed out to Tucker, “This is the greatest loss of military equipment in the history of warfare by one power.”

He’s right. Because US government is so drunkenly profligate, the numbers sound blah-blah to jaded American ears. But $85-90 billion is larger than the annual military budget for every nation around the world except the US and China. For those partial to the International Jewish Conspiracy theory of history, what America has just given the Taliban is equivalent to 85 per cent of all the military aid Washington has given Israel since 1948. The Taliban now possess more Black Hawk helicopters than almost all America’s allies; they own near to a tenth of all Humvees on the planet. That’s aside from less obvious items, such as over 160,000 radios and over 16,000 night-vision goggles that will come in mighty handy for wiping out the remnants of resistance in the Panjshir Valley.

The “solution” to this is to do what every army has known to do down through the millennia: a retreat means not just preventing your men from falling into the hands of the enemy but also their weapons – including, if necessary, your allies’ weapons. As many readers will know, at the beginning of July 1940, just a week after France threw in the towel and signed its armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy attacked and disabled the French fleet, then the largest and most powerful in Continental Europe.

The British priority was to prevent the ships falling into the hands of Germany and Italy, who would put them to very good use. In a few days of urgent negotiation, the French commander resisted London’s “suggestion” that he either place the fleet under British command or take it to the French West Indies. So the Royal Navy struck and over 1,300 French sailors were killed.

But the Germans didn’t get hold of France’s most powerful battleships — and the following day, when the French ambassador complained about it to FDR during Washington’s Fourth of July observances, the President said he would have done exactly the same.
Yet Roosevelt’s successor did not do the same — in far more propitious circumstances and on a timeline created by the commander-in-chief and his advisors.

Is the Pentagon total crap? Yes, but, like so many other rackets in Washington, it works for its principal beneficiaries: the defense contractors made over two trillion bucks off the Afghan war, so a mere eighty-five billions’ worth of materiel winding up with the goatherds is way below the lobbyists’ pay grade. The official position of America’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan (a fetching twelve-year-old lad whose pressers give the vague feeling he’s auditioning for the Dancing Boys of Kandahar), has conceded:

    We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban.

Functioning armies know how many pencils they have. As I said, I take it as read that Thoroughly Modern Milley and the Chiefs of Staff are total crap — all ribbons and no chest, the self-garlanded buffoons of a way of war that has not worked for decades: I see David Horowitz and Daniel Greenfield are calling for the Joint Chiefs to be court-martialed, which is the very least one would expect for gifting a Nato-level military to one’s enemies. But the fact that every commander on the ground went along without apparent objection suggests that Milley-style degeneracy runs very deep in the US military.

August 28, 2021

The name “Afghanistan” is becoming a badge of shame for western politicians, and deservedly so

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney points out that while it was probably beyond the capabilities of the Canadian government to evacuate all Afghanis who had assisted Canadian efforts in that country, the actual efforts fell very far short of even “adequate”:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

We have to cut through the fanatics on both sides and be very clear about this: the evacuation was always going to be messy. We were never going to get everyone out. But it is obvious that we did not get out as many people as we should have. It’s clear that we made major errors, including failing to work with veterans and aid groups on the ground; we did not lift bureaucratic hurdles quickly enough. We lost time dithering. That is our shameful failure.

It is not the Canadian government’s fault that our American allies decided to pull out of the conflict. Frankly, I still can’t entirely blame either the Trump or Biden administrations for that decision, although the execution of that decision has been catastrophic.

This was not a decision made in Ottawa, but in Washington, and for entirely American reasons. Further, the Liberals are not to blame for the U.S. government’s massive intelligence failure. We were caught totally flatfooted by the rapid and total collapse of the former Afghan government — what had been expected to take months took days. Canada, a member of both NATO and the Five Eyes, relies heavily on the intelligence gathered by our larger, more powerful ally. I do not fault Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau or his government for being caught unprepared.

So let’s dispense with that nonsense right away. In the big picture, there is not a whole hell of a lot Canadian governments could have done to avoid this crisis.

But we could’ve managed the crisis much better.

Over the last 10 days, we’ve had repeated reports of bottlenecks caused by over-restrictive paperwork requirements. We’ve seen other allies flying helicopters into Kabul to allow them to retrieve their people from sites around the city; Canada has helicopters and the ability to deploy them, but we didn’t follow suit.

Reports indicate that there was a gap of several days in any meaningful Canadian Armed Forces presence on the ground — and that gap set us back in terms of intelligence and planning. Canadian officials reportedly worried about the number of seatbelts on our transport planes even as other allies were loading their aircraft up with as many people as they could (we eventually began cramming evacuees into ours, as well). In several recent pieces here at The Line, Kevin Newman has described the struggle faced by those those trying to escape — people to whom we had had promised safe haven as their lives were now in peril due time they spent helping us during our missions in Afghanistan. There are numerous reports of our government telling these people to show up at gas stations and hotels — only to ghost them.

Facts beyond our control limited how effective we were ever going to be at getting people out, but we did not max out our effectiveness within those constraints. As a result, people will die who did not have to. The gap between the best-possible Canadian response and the actual Canadian response is a gap measured in lives.

I’m always happy to point the finger at Prime Minister Trudeau for his mistakes, but as Matt Gurney writes above, there was little that Trudeau could have done to avert the humanitarian disaster still unfolding around Kabul. The blame for deciding to pull out without adequate (or any) notice to allies or competent logistical and administrative planning lies with Joe Biden, as Conrad Black explains [this was written before the bomb attacks outside the airport in Kabul]:

Biden, in his address last Monday, in his midweek interview with George Stephanopoulos, and in his address on Friday, uttered a series of egregious falsehoods that were quickly exposed. He said there was no expression of discontent from America’s allies. For the first time in history, references to an American president in the British Parliament were met with shouts of “shame”. When Thomas Tugendhat, the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee and a retired colonel who served with distinction in Afghanistan and was decorated by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division for combat bravery, said that it was shameful for a commander-in-chief who has not served under his own colors to mock the sacrifice of men who have, all parties in the British House agreed. No American president has been so severely or — unfortunately — deservedly insulted.

No American, consuming only mainstream media narratives, would realize that there were three times as many allied forces from assorted NATO countries in Afghanistan as there were Americans, or that they were not consulted before the Americans abruptly departed and brought the roof down on all of them. The Western alliance, as former President Trump emphasized, has its problems. Most of the members were not pulling their weight. Germany, the strongest NATO country after the United States, has almost disarmed and has effectively made itself a Russian energy satellite through the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. But they did not deserve this.

After this horrifying fiasco, where the Americans scuttled and turned tail and left their European allies and Canada to fend for themselves, the NATO members have already indicated that they are in no mood to follow this administration anywhere. No one can blame them. Biden said on Friday that the United States was not sending armored vehicles to collect its citizens and bring them to Kabul airport as the British and French were doing because, he explained, Americans were not being stopped by Taliban checkpoints. Half an hour later, the inarticulate Pentagon spokesman John Kirby squarely contradicted his commander-in-chief, and the official explanation was changed to advise Americans not to try to reach the airport because of the danger.

Biden said the Afghans wouldn’t fight so they weren’t worth the risk of American lives; but 50,000 Afghan soldiers and scores of thousands of civilians have died in this war. No Americans ha[d] died in Afghanistan in 18 months (in stark contrast to the soaring crime rates in almost all American cities). As Tugendhat told the House of Commons, it is not for the commander-in-chief of this cowardly, shameful, and disastrous flight from American national responsibilities, who has never served in his own armed forces, to disparage those who have died in allied forces for a cause that he has abandoned and doomed.

The one potentially positive aspect of this horrible debacle has been the unarguable revelation that the president is not up to his job.

August 21, 2021

In this matter Canada apes the US rather than following the great example provided by France

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, France, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Kevin Newman highlights the stark difference between what France has been doing to rescue their own citizens and Afghani civilians with ties to France with the utterly feckless Canadian government’s “effort”:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off.

And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives.

On those same days in Kabul, another country tried to rescue its citizens and hundreds of Afghan interpreters and their families hiding throughout the city. I’ve pieced together what happened to them from texts and video Canadian veterans have been receiving every hour from people they know in Kabul, and I am sharing them with permission. I have verified each of these facts (from the peace of Canada) with multiple sources on the ground.

There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people. Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else.

Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them.

It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada” and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus.

August 18, 2021

Historically, empires have fallen over decades or centuries …

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

… today, however, everything seems to move much faster than it used to:

The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

    State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

    Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality. Here is their Kabul correspondent, Clarissa Ward, reporting on Sunday:

And here is the same Miss Ward reporting on Monday:

Gee, did anyone back at the anchor desk ask her what’s with the wardrobe switcheroo?

Just for the record, the Kingdom of Afghanistan introduced votes for women in 1964 – whereas Switzerland did not get even a very limited female franchise until 1971, and full suffrage not until the Nineties.

Yet, oddly, every Pushtun warlord prefers to keep his retirement account in Zurich.

Maybe, after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, you State Department arses might have enough humility to recognize that that that big messy world is subtler than your one-size-fits-all clichés.

August 17, 2021

Mark Steyn – “The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it”

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The collapse of western — specifically American — control in Afghanistan got put on fast forward and the US dying media can’t be bothered to give it much attention. Mark Steyn didn’t explicitly predict this particular high-speed collapse, but he’s been warning about the Afghan situation for over a decade:

A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:

    Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here’s the scoop from USA Today:

    Taliban’s Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden’s ‘America Is Back’ Foreign Policy Promise

You don’t say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? “America is on its back”, surely?

But don’t worry, the world’s most lavishly over-funded “intelligence community” is on the case:

    Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns

Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours — which is close enough for US intelligence work.

Was this the same “seventeen intelligence agencies” who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election — and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree?

Or perhaps it was only one intelligence agency — most likely the crack agents of the highly specialized Federal Unitary Central Kabul Western Intelligence Tracking Service.

To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire “intelligence community”?

Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.

So what’s the point?

Oh, oh, but, if a nation doesn’t have an army to defend it, a quarter-of-a-million foreign invaders could just walk into the country with impunity every month!

The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network — the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese — is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians … as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).

On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.

Of course, retreating from Kabul is kind of a western military tradition:

Remnants of an Army (1879) by Elizabeth Butler portraying William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad as the only survivor of a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

The remnants of an army, Jellalabad (sic), January 13, 1842, better known as Remnants of an Army, is an 1879 oil-on-canvas painting by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler. It depicts William Brydon, assistant surgeon in the Bengal Army, arriving at the gates of Jalalabad in January 1842. The walls of Jalalabad loom over a desolate plain and riders from the garrison gallop from the gate to reach the solitary figure bringing the first word of the fate of the “Army of Afghanistan”.

Supposedly Brydon was the last survivor of the approximately 16,000 soldiers and camp followers from the 1842 retreat from Kabul in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and is shown toiling the last few miles to safety on an exhausted and dying horse. In fact a few other stragglers from the Army eventually arrived, and larger numbers were eventually released or rescued after spending time as captives of Afghan forces.

January 5, 2018

Justin Trudeau’s PR team fumbles badly with Boyle photo-op

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Late last year, the Boyle family were “rescued” from the Taliban and the Prime Minister not only met with them, but allowed some photos to be taken that quickly made their way out onto social media. Now that Joshua Boyle has been arrested for a long list of offenses, the PM is looking very bad indeed, as Chris Selley points out:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Boyle family in Ottawa, 18 December.

The supposed geniuses surrounding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are capable of some very strange decisions. Arranging a meeting with Joshua Boyle and his family after their release from Taliban captivity, and agreeing to the Boyles photographing the smiling encounter — Joshua later tweeted out some snaps — is certainly one of them.

Boyle was arrested Tuesday and charged with a raft of offences including sexual assault and unlawful confinement, concerning events beginning immediately after the family’s return to Canada in early October. Trudeau met the Boyles on Dec. 18. Now photos of Trudeau beaming with the accused are all over the news. If PMO procedures somehow didn’t flag the investigation, that’s a serious concern. If they did and the meeting happened anyway, it’s horrendous political risk management at the very least.

Indeed, these were hardly the first red flags. The PMO argues it would agree to such a meeting with any released hostages — a very stupid policy if it exists, because the Boyles aren’t quite any released hostages. When the Taliban nabbed Joshua and five-months-pregnant Caitlin Coleman in 2012, they were ostensibly “backpacking in Afghanistan.” The phrase dances off the tongue a bit like “scuba diving in Yemen” or “gastronomic tour of Somalia”: not inconceivable, but the Boyles will not have been surprised to learn that some in the U.S. intelligence community were suspicious. They reportedly refused an American military flight home over fears — perfectly reasonable ones, surely — that they might wind up stuck at Bagram Airfield.

But what the heck, let’s think the best of the Boyles. Sunny ways, etc. The best still involves the unpleasant matter of Joshua’s short-lived marriage to none other than Zaynab Khadr — daughter of the late Ahmed Khadr, the Egyptian-Canadian al-Qaida financier for whom Jean Chrétien famously went to bat when he was detained in Pakistan.

[…]

Unseriousness is a serious charge against Trudeau: big hat, staff photographer, few cattle. Another non-official photo released this week shows Trudeau and his Castro-worshiping brother Sacha in matching sweaters depicting the Last Supper attended by emojis, with the words Happy Birthday strung over top. In a rather over-the-top tweet, Conservative MP Candice Bergen accused the PM of “intolerance” and of “mocking Christianity” — and no question, many Canadians might expect the prime minister to eschew such a garment lest it cause offence. (It was in private, of course, but it’s public now.) But many Canadians also might expect the prime minister to eschew such a garment because he’s the leader of a G7 country, a serious person with a serious job that he’s taking seriously.

This touchy-feely cool-dad happy-go-lucky shtick has taken Trudeau a long, long way. I very much doubt it can take him any further. And I think the backlash, when it comes, could be legendary.

October 8, 2014

Pakistan’s public health emergency

Filed under: Asia, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

The number of reported cases of polio is now the highest it has been for more than a decade, and at least some of the blame has to go to the CIA for using health workers as a cover for some of their covert operations.

As world health officials struggle to respond to the Ebola epidemic, Pakistan has passed a grim milestone in its efforts to combat another major global health crisis: the fight against polio.

Over the weekend, Pakistan logged its 200th new polio case of 2014, the nation’s highest transmission rate in more than a dozen years. The spread has alarmed Pakistani and international health experts and is prompting fresh doubt about the country’s ability to combat this or future disease outbreaks.

By Tuesday, the number of new polio cases in Pakistan stood at 202, and officials are bracing for potentially dozens of other cases by year’s end. Pakistan now accounts for 80 percent of global cases and is one of only three countries at risk of exporting the disease outside its borders, according to the World Health Organization.

[…]

In far-flung areas of the country, some parents and religious leaders are skeptical of the vaccine, requiring considerable face-to-face outreach by vaccination teams.

But the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist militants have waged a brutal campaign against those teams, killing more than 50 health workers and security officials since 2012. The attacks began after it was discovered that the CIA had used a vaccination campaign to gain information about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.

June 9, 2014

The not-so-hidden racism in the Bergdahl release

Filed under: Humour, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:22

Nicole Mullen explains why you’re an awful racist if you don’t see the awful racism in the swap of five Taliban prisoners for US Army hero/deserter Bowe Bergdahl:

Treating politics like professional wrestling rivalries comes with its fair share of downfalls though, and this Bergdahl case is a perfect example of such shortcomings. As a leftist myself, I was quick to dismiss any notion of Bergdahl’s traitorous behavior, nor did I take exception to Obama’s decision to circumvent congressional approval when he released five terrorists from Gitmo. I simply read that a trade occurred, googled to find out how the right felt about it, and then blindly argued against every single point that they made. Is Bergdahl a deserter? Of course not, he’s a hero. What evidence do I have of that? None. Who cares? I’m right and you’re wrong.

But, this is where the breakdown occurs, because there’s something my fellow liberals are missing in all of this, and only part of it is to blame on fervent, unquestioning support of the president. It’s odd to me that in a whole industry of race obsessed blowhards collecting freelancing checks, I’m the only one who noticed how racist the Bergdahl trade was.

I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing the president for his decision to rescue Bergdahl, but there’s something that the white left is afraid to talk about here. When Obama traded five men of color for one white man – he made a very clear statement about race. He let the entire world know that one white life is worth at least five brown ones, and that is incredibly fucked up and gross and problematic.

Think for a second – if Bush had made that trade, is there any doubt that we would be calling him out for how outrageously racist it was? If a white man had traded five brown men for one white man, we would be quick to see it for what it was – an affirmation of white privilege and power. But, because Obama is a man of color himself, it seems as if no one noticed.

I can only imagine the struggle Obama, a man of people of color, must have felt as he authorized that trade. He was betraying himself – the black part of himself – while simultaneously affirming the privilege and power structures inherent in the white part of himself. The courage it took to make that decision is remarkable, and again, I feel like he made the right choice, but we should really look at this situation and use it as a way to reflect on our cultural attitudes to the devaluation and reductive characterization of colorful men that we objectify through cisrace projections of cultural self-worth.

January 13, 2013

The “successes” of the drone war can only be measured in body counts

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

In the Guardian, Simon Jenkins discusses the negative aspects of the drone war:

The greatest threat to world peace is not from nuclear weapons and their possible proliferation. It is from drones and their certain proliferation. Nuclear bombs are useless weapons, playthings for the powerful or those aspiring to power. Drones are now sweeping the global arms market. There are some 10,000 said to be in service, of which a thousand are armed and mostly American. Some reports say they have killed more non-combatant civilians than died in 9/11.

I have not read one independent study of the current drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the horn of Africa that suggests these weapons serve any strategic purpose. Their “success” is expressed solely in body count, the number of so-called “al-Qaida-linked commanders” killed. If body count were victory, the Germans would have won Stalingrad and the Americans Vietnam.

Neither the legality nor the ethics of drone attacks bear examination. Last year’s exhaustive report by lawyers from Stanford and New York universities concluded that they were in many cases illegal, killed civilians, and were militarily counter-productive. Among the deaths were an estimated 176 children. Such slaughter would have an infantry unit court-martialled. Air forces enjoy such prestige that civilian deaths are excused as a price worth paying for not jeopardising pilots’ lives.

[. . .]

Since the drone war began in earnest in 2008, there has been no decline in Taliban or al-Qaida performance attributable to it. Any let-up in recruitment is merely awaiting Nato’s departure. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has called the attacks “in no way justifiable”. The Pakistan government, at whose territory they are increasingly directed, has withdrawn all permission.

The young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana protested in the New York Times of the carnage drones are wreaking on the politics of his country, erasing “years of progress and trust-building with tribes”. Yemenis now face al-Qaida recruiters waving pictures of drone-butchered women and children in their faces. Notional membership of al-Qaida in Yemen is reported to have grown by three times since 2009.

November 21, 2012

Upgrading the Coyote

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Strategy Page has a bit of Canadian content now and again:

Canada has ordered upgrades for another of its 66 LAV III wheeled armored vehicles. These 66 will be equipped for reconnaissance as was its predecessor the LAV II Coyote. This vehicle went to Afghanistan a decade ago and proved enormously useful by doing long range surveillance of Taliban and al Qaeda suspects. The Coyote reconnaissance system mounted on a wheeled armored vehicle. The recon gear consists of a nine meter (30 foot) telescoping mast that contains a Doppler radar, laser rangefinder, thermal imaging sensor and video camera. The mast mounted sensors can see clearly out to 15 kilometers and identify targets (day or night) for artillery or air attack. The radar can spot targets out to 24 kilometers, but can only distinguish vehicle types (wheeled, tracked) beginning at about 12 kilometers.

[. . .]

The Coyote was originally conceived as an inexpensive replacement for air reconnaissance. But the ability of a Coyote vehicle to stay in one place and carefully track movements over a wide area for days, or weeks proved very useful for intelligence work. Five years ago Canada began a $5 billion to upgrade and expand its fleet of LAV III wheeled armored vehicles. Over the last decade, Canada has replaced its 1980s era MOWAG and older LAV II vehicles with the locally built LAV IIIs. Canada donated many of the older wheeled armored vehicles (mostly 11 ton Grizzly personnel carriers) to nations performing peacekeeping duties.

November 19, 2012

Victims of state-sponsored violence in Pakistan and Gaza

Filed under: Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Brendan O’Neill wonders why fans of Obama’s re-election (and therefore also of his bloody record of drone strikes in Pakistan) are almost uniformly against Israel’s counter-attacks in Gaza:

All the people who two weeks ago were ecstatically cheering the re-election of Barack Obama are now having paroxysms of fury over Israel. Where the blogs, Twitterfeeds and daily conversations of these caring, Left-leaning folk were packed to bursting point with glowing praise for Obama on 7 November, now they are full of scorn for Israel and its inhuman, bloodthirsty bombing of Gaza. The intensity of these individuals’ delirium over Obama’s second term now finds its match in the intensity of their disgust with Israel’s military antics.

Which is weird, when you consider that Obama, their hero, has already done to the tribal regions of Pakistan what Israel, their nemesis, is now doing to Gaza.

Obama, like Israel, launches bombing raids on foreign militants, and Obama, like Israel, ends up killing innocent people in the process. Indeed, of the 283 drone strikes launched by Obama in rural regions of Pakistan over the past four years, which have killed an estimated 2,600 people, only 13 per cent have successfully killed an al-Qaeda or Taliban militant. Shockingly, this means that around 2,200 non-militant Pakistanis — or what we might call innocents — have been killed by Obama: bombed in their beds, or while herding sheep, or while driving their cars. This death toll dwarfs what has been unleashed by Israel over the past week or during the first Gaza war in 2008, when around 1,400 Palestinians died.

[. . .]

What is behind these mammoth double standards? Is it that Pakistanis are considered less important than Palestinians, and therefore there’s no need to protest when they get killed? Is it that Obama is viewed as so supercool and liberal that he can bomb whom he likes and still his cheerleaders won’t kick up a fuss? Is it because Israel is a Jewish State, and we are more offended by the sight of Jews bombing brown people than we are by the sight of America’s Democratic Party bombing brown people? What is it? There must be some explanation. Perhaps if you are one of those people who cheered Obama’s re-election and is now jeering at Israel’s militarism you might take a few minutes to tell us why some forms of militarism make you see red, and others do not.

August 28, 2012

A possible solution to Pakistan’s Taliban problem

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

Strategy Page on recent developments in Pakistan over domestic terror groups and the Afghani Taliban:

There are currently 150,000 troops in the Pakistani tribal territories, and nearly 40,000 surrounding North Waziristan (an area of 4,700 square kilometers, with 365,000 people). North Waziristan has been surrounded since late 2009, but Pakistani generals have refused to go in and take down this terrorist refuge. Politicians have been under growing pressure from the West, especially the United States to do something about the continued terror attacks by what the Pakistanis call “bad Taliban”. These are mostly Pakistani Taliban who wants to establish a religious dictatorship in Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban, who wants to establish a similar government in Afghanistan are considered “good Taliban” (along with the minority of Pakistani Taliban who don’t want to overthrow the government.)

In the last two years, the Pakistani Taliban have also caused hundreds of casualties among pro-government tribesmen throughout the tribal territories, and it’s no secret that the army hires tribesmen and puts them in dangerous situations to minimize army casualties. The army cannot afford to lose the support of the loyal tribes up there. All this has put pressure on the army to eliminate the refuge the killers can flee to in North Waziristan. Several times, because of the demands of Pakistani and American politicians, the Pakistani generals have said they will consider advancing into North Waziristan. But it hasn’t happened yet. The most likely outcome to all this is a very special army operation in North Waziristan, one that will avoid doing too much damage to their terrorist friends, and just go after a few towns known to be terrorist (who attack Pakistan) hangouts. In other words, the army will put on a show, and hope that the intended audience (the United States) approves. Bad reviews will be bad news indeed. Then there’s the fact that there will be a lot of advance publicity for this operation, including details (in the Pakistani media) of which Pakistani brigade will go where, giving the terrorist groups plenty of time to get out of the way. This has happened before, and could happen again.

The bottom line is that the Pakistani military is not likely to attack its longtime and loyal terrorist allies (especially Haqqani Network) in North Waziristan, at least not as long as the elected politicians have no control over selecting the senior military leaders. The Pakistani military is a self-selected aristocracy that extorts a large chunk of the national wealth to sustain itself. More Pakistanis are looking at the military this way, especially in light how well serving and retired generals (and lower ranking officers) live. But the military has the firepower and few civilians are eager to take the troops on.

The Pakistani generals deny that there is any agreement with the Americans to shut down terrorist operations in North Waziristan in return for NATO action against Pakistani Taliban hiding out in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in the last week, American air power appears to have done just that, killing several senior Pakistani Taliban leaders in their Afghan hideouts. Now the Americans are waiting for their Pakistani counterparts to do something in North Waziristan. This is one reason civilians in North Waziristan are fleeing their homes. They know how such deals work; you do a big favor for someone and there has to be payback. It’s the code of honor and must be observed. But maybe not. Officially, Pakistan opposes the American UAV patrols over North Waziristan and the hundreds of missile attacks on terrorists below. Pakistani politicians openly decry these attacks as violations of Pakistani sovereignty, while privately supporting these operations that kill Islamic terrorists the Pakistani security forces will not or cannot get to. It’s all a convenient hypocrisy.

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