#2
i think we probably should have skipped getting in with a ground presence. kept supplying the northern alliance (or whoever) with air power anytime they called for a talli-wacking. left running/building that shit-hole to whoever wanted it. our job was to make sure it didn't get used as a base for ops against us. we can do that from the air with friendlies on the ground providing targeting information.
the LAST thing we should have done was put a pashtun in power where he could wring his hands about fluffy ducks and bunnies getting boomed. someone like Dotdum (sp?) calling the shots with a liberal(in the non political sense) application of daisy cutters/moabs dropped on demand would have been my preferred method of handling this op.
Posted by: abu do you love ||
11/13/2009 1:46 Comments ||
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#3
with a liberal(in the non political sense) application of daisy cutters/moabs dropped on demand
And just why can't we use liberals as Daisy Cutters?
#6
The only way to have ever gotten a win in Afghanistan was to right from the start, rewrite the government, give them a MacArthur (PBUH) constitution, and put all children in western style boarding schools in the big cities.
We would still be fighting, but at least Afghanistan would have a future. Someplace to go that isn't the disaster that it is. No guarantees, but at least a possibility.
As things stand now, the very best that can be hoped for is that it will turn into a Taliban hostile narco state.
#7
As things stand now, the very best that can be hoped for is that it will turn into a Taliban hostile narco state.
Sort of like LA with barbaric gang fighting over turf and the narc trade with refugees fleeing the state [and unfortunately taking their nasty habits and behaviors with them]. A failed state that is grid lock with specials interests [another form of tribes] seeking to get their cut of power and wealth and an myopic 'intellectual/elite' class out of touch with the basics of civilization hunkered down in their little bubble communes from the diversity they championed for everyone else.
#8
The partition Iraq people were right on the concept and wrong on the country. Partition Afghanistan into tribal areas. Ring fence each and kill anyone that crosses. Kabul becomes a neutral tribal gathering center with a figurehead King restored to a very weak constitutional monarchy. Status quo of 1957.
#10
The difference is that Vietnam was won militarily (then the plug was pulled on SV), whereas the Afghan War is unwinnable.
Otherwise I agree with abu, we should have let the Northern Alliance do their stuff with air, training etc support.
Although MOABs are a waste. It would be like Arclighting North Dakota. Kill a lot of corn/wheat (poppies and rocks in Afghanistan's case) and not much else.
#11
The Burg has in the past advocated building a big fence around Pashtunistan. The Pashtuns can do as they please inside but aren't ever allowed outside. Fence, razor wire, gun turrets, moats, crocodiles, sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads, whatever it takes, but the Pashtuns stay in their land, and we get the rest of the earth. Seems like one good solution.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/13/2009 11:03 Comments ||
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#12
A fenced Pashtunistan "Hotel California" sounds great: Islamo immigrants and deportees can check in anytime but they can NEVER leave.
#14
a well placed MOAB would sure do a LOT more on the 'hearts and minds' front than any of the other worthless DOS projects we have funded to date ever will.
Posted by: abu do you love ||
11/13/2009 20:44 Comments ||
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#15
Compare wid GUAM PDN OP-ED > TOM HAYDEN [US Congresscritter, CA] - OBAMA SHOULD CHOOSE RETREAT!?
#16
#13 The fence is a lovely idea, but I don't see how it could be done out here in the real world. Posted by: trailing wife
Radiation, TW. Dig a ditch around Pashtunistan, just a couple of feet deep but about 50 feet wide. Fill it with all our discarded radioactive waste. Kill two birds with one stone, as it were. The stuff won't even have to be identified - it'll glow at night, and things crossing it will die in a day or two.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
11/13/2009 22:38 Comments ||
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In what's becoming an annual ritual, state government again is on track to have an even greater-than-expected budget deficit. And once again, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says there must be across-the-board spending cuts. He's half right.
Spending cuts are essential. State government anticipates up to a $7 billion shortfall this year and another $7.4 billion in 2010-11. But cutting indiscriminately across the board is as imprudent as approving all kinds of spending, with little concern for whether it's proper or justified and with even less foresight about the consequences. The governor might as well resort to a dart board.
Now that the necessity to reduce spending is undeniable, the governor and legislators need to exercise some of the discernment largely absent from previous budgetary deliberations.
Politically, the governor may prefer shifting responsibility for hard decisions to the Legislature -- and consequently to numerous lobbyists representing their many affected constituencies. That way he can appear to take the high ground, insisting deprivation be shared equally. Both these political postures are disingenuous. We suspect they're designed to avoid the responsibility of making hard decisions, and to maximize public outcry by spreading the pain over as many sectors as possible.
Mr. Schwarzenegger knows not all government spending is created equal. In short, some government operations deserve deeper cuts than others.
Californians elect legislators and the governor to make these decisions, however unpleasant or politically unpalatable. That's what representative government is supposed to do. We urge the governor and Legislature to identify the most appropriate areas for budget cuts and then make the most significant cuts there. There's no shortage of ideas; various commissions have studied the question in recent years. Bloated payrolls and regulatory agencies are good places to start.
Unfortunately, there are many disproportionately influential constituencies, such as public employee unions. The inherent risk in that is those lobbies effectively could be the ones to decide what and how much to cut -- unless the governor and legislators show leadership. That's all the more reason to pare payroll first. And pigs can fly.
I've said it before, I truly believe we'd be better off if we dissolved the legislature altogether. Then the governor could propose a budget and let the people vote on it. You think we're too ignorant to vote on a budget? I think that's what the legislators think but then, they're all crooked.
The governor could propose state laws and let the people vote on them.
The people could also put their own proposals on the ballot the way we already do. That, BTW, is the only way we ever get any decent laws passed in this state.
#3
I think it was William Buckley who once said that he'd rather be governed by the first 3,000 people listed in the Boston phonebook than by the last 3,000 Harvard grads.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/13/2009 15:03 Comments ||
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#4
Ostriches. Keep trying to run away from the problem or put your heads in the sand hoing it goes away. Guess what - you rang up the bill and it will be paid one way or another.
#5
I am so pissed at the "governing classes" here in California that have traqded fiscal sanity for buying votes and importing votes and ruining a lifetime of financial effort. I have live here 35 years, paid taxes, bought a home and paid for it, and suffered through increasingly liberal governance, until we have reach a point where they really have killed the goose that laid the golden egg. I'm leaving, and taking the massive loss in value for my home to do so.
I have no confidence that anything can be done to save the place. The tipping point has been reached. More people get from the state than give to it, and all that faces me in the future is more and more public theft from my wallet to give others, The country ins't far behind but a few places will likely be the last to slip under the waves. I'm going there to finish out my days.
My grandchildren will be speaking chinese or spanish and wondering how I let this happen...
and I hope they learn the hard lessons that, diversity, loss of unifying culture, abandonment of actual history and "tolerance" teach....
Canadians are no better than Germans. Human beings are what we are. In similar circumstances, confronted by apparently invincible state power, and in the presence of unambiguous evil, the great majority will stand silently by. An interesting minority will cheer, however.
I sense this when I look at the indifference of the great majority of Canadians today, to real evils that are exposed in our own public life, to the dark encroachments of our own increasingly arbitrary bureaucracies, to the progressive extinction of our liberties by our own Nanny State. These evils are arguably modest on the scale of what exploded in Nazi Germany, but we are utter fools to neglect the rising temperature in our own witches' cauldron.
Let me not drift off-topic. The Jews have been called "the canaries in the mine" of history, and there is profound truth in this. I am struck by this "blurb" from a tract by David Solway, the remarkable Canadian
"The spectacle we are observing today -- the reluctance to deal adequately with terrorism, the political contriving against our own best interests, the serpentine efforts to exculpate the enemy, the relativizing of moral principle, the Left's betrayal of its own liberal culture, the renewed 'treason of the intellectuals', and especially the mounting acerbity towards Jews in the court of public opinion, and the isolation of Israel as a pariah state -- is merely the modern instantiation of this long offensive against our very survival."
poet (Hear, O Israel! -- just published by Mantua Books):
"Hatred of the Jew is the perpetual vestige of Western resentment and vexation against its own civilizing imperative. This too was Winston Churchill's understanding of Jew-hatred, which he described as Western civilization's revolt against its own central values as manifested in art, science, and political and religious organizations ...
"The spectacle we are observing today -- the reluctance to deal adequately with terrorism, the political contriving against our own best interests, the serpentine efforts to exculpate the enemy, the relativizing of moral principle, the Left's betrayal of its own liberal culture, the renewed 'treason of the intellectuals', and especially the mounting acerbity towards Jews in the court of public opinion, and the isolation of Israel as a pariah state -- is merely the modern instantiation of this long offensive against our very survival."
As a (Catholic) writer who has been called a "Jew-lover" by quite a few phone callers and e-mailers over the years since 9/11, I should like to admit the charge, and stand by the position. The synagogues of Europe have been painted with swastikas again, this time mostly by Islamists; the president of Iran has openly prophesied the "final end" of Israeli Jewry in "fire and the sword" -- and the Chamberlain president of the United States seeks negotiations with him.
As World War II stirred from the ashes of World War I, so World War III seems to stir from the ashes of World War II. On this day of remembrance, we must think of the future.
It is the third verse of that beautiful rondeau, "In Flander's Fields," that we have forgotten:
"Take up our quarrel with the foe: / To you from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high. / If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep."
Posted by: Fred ||
11/13/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
COL McCrae was wounded in May 1918 and was taken to one of the big hospitals on the coast of France. On the third evening he was wheeled to the balcony of his room to look over the sea towards the cliffs of Dover. The verses were obviously in his mind, for he said to the doctor "Tell them, if ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep." That same night COL McCrae died."
"There were five people who came after me from a place in Bajaur. They tricked me. They told me they were going to behead my father. I went with them but my father wasn't there. They tied me up. They said: 'You have two choices. We will behead you, or you will become a suicide bomber.' I refused.
There were two more guys of my age. They were also training to be suicide bombers. If we refused they would tie our hands behind our backs, blindfold us and start beating us.
They brainwashed us and told us we would go to heaven. They said 'there will be honey and juice and God will appear in front of you. You will have a beautiful house in Heaven'.
We used to ask them to let us out to pray. They would reply 'you are already on your way to heaven. You don't need to pray.'
They beat me hard for five days. I wasn't given any food. While they were beating me I agreed to become a suicide bomber. They separated me from the other boys.
Mosque mission
They took me to a dark room and started giving me pills. I was handed over to Maulvi Fakir [the Bajaur Taliban commander]. After all this preparation they said I was to go and do the job in a mosque.
It was an ordinary mosque but the cleric there used to talk against the Taliban, and they declared him their enemy. They told me the cleric was a non-believer, a non-Muslim.
They took off my shirt and put the jacket on my shoulders. There were two hooks on my chest. They told me that when you go there you say 'Allahu Akbar' [God is Great] and then you pull apart these two hooks. Then they took me there, showed me the mosque and went off.
I was drugged and I couldn't feel anything. I only came to my senses when I arrived in the mosque. I saw the peaceful kind face of the cleric, and I saw the mosque was full of holy books. I saw the people praying. And I thought, they are all Muslims. How can I do this? I decided not to and I came out.
I sat under a tree outside the mosque and waited for prayers to be over. After that I made my way back to the Taliban. Then they called me 'a son of a bitch' and asked why I had come back without doing it.
I told them I could not do it because they were carrying out body searches of all the people entering the mosque. They took off my vest and handed me over to Maulvi Fakir.
They tied me up but I told them to give me another chance and I would do it. They trusted me. I was roaming around with them for a couple of days. I got to the road, found transport and came home. They followed me to my house. They wanted to know if I was still there or had run somewhere else.
The Taliban had beaten me so harshly my back was scarred. When my parents saw that my mother started to cry, and told me not to go back to them. My father asked them why they were after his son. One day he took his weapon and went after them. But they wanted to kill him so he came back home and closed the door.
Before the Taliban came we used to enjoy freedom. We used to play, and go to our schools. There were no restrictions on us. Morning and evening we used to play games, and sit and chat with friends. We used to listen to music on our mobile phones. They banned that. They stopped us doing anything. They stopped us playing cricket and going to school. We felt like prisoners.
I want to join the army because they are the defenders of the land. They are fighting for the right cause. I want to fight against the Taliban. I have no other intention except to defend my country. The Taliban should be eliminated.
I want to tell the Taliban that they are cruel, and what they did to me was unjust. I can't kill innocent Muslims.
I am not afraid of them. I am only afraid of God. I am answerable only to Him."
Posted by: Oscar ||
11/13/2009 03:55 ||
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#1
The reason I posted this was :
I want to join the army because they are the defenders of the land. They are fighting for the right cause. I want to fight against the Taliban. I have no other intention except to defend my country. The Taliban should be eliminated.
Maybe the next generation of that shithole will transpire to be something rather than nothing.
I aint holding out much hope though :(
Posted by: Oscar ||
11/13/2009 8:12 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In what's becoming an annual ritual, state government again is on track to have an even greater-than-expected budget deficit. And once again, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says there must be across-the-board spending cuts. He's half right.
David Warren
