....
So, what does this mean for logistical support of ISAF forces? According to Nesar Ahmad Nasery, the deputy head of Torkham Customs, around 1,000 trucks cross into Afghanistan on a daily basis, nearly 300 of which are NATO contractors carrying NATO supplies in sealed containers. Khyber Transport Association chief Shakir Afridi said that each oil tanker has a capacity of 13,000-15,000 gallons. In October 2010 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen said that fossil fuels are the number one import to Afghanistan.
Noting the obvious, as Afghanistan has no indigenous hydrocarbon supplies, every drop must be brought in, with transit greatly increasing the eventual cost. For 2001-2008, almost all U.S. and NATO supplies were trucked overland to Afghanistan through parts of Pakistan effectively controlled by the Taliban.
Ground supplies are shipped into Pakistans Arabian Sea Karachi port and offloaded onto trucks before being sent to one of five crossing points on the Afghan border, the most important being Torkham at the Khyber Pass and Baluchistans Chaman. The recent attack has put all these routes at risk, perhaps permanently. Pakistan, being the shortest and most economical route, has been used for nearly a decade to transit almost 75 percent of the ammunition, vehicles, foodstuff and around 50 percent of fuel for coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan.
Posted by: Paul D ||
12/04/2011 9:55 Comments ||
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#2
Xenophon and Alexander showed that in the end a Western Army can walk to the seaports. The area and its population along the way, however, usually doesn't do as well.
#3
I imagine the Pakstanis think they can twist our arm for more donations and higher fees using the threat. It may even work, short term. But more of our supplies are coming through the the northern route, and we have fewer troops there to need supplying...
#8
I personally think two Marine divisions, combined with ARCLIGHT and Tac Air could open up a supply route PDQ. Bring in a Navy CB battalion and build a da$$ed railroad from Karachi to Kabul or Kandahar. plus a pipeline or three. It's time to call Pakistan's bluff and kick the living sh$$ out of them. You CANNOT win a war against Mooselimbs - or anybody else - by being "nice". Alexander, Genghis Khan both had the same idea. Destroy Pakistan and give it back to India, if they'll have it.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
12/04/2011 14:27 Comments ||
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#9
Eohippus, fair point. "Free Balochistan!" has a ring to it, and it'd also make the Iranians nervous.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/04/2011 14:31 Comments ||
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#10
Destroy Pakistan and give it back to India, if they'll have it.
Well, Manmohan mentioned they didn't want it back in its current state. After some house cleaning and such...maybe.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
12/04/2011 14:59 Comments ||
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#11
Elphinstone didn't play by the same rules as Alexander or Xenophon. or Khan.
#12
Muqtada Sadr has said his Boyz will resume attacks in Iraq iff the US-NATO maintain evena minimal presence there - prob safe to say ditto for the AFPAK Hard/Bad Boyz as per post-2014 US-NATO presence in Afghanistan.
In sum, then ...
> To prevent Iran per se from having NucWeaps, the US must attack Iran.
> More importantly, to prevent various Regional, International Militant-Terror Groups + aligned NGOS from acquiring Nuke-WMDS MilTechs, the US must attack Iran.
> To save post-2014 Iraq from hegemonic Rising Shia Iran, the US must attack Iran.
> To save post-2014 Afghanistan from Pak-based MilTerrs despite lack of overland MLLS, + no Balochistan, the US must attack Iran.
> To save Israel, now andor post-2012/2014, etc. the US must attack Iran.
> To save the Sunni Muslim Middle East from hegemonic Rising Shia Iran, the US must attack Iran.
> To deter or prevent a ME Nuclear Arms race as due to Sunni-vs-Shia regional competition for Regional + OWG Caliphate dominance, the US must attack Iran.
I can think of other rationales but the above is good for starters.
As per the US, to save CONUS-NORAM + EU + even MAMA RUSSIA + CHINA from the threat of Iranian LR IRBMS + ICBMS that be used to deter any international counterresponse agz a "Nuclear 9-11/Mumbai" event(s) vee Nuke-WMD armed pro-Iran or pro-Jihad MilTerr Groups, the US will have to attack Iran.
REMEMBER, THE ISLAMIST JIHAD/INSURGENCY IS ULTIMATELY "GLOBAL/UNIVERSAL/INTERNATIONAL" IN SCOPE, not just Regional or Local.
By "US must attack Iran" I mean or infer direct US = US-NATO/Allied direct invasion + LT occupation of same.
WANNABE SHIA IRAN WANTS + LIKES ITS NUKES JUST AS ALREADY NUKE-ARMED PAKISTAN'S GOVT. LIKE SUPPORTING RADICAL ISLAMISM.
Pesky Persians are Pesky = Iran gets its Nukes, or else Iran gets invaded.
* ISLAMIST JIHAD > ISLAM CONQUERS THE WORLD, ALA THE OWG CALIPHATE [Nuclear], OR IT DOESN'T.
* "PEARL HARBOR" MOVIE > COMMUNISM-SOCIALSM CONQUERS AMERICA, OR IT DOESN'T.
* RISING CHINA > ONE-N-ONLY WORLD "SOLE SUCCESSOR" TO THE "WEAK/DECLINING" US SUPERPOWER, OR IT ISN'T.
And thusly, my dear Virgina, we once again again again learn why God invented the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction/Annihilation.
#13
What we need to do is better foment combative discord between various "flavors" of islam. 'Get Shias and Sunnis chopping each other to shreds everywhere we can. Things could not get much better than the old Iran-Iraq war - with competing human wave attacks continually eating up entire cohorts of young asshats.
Who will be a better "War President" - Gingrich or Romney? I tend to think Newt will do better.
#14
ION DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > OIL SUPPLY [fuel exports] TO AFGHANISTAN ALSO SHUT DOWN [by Islamabad] AT TORKHAM.
ARTICLE > MAP = PROPOSED ALTERNATE "SUPPLY ROUTES FOR NATO TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN" > SHORTEST ALTERN LAND ROUTE = from Chabahar, I-R-A-N to Afghan city Delaram.
Also from SAME > GRIEVING [Pak] FAMILIES DEMAND JUSTICE FOR SLAIN SOLDIERS.
* SAME > BEREAVED FAMILIES DEMAND END TO
"AMERICA'S WAR".
ARTIC > Dead Soldier's Relative = opined that the family may feel better iff he had died fighting Hindus = INDIA, aka PAKISTAN'S MORTAL ENEMY, but no purpose was served wid him getting killed via US Drone + "friendly fire"???
* WAFF > {Russia Today] US CAN'T AFFORD TO OPEN ANOTHER FRONT IN PAKISTAN.
ARTIC > HAMID GUL = opined that iff POTUS OBAMA hopes to get some political = re-election? benefit from this war, he must get the bulk of US Troops out of Afghanistan before November
2012 next year???
* WAFF > ISLAMABAD HAS BEEN STRETCHED TO THE LIMIT. THE ASSUMPTION THAT PAKISTAN HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO OBEY AMERICA MAY TURN OUT TO BE A DIRE STRATEGIC ERROR.
IIUC, iff the US-NATO are not careful, they may see Pakistan devol into ANOTHER, ALREADY NUKE-ARMED "REVOLUTIONARY/ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF
IRAN" IN WEST ASIA???
by lotp
To understand how we got to where we are today, with a POTUS who's made it clear he would like to dismantle the US nuclear arsenal while madmen in Pyongyang and Teheran - or are they mad??? - work to acquire thermonuclear weapons and threaten by their actions to pass tactical nukes to terror groups, it helps to know how close we came - or how close some thought we came - to serious nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.
David Hoffman's 2009 book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy recounts in detail threats the public remained unaware of at the time, and the slow dance towards strategic arms control agreements. Hoffman, a WaPo investigative reporter whose book greeted the newly installed Adminstration, favors disarmament. But do the remedies advanced by either the Left or the Right during and just after the Cold War address the threats we face today?
Hoffman's account leaves out some important history. In the 1950s the Soviet army vastly outnumbered that of the US. The Eisenhower administration's response was to announce massive nuclear retaliation for any Soviet hostilities anywhere, since the US couldn't respond with conventional forces to as many fronts as the Soviets might attack simultaneously.
Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles thought the idea of nuclear strike would be too horrible to contemplate and assumed that their announced policy would therefore deter Soviet aggression.
However Herman Kahn, who had contributed to US fusion weapons design and who was a key early analyst at Rand, argued that an "all or nothing" approach actually made nuclear attacks more likely, not less. Applying game theory and scenario planning, Kahn suggested one could both contemplate survival of nuclear war and reduce the likelihood of things getting to that point by identifying and countering enemy geopolitical moves in convincing ways.
The Left was horrified by the publication of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkableand On Thermonuclear War. The Right embraced the idea of strategic planning but paid less attention than they might have to Kahn's warnings about sober evaluation of the escalation path. Instead, both the US and the Soviets embarked on a major strategic arms race -- bigger and more numerous weapons, ICBM delivery systems, communications and rapid improvements in monitoring technologies (especially by the US).
By 1980 there were enough strategic nuclear weapons in the major powers' stockpiles to wipe out every large city on Earth, many times over.
But nuclear strike wasn't the only mass destructive threat that had emerged during the arms race. In 1979 a Soviet bioweapons lab accident just east of the Ural mountains released weaponized anthrax, killing over 100 people and numerous livestock. Later, Soviet scientist Kenneth Alibek would defect, but not before leading bioweapons programs that developed highly virulent strains of multiple pathogens, in direct violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention the Soviets had signed.
Hoffman's account starts with the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk and with tensions in the early 1980s as the Soviets grew increasingly concerned about the US land and sea-based ICBM capability. He documents the hesitant, on-again/off-again attempts by leaders on both sides to find a way out of escalating arms development, with Thatcher and Reagan playing key roles in the West and Gorbachev doing the same in the East. Gorbachev was deeply concerned about what he saw as the corruption, bureaucratic lethargy and stupidity of the Soviet apparatus, as evidenced by the failure to act promptly and appropriately in response to the accident at Chernobyl -- a failure that suggested the country could not respond to a military attack effectively, either.
One system was allegedly in place for such an event, however. Code named Dead Hand it was intended to automatically, or semi-automatically, launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal at once towards the US if a series of events suggested that the Soviet leadership had been killed, according to Valery Yarynich, a Soviet expert who joined discussions in 1991 between US and Soviet civilians on nuclear command and control issues. His confidant, Bruce Blair, was a key member of the Brookings Institute, a leading liberal think tank on strategic matters.
Thus began an intense, high stakes dance at multiple levels: negotiations of arms limitation agreements and subsequent cat and mouse games in which the Soviets in particular made many attempts to avoid having their significant violations of those agreements be provably documented.
Earlier attempts at strategic arms limitations -- the SALT I and SALT II treaties -- had collapsed when the US withdrew due to blatant Soviet cheating and aggressive moves in Afghanistan and Cuba. A new 1991 SMART treaty did institute limits on nuclear stockpiles and a formal inspection regime.
However, treaties are negotiated between states and in 1991 the Soviet Union was unraveling. Sen. Sam Nunn, who had just visited Moscow, believed social chaos was imminent in the USSR. He consulted both Blair and also physicist Ashton Carter of Harvard, who stressed that nuclear safeguards were reliable only when there was social stability in a given country. Nunn approached the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin, to jointly introduce a bill that would offer massive economic aid to Russia to forestall chaos they feared would lead to dispersal of the thousands of tactical nukes the Soviets had manufactured and stored all over the USSR. But Aspin's history of gleeful and publicity-seeking attacks on the Pentagon caused significant resistance to the bill, both by Pres. George H.W. Bush and by much of the public.
Shortly afterward, with the help of Ash Carter, Nunn and Richard Lugar got Congress to permit $500 million to help Russians control their nuclear stockpile and convert weapons industrial capability to civilian uses. At the Pentagon, Carter found little sympathy from SecDef Dick Cheney, who told Carter he wanted the Soviets to be "in freefall". Carter thought that Cheney was naive about the dangers of Soviet implosion. He was convinced that Nunn and Lugar were right: the best policy for the US was to seek cooperative ways to handle the issue of Soviet weapons capabilities in the former soviet states and their satellites.
A SMART II treaty was signed with post-USSR Russia in 1993 under Bill Clinton. Skeptics, however, have deep concerns about the treaty's effectiveness for controlling tactical nuclear weapons in particular.
Biological weapons were an even more difficult matter. In 1994 Andrew Weber led an inspection team that visited Kazakhstan and came away with clear evidence of the extent of the Biopreparat program -- massive tanks for generating not only anthrax but virulent weaponized forms of plague, smallpox and other pathogens. Weber also found stacks of processed uranium in Kazakhstan standing unguarded in warehouses and idle facilities. The Russians steadfastly refused to allow US inspectors access to facilities handling highly enriched uranium or plutonium. But by 1994 not only was this material available across Russia -- it had begun to find its way to other countries such as Germany.
A covert operation, Project Sapphire, was organized to purchase the Kazakh fissile materials from that government and airlift them to Oak Ridge's Y-2 facility. Andrew Weber stood on the tarmac in the freezing weather until the last C5 cleared the ice and snow with the final load.
In 2007 Weber was approached by Lev Sandakhchiev, head of the Vector bioweapons research facility, who told him that the Iranians were attempting to purchase Soviet expertise in advanced biological agents. Russian scientists were becoming desperate to support their families. Salaries hadn't been paid in months and someone was going to transfer lethal capabilities soon. Weber managed to overcome distrust about misuse of US aid by Russians with long involvement in the secret Soviet programs and with several million dollars diverted the Vector facilities to civilian uses.
In 2009, a few months after Hoffman's book hit the stands, Dr. Ashton Carter was nominated and approved as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics in the Obama administration. (He has since been promoted to Deputy SecDef.) Reporting to him was Andrew Weber as Assistant SecDef for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense. A congressional staffer who had also supported Nunn-Lugar activities, Kenneth Myers III, reports to Weber as head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, responsible for the US' counter Weapons of Mass Destruction capabilities. Myers is the first non-scientist, non-PhD to head DTRA or its predecessor agencies. The dominant policy promulgated by all three men, and by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is the policy initiated by Nunn and Lugar, i.e. Cooperative Threat Reduction.
Herman Kahn urged US officials to examine possible geopolitical and military strategies, identify escalation paths and adopt stances that were designed to prevent escalation to strategic use of WMDs. Sometimes, he argued, those policies should intentionally escalate quickly so as to convince the other side that it was a losing policy to escalate fully. Scenario-based planning and game theory worked, more or less, during the Cold War because the players on both sides were nation states that were, more or less, rational actors.
Cooperative Threat Reduction is arguably a more tactical response, an approach that attempts to deal with the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons that threatened as a result of the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR. Weber treated ex-Soviet scientists with respect and support and many of them responded by exposing and dismantling bioweapons and nuclear capabilities.
But one might ask whether either CTR or the version of Kahn's approach that dominates strategic military planning in the US today is adequate to deal with states that may not be rational actors -- or that wish to be seen as possibly non-rational actors in order to gain negotiating power. Pakistan, Iran and North Korea do not seem to be responding in the desired manner to the pre-emptive humility on which President Obama has based his international efforts. Is that because Obama and Clinton do not understand the escalation curve or the incentives for those players? Or because those states are not, in fact, rational actors? Or because those states already have capabilities not publicly acknowledged which US officials fear will also disperse if a CTR approach is not adopted?
Nor are nation states the only actors in this drama. Hoffman notes that Weber himself worries about the unknown threat -- the weapons and materials that were not cooperatively identified and neutralized in the ex-Soviet states.
The Dead Hand has little to say about Pakistan, or China, or religiously zealous terror networks and their own WMD aspirations. But neither Cold War strategies nor the post-Cold-War CTR tactics seem adequate to address threats we face today. Nor does Hoffman's book contemplate future threats: the imminent availability of bio-engineering capabilities that fit in a garage, for instance. As a record of the 80s and 90s, however, it does give insight into how we got where we are today.
#2
There is an important difference between then and now. Well before the communists ruled Russia, there were great concerns about the Czars and their rather imperialist behavior.
They contended with the British Empire at intervals with such things as "The Great Game", mostly a cold war.
And Teddy Roosevelt actually played peacemaker between Russia and Japan, who had been in a mutually imperialist struggle over Manchuria and Korea.
But this was an entirely different affair from when the communists took over. They were not content with these mild imperialist goals. They craved to rule and exploit the world.
Fortunately for all concerned, the communists were the ideal philosophy to utterly cripple Russia. Had just about any other form of government ruled Russia, even if not directly imperialist, Russia could very well likely be ruling the world today.
but we should long remember, that even under the utterly incompetent communists, Russia did end up controlling about half the world, despite very active opposition.
But, in the process, Russia used itself up. The ruling ideologues wasted vast resources and brutalized the Russian people so much, that under the best of circumstances they will be a hundred years or more in recovery.
And instead, they have Putin. And while inertia will likely reelect him, the enthusiasm has worn thin. His ideology is not communist, but a low order of intelligence apparatus technocrat.
The end result is an unsatisfying as if the CIA put one of its people as a figurehead president of the US. Which Obama may very well be. He is not a good president, or even very passable as a figurehead of a president. Instead he spent all his time on petty schemes which have not accomplished much, and now he is on perpetual vacation, leaving apparatchiks in charge.
#3
I know something about a lot of this. I'll try to skate between what's available to all and what remains classified.
"Dead Hand" was a concept, but was never fully implemented in the Soviet Union. The paranoia of the Russian leadership was such that they never were willing to give full control of Soviet defensive or offensive weapons to the generals. There was always the possibility of a coup.
The Soviets were thoroughly convinced they could survive a nuclear war up until about 1985. They spent tens of billions on civil defense, and trained anyone in any kind of defense industry on how to respond. They finally decided, in the mid- to late-1980s that our lead in electronics was just too big to overcome, our missiles far more accurate than we were saying (whether true or not - I don't know), and that no one would
"win" a multiple-missile exchange. At the same time, the Russian people were finally getting exhausted from the excesses of communism, and were simply going through the motions - pretending to be productive, while 50% or more of everything that was created was defective (with the exception of military hardware, where there was more supervision and quality control).
I've studied enough anthropology to know that one of the first signs of the decline of a species is that it soils its own nest. The same is true of societies. By the late 1980's, the Russians were no longer picking up after themselves and others. Trash began to accumulate along rail lines, in cities, and around industrial sites. Things that didn't work weren't repaired, but dumped - everything from aircraft to shoes. It wasn't really a surprise that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 - the "handwriting" had been on the wall for at least five or six years before that.
When you lose pride in your work, in your nation, and you have no religion to fall back on, you have no reason to feel responsible for what goes on around you, and collapse is inevitable. The OWS crowd scares the beejeebers out of me because they reflect the same sense of entitlement and lack of responsibility that 1980's Russia displayed.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
12/04/2011 14:54 Comments ||
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#4
Indeed, Old Patriot.
That said, the issue of the old Soviet / newer Russian tactical nukes is of some concern and the bio-agents is a bigger one. The biological threat is real and growing although instability in e.g. Pakistan or Iran may well be a shorter term problem.
We can see both of those countries imploding, or threatening to implode, before our eyes. So the game theory / scenario-based Cold War approach is probably not going to be all that applicable. And yet it neither is an openly failed state and so must be dealt with using state-to-state mechanisms, at least in part.
In the case of Pakistan, implosion may bring (or may already be in the process of bringing) serious headaches soon. Will the CTR approach have any real chance of succeeding with either country? It's a concern ..... but Hoffman's book makes it clear why those in office right now continue the attempt.
I've heard members of the troika (Carter/Weber/Myers) talk about their work in the 90s. It's clearly a significant part of their lives and one they consider a success, and with good reason. As with us all, what once worked tends to become a lasting paradigm whether or not it applies well to new circumstances.
#5
Thank you, Old Patriot. And thus we see that studying the liberal arts is useful in everyday life, although it may not lead to expensive suits and corner offices.
#6
Re: Dead Hand, OP, that'a what seems to be the current unclass assessment, i.e. that is is partially implemented (semi-automated).
The accounts, plus some corroborating evidence, did contribute to the impetus for SMART 1. But what really scared the beejesus out of the inspectors after the treaties were signed was the repeated evidence they stumbled on of a) significant engineering and weaponizing of virulent pathogens and b) high volume manufacturing facilities for those pathogens - facilities that had clearly been used and were not 'merely' being held in reserve.
Vector was a virus engineering facility. The goal was reported to Andrew Weber as a viral agent that would mimic lesser diseases during the rapid infection spread stage, only to turn very deadly at a point in the viral spread when authorities would be overwhelmed.
An interesting data point that this came to the surface in 2007 and we saw major governmental action WRT the possibility of avian flu epidemic shortly thereafter.
[Dawn] THE fraught relations between Pakistain and the US have often been likened to a bad marriage in which the two partners can`t live with each other, but are bound together by mutual dependency.
I knew a few similar relationships, and it was painful to watch two people tearing each other apart. I was in the US when the two Pak border posts along the Afghan border came under fire from NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and organization.... helicopter gunships, killing 24 soldiers. When questioned about the angry Pak response, I asked my American friends what their reaction would have been had Pak fire inflicted such heavy casualties on American troops in Afghanistan.
The truth is that all hell would have broken loose, with loud calls from across the American spectrum demanding immediate retaliation. Pak offers to mount a full investigation would have been brushed aside as a whitewash. Politicians would have called for a suspension in military aid -- the biggest stick the Americans have in their relationship with Pakistain.
In the event, Pakistain has used all the sticks in its cupboard: a halt in NATO supplies, notice to vacate Shamsi airbase in Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... and the decision to refuse to attend the Afghan security conference in Bonn next week. All these actions underline the transactional nature of the Pakistain-US relationship: if you give us this, we will give you that. And as a rentier state, Pakistain had some valuable geopolitical real estate to offer.
The reality is that there has never been a convergence of values or long-term interests between the two countries, despite their long and troubled alliance. True, both states started off by entering into anti-communist pacts in the 1950s. But for Pakistain, this was a way of acquiring American arms in its rivalry with India.
Once the USSR imploded, the rental value of Pakistain fell to zero in US eyes. Military and economic sanctions to discourage nuclear proliferation kicked in, the supply of F-16 fighter planes we had paid for was blocked and Pakistain was declared an international pariah when we tested our nuclear devices in 1998.
Just as it seemed the relationship was doomed forever, the late Osama bin Laden ... who has left the building... launched his war on America, and with 9/11, a second honeymoon began. But the lack of any solid basis to the partnership beyond short-term needs has meant that it is always going to be hostage to outbursts and spats that threaten to spiral out of control.
Ultimately, the relationship is resurrected each time it hits rock bottom because of our mutual need for each other. Our military desperately needs the high-tech weaponry it is unable to procure elsewhere and our economy can`t do without the assistance that trickles in fitfully from Washington. More urgently, we need American support for our frequent loan requests for multilateral aid.
American needs are more straightforward: Pakistain`s approval for the use of its airspace to support NATO troops in Afghanistan from aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea, the use of our road network to carry supplies overland and the interdiction of cross-border militancy.
It is this last task that has proved so contentious. Over the years, as NATO casualties have mounted, western leaders have blamed Pakistain for `not doing enough` to combat beturbanned goons based on its soil, and for not stopping them from crossing into Afghanistan at will to fight NATO and Afghan forces.
This is a question that frequently came up during the talks and media interviews I gave in America recently on my book tour. I tried to explain Pakistain`s red lines to my largely American audiences. Our defence establishment`s misplaced preoccupation with the threat it perceives from India is obviously one.
Another is the army`s need to have proxies in place for the post-US scenario in Afghanistan in which the pre-9/11 civil war is likely to resume. The third lies in the dangers inherent in taking on the Haqqani network at a time when the army has its hands full already, fighting the local Taliban. And finally, there are problems inherent in repeatedly ordering our Frontier Corps to fire on fellow Pakhtuns and fellow Moslems.
I also reminded my listeners of the anger caused by the charge that the Pakistain Army was not doing what it was supposed to despite the billions it was getting from the Pentagon. Our officer corps is furious at being thought of as a mercenary army, doing the bidding of foreigners for financial considerations. In its eyes, it has national interests to protect, irrespective of the military aid it is getting.
Clearly, there is a mismatch of expectations here. For the American public, politicians and media, the narrative is about paying hard cash to buy certain services, and getting short-changed. This is the nature of a transactional relationship: when the customer doesn`t think he`s getting what he paid for, he complains loud and hard.
From the popular Pak perspective, we have already paid too high a price for entering into this war on America`s side. In terms of lives lost as well as economic damage, the public perception -- whipped up by the populist media -- is that enough is enough.
According to an opinion poll published by this newspaper, 55 per cent of all Americans consider Pakistain to be an enemy. This bleak view of its alliance partner is similar to the perception of two-thirds of all Paks about the US. So clearly, there is not much warmth in the doomed marriage.
Nevertheless, the joyless couple are condemned to carry on with a façade of a united front for the next three years when US forces are scheduled to begin pulling out of the quagmire Afghanistan has proved for them. This time, though, there is little prospect of the couple getting back together.
From the American perspective, a combination of a slumping economy and 15 years of bad vibes will make any resumption of aid politically impossible. As it is, there is increasing resistance to military and economic assistance. Only the presence of US troops in the region is making it possible for the B.O. regime to continue disbursing aid.
For many Paks, this cut-off will only reinforce the popular image of America -- fed by years of propaganda -- as a fickle, fair-weather ally who abandons us when we aren`t needed.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/04/2011 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
the late Osama bin Laden, Who roasts with Hitler, Himmler(Etc),
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
12/04/2011 0:26 Comments ||
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#2
Saw the title.
Thought that was Bill and Hilarity.
#3
While the US is pulling its forces out of Pakistan, this may actually be a good thing in the long run. Pakistan will still be fighting its Taliban, and the US will likely cut off a lot of aid their military had used to buy weapons, or grafted away.
This may not be a bad shift in the complexion of the battle. By being denied an easy trade route, the US will have to shift much more responsibility to the Afghan army sooner. But despite perpetual violence, it is unlikely that there will be a return to power of the Taliban any time soon.
Not only do they beat and shoot pro-democracy demonstrators and storm foreign embassies on demand, they record rap songs like this one is support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (Lyrics here.)
Just imagine what the same Basijis would do to an independent Occupy Tehran movement.
Feelings among Occupiers toward the Iranian regime are not reciprocal.
Something is happening in Iran. Forces are in motion. But what is happening? And who are the forces that are on the move? Since this week's bombing in Isfahan, the world media is rife with speculation that the war with Iran over its nuclear weapons program has begun. But if the war has begun, who is fighting it? What are their aims? And what are their methods and means of attack? On Wednesday the Times of London published a much-cited article about this week's blast in Isfahan. The article referred to the bombed installation as a "uranium enrichment facility."
But there is no uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan. Rather there is a uranium conversion facility.
As the news analysis website The Missing Peace explained, a UCF is an installation where yellowcake is converted into uranium hexafluoride, or UF6. In Iran, the UF6 from Isfahan is sent to Natanz, where it is enriched.
While Isfahan's UCF may be a reasonable target in an all-out attack on Iran's nuclear program, it is not a vital installation. According to American military analyst J.E. Dyer, it would not be a priority target for Western governments whose primary goal is to neutralize Iran's nuclear weapons program.
As Dyer put it in a blog post at Hot Air, "Western governments make their targeting decisions based on criteria that would put the Isfahan UCF several notches down the list of things that need to be struck in November 2011. It's a workhorse facility in the fissile-material production network, and it's already done what needs to be done to assemble an arsenal of multiple weapons. Uranium conversion is also 'mastered technology'; Iran can reconstitute it relatively quickly."
Dyer concludes that due to the site's low value to Western governments, "It is extremely unlikely that a Western government" perpetrated the attack.
If Dyer is right, and the Isfahan site is not critical to Iran's nuclear project and was therefore not attacked by a Western government, who attacked it and why? Dr. Michael Ledeen, an Iran expert from the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote Monday at PJ Media that the attack at Isfahan, like the attacks two weeks ago at the Bidganeh Air Force base and two other Revolutionary Guards bases were conducted by members of Iran's anti-regime Green Movement. In those attacks, Revolutionary Guards Maj.-Gen. Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam was killed and some 180 Shahab 3 ballistic missiles were destroyed.
Speaking to The Missing Peace, Daniel Ashrafi, an Iranian anti-regime activist living in Canada, claimed that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was scheduled to visit the Bidganeh base at the time of the kaboom, but he was delayed.
If true, this would mark the second time that a facility was bombed when one of Iran's big shots was scheduled to visit the site. In May, the Abadan oil refinery was bombed during a site visit by Iran's diminutive PresidentMahmoud Short Round Ahmadinejad.
Given the shroud of secrecy that covers all operations in Iran, any attempt to assess what is happening on the ground is necessarily speculative.
But speculation can be useful if it is grounded in a reasoned assessment of the differing goals of various actors and the probability of their willingness to act alone or in concert with others to achieve their goals.
In the case of the Green Movement, what began as a protest movement after the regime stole the 2009 presidential elections, morphed in the ensuing months of protests and regime repression into a full-blown revolutionary movement.
No longer content to demand that Ahmadinejad step down and fair elections take place, the Green Movement began calling for and working towards the overthrow of the regime as a whole. And since last year, regime installations as well as key members of the Revolutionary Guards have been targeted on a regular basis. As The Washington Post reported last week, since 2010 there has been a fivefold increase in the number of kabooms at Iranian oil pipelines and refineries. Whoever is behind the blasts is clearly targeting Iran's high value economic assets.
And now they have moved on to military installations and nuclear sites.
THIS ESCALATION in the war of sabotage against the Iranian regime provides two important lessons for Western policy-makers assessing Western options for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
It tells us the popular Western belief that a US or Israeli or coalition strike on Iran's nuclear installations would provoke the Iranian public to rally around the regime is utter nonsense. In the case of the Isfahan bombing, for instance, there are two possible scenarios for who is responsible.
First, it is possible, as Ledeen argues and Dyer infers, that the attack was the work of regime opponents acting on their own. Second, it is possible as Israeli officials quoted by the media have hinted that it was a collaborative effort between local regime opponents and foreign forces.
In either case, what is clear is that at least some Iranians are willing to target their country's nuclear installations if doing so will harm the regime.
At the height of the 2009 Green Movement protests against the regime, US President Barack Why can't I just eat my waffle? Obama justified his decision not to side with the anti-regime protesters by claiming that if the US were to support them, they would lose popular credibility. In his words, it would be counterproductive for the US "to be seen as meddling" in Iran's domestic affairs, "given the history of US-Iranian relations."
And yet, what we see is that no one is rallying around the regime. The attacks on Isfahan and Bidganeh, which the regime was quick to simultaneously deny and blame on foreign governments, did not cause the people to rally to the side of the mullahs. So, too, the repeated bombings of petroleum facilities are not fomenting an upsurge in public support for the regime. To the contrary; domestic disgruntlement with the regime continues to rise as the standard of living for the average Iranian plummets.
And this brings us to the "students" who raided the British Embassy on Tuesday. On Thursday the regime released from jail all the "students" placed in long-term storage for raiding and torching the embassy and briefly holding British personnel hostage.
Their release is yet further proof that the embassy attackers were neither students nor angry at Britannia. Rather, as British Foreign Minister William Hague and others have alleged, they were regime goons who belong to the same Basij force that massacred, tortured and raped the anti-regime protesters from the Green Movement in 2009.
According to the official Iranian press agencies, the "students" raided the British Embassy because they were furious that Britannia announced it was cutting its ties with Iran's Central Bank. If Obama were right, and Western anti-regime actions were counterproductive, then we could have expected real students, like the ones who called for the overthrow of the regime in 2009 to protest outside the British Embassy. But the fact that they stayed home while their attackers turned their truncheons on the British is clear proof that Obama simply didn't know what he was talking about.
AND AS Obama's statements in the wake of the assault on the British Embassy made clear, he still fundamentally misunderstands the situation in Iran. Responding to the attack, Obama said, "I strongly urge the Iranian government to hold those who are responsible to task."
That is, the US president opted to pretend that "those responsible," were separate from the regime, which they are not.
Obama's response is of a piece with his non-response to Iran's plan to bomb targets in Washington.
It is also in line with his refusal to contemplate sanctions against Iran's Central Bank and its oil sector. Moreover, Obama's continued insistence on working through the UN Security Council to ratchet up sanctions on Iran despite the fact that Russian and Chinese support for Iran has blocked that venue make clear that he is not at all serious about using US power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Thankfully, Obama's abandonment of the traditional US role as the leader of the free world has not prevented Western governments and regional forces for freedom from acting in their common interests. Britannia and La Belle France have responded to the regime assault on the British Embassy by rallying Western European nations to escalate the EU's campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unlike the B.O. regime, which continues to falsely characterize Iran's nuclear program as a threat to Israel alone, the Europeans are increasingly willing to acknowledge that the program and the regime constitute a grave threat to European security and to global security as a whole.
Whereas the B.O. regime peevishly argues that an embargo on Iranian oil will raise world oil prices, this week the British openly called for an embargo on Iranian oil. In truth such an embargo would harm Iran far more than it would harm the global economy. Europe buys 20 to 25 percent of Iran's oil exports, but Iranian oil makes up only 5% of European oil imports. At least in the short run, Soddy Arabia could pick up the slack, thus ensuring stability in global oil prices.
In the absence of US leadership, a coalition and a strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and continuing to terrorize the West has emerged. First, we have the Iranian opposition which is apparently actively involved in sabotaging with the aim of overthrowing the regime. Second, we have Israel which is completely committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And finally we have leading European states that are increasingly determined to take practical steps to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
There are many opportunities for collaboration between these forces. In an interview with The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... following the UN's ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency's report exposing Iran's nuclear weapons program last month, Jean-Jaques Guillet, who published a report on Iran for the French National Assembly, said the goal of these forces should be to overthrow the regime. In his words, "If we press the regime strongly, there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime's implosion, not more talk."
Guillet suggested that La Belle France could cut off satellite service to Iran. Iran's television networks are broadcast through the French owned Eutelsat.
Cutting off regime broadcasts, placing an embargo on Iranian oil exports, and actively assisting anti-regime forces in sabotaging regime installations, including nuclear installations, have the potential of achieving the goals of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and facilitating the empowerment of pro-Western democrats in that country.
Clearly, US participation in such a collaborative strategy would be helpful. But between the kabooms in Isfahan and Bidganeh, and the surge in attacks on other regime targets; and Europe's notably robust response to Iran's attack on the British Embassy, it is possible that these goals can be accomplished even with the US following far behind.
Continued on Page 49
Instapundit in Washington Examiner
A couple of years back, I suggested in these pages that higher education was facing a bubble much like the housing bubble: An overpriced good, propped up by cheap government-subsidized credit, luring borrowers and lenders alike into a potentially disastrous mess.
Subsequent events have proved me right as students have begun to think twice about indebtedness and schools have begun to face pressure over tuition. For higher education, costs have skyrocketed even as the value of their product has been declining, and people are starting to notice.
#2
Lazy and inefficient Human Resource departments created credentialism thus giving former educational institutions power to print and distribute paper affirming intelligence and skill like the Wizard of Oz.
Wizard of Oz: Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma.
The fate of Detroit could be decided this month. Long suffering Detroit could run out of cash completely by spring, and has an unresolved $200 million hole in its budget through June. Under Michigan law, when the citys bonds drop below the BBB level, the governor can appoint an emergency manager with broad powers to put the city back in fiscal shape, including the power to annul existing union contracts. The mayor and city officials say they can manage things on their own; the state treasurer says the city is failing its legal obligations and has announced a financial review that could be completed by Christmas. Under agreements Detroit signed with banks when negotiating an earlier loan package, the city could face $400 million in penalties if the state takes control.
Thats not the only problem: if the review determines that the city is broke, white Republican officials could end up making decisions that change the fate of a predominantly African American city imposing cuts in employment, pay, benefits and services that will affect almost everyone who lives in Detroit.
Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Gerritt lays out what the governor will face if the takeover goes forward:
Plantation is a word hell hear a lot in fact, Councilman Kwame Kenyatta already invoked it to describe what would happen if the state took control of the citys finances in an effort to keep it from running out of money by spring
Nothing happens in this region outside the context of race. Our often-painful history is the oxygen we breathe, even when we choke on it. Were all finding it a little hard to breathe just now
#1
On the brink? Hah! The question is whether the current mayor, Dave Bing, will be able to drag the half-submerged, sodden corpse out of the water or whether a once prosperous and thriving city will quietly slip beneath the surface after half a century of Democrat mismanagement and corruption.
Nothing happens in this region outside the context of race.
Perhaps because ex-mayor Coleman Young played the race card for 20 years and made a political living pitting the city against the surrounding suburbs and the rest of the state?
Posted by: Paul D ||
12/04/2011 6:55 Comments ||
Top||
#3
if the review determines that the city is broke, white Republican officials could end up making decisions that change the fate of a predominantly African American city -- imposing cuts in employment, pay, benefits and services that will affect almost everyone who lives in Detroit.
That is the most vile paragraph I've read in a long time. Completely dodges all responsibility the Democrats have for creating the problem in the first place and tries to blame the Republicans for trying to fix it and slur them as racists in the process. Vile.
#4
"if the review determines that the city is broke, white Republican officials could end up making decisions that change the fate of a predominantly African American city"
Here's an idea: Ask the people who actually pay taxes to Detroit what they're willing to support. Leave race totally out of it - you pay taxes, you get to decide; you don't pay taxes, shut up, it ain't yer damn business.
Posted by: Barbara ||
12/04/2011 13:57 Comments ||
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#5
you pay taxes, you get to decide; you don't pay taxes, shut up, it ain't yer damn business.
Yes, It's like a non-stock holder going going to a board meeting and voting and making decisions. Voting yourselves money is what's gonna do in this country...just like public workers unions.
Posted by: Jack Salami ||
12/04/2011 18:31 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Change from Democracy to
1 Dollar of Tax extorted = 1 Vote.
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.
THE fraught relations between Pakistain and the US have often been likened to a bad marriage in which the two partners can`t live with each other, but are bound together by mutual dependency.
Mahmoud 
