The current US strategy of attempting to protect the Afghan population and marginalizing the Taliban is surprisingly ignorant of both the realities of Afghan society and the limitations of America's tolerance for casualties. History is not encouraging. In two centuries, the Pashtuns have never once tolerated a permanent presence of armed foreigners. Although foreign Taliban are acceptable
They tolerated the Sikhs though... those who didn't lost their heads. The Sikh king Ranjit Singh took half their lands, and kept it. When the British defeated the Sikhs, those Pashtun lands and people ended up under the Raj and today Pakistan
Defending families and villages is a cultural duty of local men, and the presence of outsiders is generally perceived as a threat, especially when they are non-Muslim. Historical memories are long in this part of the world. Some Afghans still say prayers for mujahedin who fought against the British -- in the 19th century.
Because the Afghan culture highly values politeness, Westerners rarely understand how unpopular they are in the region. The presence of coalition troops means IEDs, ambushes and airstrikes, and consequently a higher probability of being killed, maimed or robbed of a livelihood. Any incident quickly reinforces the divide between locals and outsiders, and the Afghan media provide extensive and graphic coverage of botched airstrikes and injured civilians.
Aid always has the potential to create trouble. Contrary to what is often supposed, an Afghan village is rarely a "community," in the sense that its residents are accustomed to working together toward common goals. Afghans are much more individualistic than that. Frankly, we don't have the human resources to do work of this kind. Very few Westerners speak a local language, Eight years and counting of minimal US effort in this regard
and it is too much to expect soldiers to have sustained contact with the population in hostile villages.
If the White House heeds McChrystal's advice and sends more troops to the south and east of Afghanistan in hopes of retaking Pashtun population centers, American casualties will likely rise above 800 a year, about what they were in the worst years in Iraq.
Gilles Dorronsoro is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
We are not going to build a liberal democracy in Afghanistan; it will take longer and cost more than this nation is willing to invest. We are not going to have stable Western armed enclaves in Afghanistan. That can be done, but won't be very useful, and will be costly over long periods of time -- again something that this nation is nearly incapable of. That inability, by the way, has been true for a very long time.
Containing Afghanistan is simple. Leave, with warning that we are going, taking with us those doomed allies to whom we have sworn protection (it's probably too late to build them an enclave, and they don't want that anyway). Afghanistan for the Afghans, meaning tribes and warlords with Pushtan domination around Kabul. We can try to shore up an anti-Taliban faction in Kabul. That might even work. But do it from afar. The strategy of counter-insurgency would work if we could actually commit to two generations of doing it, feeding a squad a month into the meatgrinder and disrupting a lot of American families for two generations here; but we aren't going to do that, and blood and treasure poured into Afghanistan is likely poured into, well, not sand, but the Ford of Kabul River.
#1
They talk of the cost of being in Afghanistan but have nothing to say about the cost of leaving. FTA: "Dorronsoro was a professor of political science at the Sorbonne, Paris and the Institute of Political Studies of Rennes. He also served as the scientific coordinator at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, Turkey"
And Pournelle has never been if favor of Iraq or Afghanistan.
I thinks we can see where these folks are coming from....
#3
--- I thinks we can see where these folks are coming from....
--- Leaving will give us a Taliban government pretty quickly... a well armed and organized minority group ... keeping the others supressed.
I'm looking for better ideas. I do agree with Pournelle that the US electorate will not put up with the 20+ years of counterinsurgency efforts that seem to be necessary to prevent Afghanistan from serving as the base for jihad. But a policy of containment is almost as difficult to sustain.
The strategy of the United Nations' biggest peacekeeping force is under scrutiny following reports that government forces it is supporting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have used wide-scale rape and murder as weapons of war.
Abuses committed in a campaign against rebels in the east of the country have been extensively catalogued by human rights organisations. They have now come to the fore with a claim by one of the UN's own experts that the results of an 8-month UN-backed offensive have been "catastrophic".
When was the last time that something occurred in the DRC that was not either catastrophic or evil?
Hundreds of thousands have been displaced, thousands raped, hundreds of villages burnt to the ground, and at least 1,000 civilians killed," Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said in a statement last week after a 10-day visit to the DRC.
What Mr Alston termed the "nightmare situation" in the eastern Kivu region underlined the dilemma of peacekeepers required to conduct increasingly robust and proactive mandates handed to them by the UN Security Council with what their commanders often complain are inadequate resources.
Especially with troop contingents mainly from countries who view catastrophic behaviour as one of the perks of the job.
In the case of Monuc, the 19,000-strong UN force in the DRC, that has meant cooperating with the frequently badly-trained and undersupplied forces of the government's army, the FARDC. Many of them are former members of a plethora of rebel movements in the country.
Current operations are aimed at combating the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a Hutu force formed among those who fled to Congo after perpetrating the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
In a Security Council debate on Friday, Ileka Atoki, DRC envoy to the UN, acknowledged that government elements had been among those implicated.
He said he had been warning the Security Council for a decade about the phenomenon of armed groups in the east using systematic rape, infecting women and child victims with the HIV/Aids virus.
Mr Alston said in his statement that in a recent assault FARDC troops surrounded a camp and shot and beat to death at least 50 refugees. "It also appears that some 40 women were abducted from the camp. A small group of 10 who escaped described being gang raped, and had severe injuries; some had chunks of their breasts hacked off."
Alan Doss, the British official who is the UN's special representative in the DRC, reported progress in the so-called Kimia II offensive in a statement to the Security Council. "There is now a real prospect that the conflicts that have long blighted the eastern Congo can be ended," he said.
But he also noted the challenges facing a UN force, responsible for civilian protection as well as for preventing abuses in an area the size of California and with insufficient air support. "It is oibviously not possible to protect everyone, everywhere, all of the time . . . so, inevitably, the question arises: should Kimia II be halted?"
He said a suspension now would only strengthen rebels "who might well draw the conclusion that attacks against civilians will force the government to give in to their demands".
The Security Council last November mandated 3,000 reinforcements for the Monuc force to help protect the lives of more than a quarter of a million civilians displaced by war after rebels led by Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Tutsi commander, seized territory in the east of the country.
Security Council members, rethinking peacekeeping strategy in the context of controlling an annual budget that has risen to $8bn a year, have acknowledged the pressure on resources.
Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, said earlier this year Washington would examine ways of increasing its assistance to UN missions, including Monuc, "to better protect civilians under imminent threat of physical, including sexual, violence".
I sit before my aging patient Julia for a few moments before my office nurse bangs on the door to say I'm running late. Julia looks at me across the desk, and in her pleading eyes, I can see her hopes for a reassurance or a cure. She hopes that I will tell her that nothing is wrong, or if there is something, that I can immediately fix it.
She is not thinking about health insurance reform. She is not worrying that the government is plotting to spread expensive insurance to pay for low-tech care for the entire population. She hopes only that her card will cover her in the case of illness. She is far more concerned about losing her connection with me and my network of doctors than she is about whether health insurance is extended to more people.
Thinking about her and those like her makes me very angry. Should I tell her that the very art of medicine that I rely on to take care of her is in mortal jeopardy? I barely have enough time with my growing list of patients to concentrate on her case as it is, and the reform will bring me more patients with lower payments. Should I mention that many of my contemporaries (the network she relies on) are no longer accepting her Medicare, even before the reform bills sink their claws into it and cut Medicare to the bone with hundreds of billions in cuts?
Should I say that primary care doctors like me already designate an employee to deal entirely with insurance, and that this problem will only get worse as we move in the direction of comparative effectiveness studies and bundling payments based on so-called quality? I lay awake at night thinking of the services I will deliver only to be denied payment.
The orthopedist I referred Julia to for her total hip replacement received only $970 for the procedure, and he says he hates to operate now because he loses an hour before and after each operation getting ready and cleaning up. If his payments drop further or his malpractice premiums rise higher, he vows to work only in the office and avoid the operating room altogether. Who will operate on patients like Julia then?
The organization that supposedly represents us, the spineless American Medical Association, has sold its soul to health reform in return for a one-year moratorium on the legislated, across the board 21% Medicare cuts that are always hanging over our heads. This feels too much like Kafka's In the Penal Colony, where our terrible future is written on our bodies in indelible ink. Every practicing doctor I know is worried about this future.
Increasing government oversight will not only hurt doctors in the pocketbook, as reimbursements are inevitably cut. It will also lead to greater bureaucratic inefficiencies. There will be more paperwork, less approvals and less time for cures.
Today, my patient Julia is wondering where the H1N1 swine flu shot is; it was supposed to be here weeks ago. I don't have the heart to tell her that since the Centers for Disease Control and the state health departments took over distribution a few weeks ago, it is nowhere to be found. I have filled out form after form, applied for new ID numbers, and still I can't get on the right list to receive the shot.
This is the future. And as the Baucus bill glided through the Senate Finance Committee last week, I can see that the future is here.
#1
Why Doctors Are Worried....because the government will now remove 'privacy' and get between the patient and her/his doctor and critical decisions. Paging Roe, Paging Wade, government courtesy phone pick up.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Steve, but the above statement strikes me as something we - society, medical practice, legal practice - have lost track of over the last few decades. That is, that medicine is an art as well as a science. The diagnoses don't always come from a urinalysis and the treatment isn't always some magic potion - effective medical diagnosis and treatment requires two-way communication between patient and doctor, and that communication takes time.
#4
You are correct. Otherwise a Mac could do diagnosis. Just check the boxes with your symptoms.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/23/2009 17:26 Comments ||
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#5
I suppose a PC could also if you didn't mind waiting for a reboot during those critical moments when you're trying to figure out if you're having a stroke or not.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
10/23/2009 17:50 Comments ||
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#6
Somebody call the Wahmbulance. Doctors are going to have to put off buying the third house and the Porsche until next year. Oh, drat!
The White Houses extraordinary assault on the Fox News Channel will end in tears and not for Rupert Murdoch, Foxs owner. The Obama administration has embarked on a high-risk strategy of shooting the messenger, in effect blaming its plummeting poll ratings on alleged political bias at the number one 24-hour cable news network. As Anita Dunn, the Mao-quoting White House communications director put it in an interview with The New York Times:
Were going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we dont need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.
As Dunns statement illustrates, this is an overtly political campaign and one that is doomed to failure, as it will ensure that even more Americans end up tuning in to Fox shows. The United States is a nation built around the principles of free speech, limited government, and free enterprise, and it is highly unusual for a US administration to launch an authoritarian vendetta against an individual news station. It smacks of mean-spiritedness as well as desperation, and is an approach that is already backfiring, with Foxs ratings receiving an added boost from the huge publicity.
Fox News is succeeding in America precisely because it is not afraid to challenge the status quo, and to take on the power of big government. It is unique in broadcast media in going against the grain of the dominant liberal networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, by providing an alternative perspective in a nation where conservatives are still the largest ideological group according to Gallup. Television news in America has for decades been dominated by a left-of-centre oligopoly that has not reflected public opinion. That smug arrangement was shattered when Fox opened for business in the mid-1990s.
Fox News has succeeded spectacularly in racing ahead of its rivals in the cable news market, notably CNN and MSNBC. Its evening shows such as the OReilly Factor, Glenn Beck and Hannity pull in several million viewers compared to just hundreds of thousands on Foxs competitors. Fox offers a highly opinionated, fast-paced and entertaining brand of political debate that includes all sides of the political aisle. The top hosts may be largely conservative (though not necessarily Republican), but the guests frequently are not, creating an adversarial and combative arena that until recently was a rarity in American news coverage.
Fox also benefits from an extraordinary level of professional management that sets the gold standard for cable news organizations. It is a remarkably well-run operation that also projects the American dream, with its proud emphasis on entrepreneurialism, patriotism, and a strong sense of national identity. Fox is unashamedly pro-American, a breath of fresh air in an age when US foreign policy is increasingly weak, muddled and confused.
The success of Fox News is not driven by any political agenda, as its Administration critics claim. It is simply doing its job as a news organization by questioning the positions and policies of the elected government and officials of the United States, whoever is in the White House. That is the proper role of the media in a free society, and any attempt by the government to muzzle Fox is a threat to the freedom of all American news outlets, including liberal juggernauts such as The New York Times, NBC and CNN.
#3
When does the Obamation start trying to use his international blasphemy "laws" against Fox? Is this why he's so hot to trot on censorship of "hate speech"?
Jennifer Rubin, "Contentions" blog at Commentary magazine In discussing the White House war on Fox News:
It's a cringe-inducing moment, both for those who oppose the White House on policy grounds and those who cheer its every move. As surely as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton allowed their personal flaws to erode the office of the presidency, Obama seems bent on allowing his own flaws (thin-skinnedness, hubris) to do potentially grave damage to the office as well. And over what? Not some grand policy matter or some key personnel matter, but over the desire to exclude a news network that has criticized him. For those who suggested that Obama's main selling point was his "superior temperament," we anxiously await an admission of grave error. It seems they were terribly mistaken.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/23/2009 08:02 ||
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#1
Either the MSM needs to call Barack "I don't lose a lot of sleep over it" Obama out on his attack on FNC or just admit openly that they are all a bunch of liberal elitists who willingly do whatever The 0ne tells them.
The deliberate targeting and ostracizing of a media organization is unprecedented and I'm quite shocked that the only person other than FNC to even question the White House is Jake Tapper @ ABC.
It's proving harder than I expected to shake off the image of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Mao Zedong at a commencement speech in June.
The videotape of her evoking one of her "favorite political philosophers" before an audience of graduating teenagers and their parents has a blandly sinister quality that's all the more gripping for its echoing, tinny sound -- a consequence of the soaring architecture of the National Cathedral, where Dunn gave the speech.
The discovery that a member of the Obama administration expressed admiration for the thinking of a collectivist tyrant is, while disappointing, not so surprising. Dunn is hardly the first acolyte of the president to publicly esteem foreigners with extremely bad ideas (see: Ayers, William).
It's also true that we can all agree with Hitler and Stalin that two plus two equals four. We might even agree with Mao and Dunn that each man should fight his own war, if only in the lightest, most metaphorical way.
No, what's so disconcerting is the thought of all those upturned faces, row upon row, in the cathedral's great interior that day -- all those impressionable young people, hearing an avatar of the Obama administration talk sympathetically about how, in 1947, Mao was being challenged from within his own party about his plan to take over China. (I know, right? What odds! What a guy!)
All those parents, listening to the speaker evoke one of the past century's most accomplished mass murderers. The whole earnest, hopeful audience, tittering when Dunn infelicitously used the word "coupled" in juxtaposing Chairman Mao with one of her other favorite political philosophers, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
One burst of nervous mirth, then quiescence. That's what I can't shake: The silence of all those people, trapped in the glare of the moment and unable if only from sheer politeness to express any discomfiture at the deeply unpleasant choices made by the woman brought in to mark their child's great milestone.
Imagine if you are there. Your child is graduating and some dame from the Obama White House has turned up to give the main speech. It's exciting! And you're nodding and beaming proudly and glancing toward the young person for whom you'd leap in front of a train for, for whom you have groaned under the weight of private school tuition (that's the audience Dunn was addressing), when suddenly the speaker's voice starts talking about Chairman Mao.
Chairman Mao, you think? The 70-million-dead Mao? Re-education camp Mao? Totalitarian, one-child policy, political-power-grows-out-of-the-barrel-of-a-gun Mao?
And what can you do? Hiss? Turn to the person next to you and complain loudly? Of course you don't, because it would be rude. And in any case, you're done -- the kid is graduating and there's no point stirring things up, or identifying yourself as one of Those Parents who cause a fuss, who draw looks and careful questioning at the reception afterward, whose wheel is altogether too squeaky.
We live, so our children tell us, in a free country. You would not know it from observing many, many school events. You would think that, when the librarian uses a Thanksgiving read-aloud as an excuse to promote vegetarianism, a parent would speak out right away. She won't.
You would think that when the music class performs a ballad to Obama, some parent will object loudly. Unlikely. You would think when elementary school students are given Shepard Fairey portraits of the president to color, some parent will complain. Nope.
This week, one parent talked about how it felt to be addressed by Mao-admiring Dunn.
"My heart kind of sunk is really what it was," the man told Fox News' Glenn Beck. "And it was mixed emotions of, you know, being really proud of my son who is getting out of high school and moving on to bigger and better things, and just wanting to enjoy that day to the max, you know, with family and friends, all of that, and then -- but having this sunken heart feeling of, you know, why did she go there?"
The father who so bravely "spoke out" on Fox did so only after the network agreed to disguise his voice and shield his face. His son has graduated. He isn't saying anything very dramatic or critical. Yet, he's still afraid. In the Age of Obama, that ought to haunt everyone.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/23/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
If you recall from the video of Dunn's Mao speech, there is definitely some nervous laughter from the audience when she first brings up Mao as one of her political heroes. The crowd clearly didn't know what to make of it and understandably so: "Wait... what? Did she just say that Mao is one of her political heroes? That's kind of funny.... right? It's definitely a little weird so I'll just chuckle a little bit and hopefully that will get rid of the uncomfortable silence in the air."
The nervous tick, which some have compared to a cow chewing curd, is for me confirmation that she knew exactly what she was doing and she did it anyway. Why? Because she knew that as a high-ranking member of the Obama administration, she could get away with it. Of course, her pathetic attempt to pay lip service to Mother Theresa in an attempt to counter-balance her Mao praise is about as transparent as Obama's trail of broken promises.
#2
her pathetic attempt to pay lip service to Mother Theresa
As I recall she paid a lot of lip and tongue service in that video to both Mao and Sister Theresa. I think you are right eltoroverde--hit em with Mao and soften it with S.T.
Inspector Frances Induwars brutal beheading in Jharkhand followed by the massacre of 17 policemen in Maharashtra two points in the countrys hinterland almost a thousand miles apart yet united in a chilling display of ruthlessness and reachonce again place the challenge of Naxalism on the Indian state in grim perspective. As a serving police officer, two illusions being harboured about this menace are of grave concern. The first is that within sections of the policymaking establishment, and in popular opinion, we continue to see militant Islam as the graver threat when on the ground it is the Maoist menace that poses a more serious problem. The second illusion is that large sections of our so-called intelligentsia see the Naxal challenge as a problem for the Indian state and its authority and not for civil society at large.
Everyday, on primetime talk shows our intellectuals earnestly explain and equate the actions of our soldiers and policemen with those of the Naxal. A national sense of naivete dominates public discourse about the Naxal menace. Our civil society has always had a bleeding-heart reaction to the sorrows of the world. But strangely, there is scarcely a tear for the widows and orphans of the men who die defending India in the line of duty. Just as Mumbai 26/11 woke up our gilded classes to the dangers of militant Islam, perhaps it will take a siege followed by a massacre in Delhis JNU to disabuse our chatterati of their romantic illusions about the Naxal agenda. Militant Islam is easier to demonise because ultimately its roots are foreign. Naxalism deceptively uses the grammar of justice, poverty and empowerment in a manner that leads many in our civil society to embrace it as a righteous cause. How did the defence of a pluralistic, tolerant vision of India acquire moral equivalence with a rebellion based on a murderous ideology, one that has been responsible for some of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century? How did we forget to mourn and avenge our fallen dead?
How did the defence of a pluralistic, tolerant vision of India acquire moral equivalence with a rebellion based on a murderous ideology, one that has been responsible for some of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century? How did we forget to mourn and avenge our fallen dead?
In these ambiguous times, popular opinion, driven by a 24/7 news cycle, wants untarnished victories and untainted heroes. Meanwhile, the battlefields of 21st century India turn both bloodier and greyer. The heroes of today are fighting a shadowy enemy that finds shelter in the fabric of civil society. Our soldiers and cops always rise to the national need but given the pitfalls of fighting terrorism and counter-insurgency in a democratic framework, they are seldom given the benefit of doubt. No surprise then that despite all the hype of the coming Indian century, in nine years of the new millennium, large parts of our hinterland are now beyond the writ of the state or the charms of civil society.
In the minds of an important section of our intelligentsia, the Indian state can do no right. Some of us are prepared to believe only the worst about those who are ready to die to protect us. To them, a soldier or a cop only deserves fear and loathing, whereas the Naxalite deserves to be treated as a figure of mythical glory. In justifying, and even celebrating the Naxals for killing for their vision of utopia, our civil society insults the memory of the security forces dying every day for the far less glamorous aim of preserving the mundane freedoms of our ordinary life. Our bleeding hearts forget all too easily that it is not the PUCL or the PUDR that really underpin our rights; instead it is the readiness of the men in green and khaki to die for the country that remains the ultimate guarantor of our national freedoms. The liberties enshrined in our Constitution, in the exuberant expressions of our cultural forms, in our creation of wealth and intellectual capital, are all ultimately supported not by pious intent and noble thoughts alone, but by our rugged determination to stay the course and by the steel of our guns and the lead of our bullets.
Our civil society must give up this dangerous flirtation with the ideologies of hatred and murder and must give honest support to those of us who are being asked to make the supreme sacrifice. We must expose, isolate and target the entire spectrum of Naxalite ideology from the militant in the jungle to the ideologues in our midst. There is never any shortage of brave men and women prepared to serve and die for our country. We simply need to make up the shortage of citizens who are prepared to recognise and admire the need for doing so.
The author, a former student of JNU, is presently SSP Dehradun.
Posted by: john frum ||
10/23/2009 16:42 ||
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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.
By Harvey Morris at the United Nations 
The White Houses extraordinary assault on the Fox News Channel will end in tears and not for Rupert Murdoch, Foxs owner. The Obama administration has embarked on a high-risk strategy of shooting the messenger, in effect blaming its plummeting poll ratings on alleged political bias at the number one 24-hour cable news network. As Anita Dunn, the Mao-quoting White House communications director put it in an interview with The New York Times:
It's proving harder than I expected to shake off the image of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Mao Zedong at a commencement speech in June.
