Article

2008-11-18 Afghanistan

Convoy brings winter relief to Nato forces

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Posted by Steve White 2008-11-18 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11132 views ] Top

#1 Sounds like bait on wheels to me. Why troll when they can be attracted to the hook.

Posted by tipover 2008-11-18 00:32|| 2008-11-18 00:32|| Front Page Top

#2 "... raising fears that the Taleban are mimicking tactics used against the British in 1841 and Soviet forces two decades ago."

duh ... if this is just "raising fears" in someone's mind, then "someone" needs to head to their playpen, for nap time.

Afghanistan is a no-win situation, and we need to get the f%#k out. Recruit and hire the toughest of the bad guys, pay them well, and have them exercise dictatorship over the rest of the Afghans. Tell them that if any hint emerges anywhere in the world of a violent act that traces back to Afghanistan, we will cut off all payments, obliterate all the poppy fields, saturate all mountain passes with scatterable mines, destroy all telecom and air transport links in and out of the country - and leave them to go back to the stone age.

There is nothing more ludicrous that placing precious military forces into a landlocked, remote, isolated mountain environment - in winter - in an extreme part of the world - and try to sustain them indefinitely, while they chase locals around the mountainsides. There is nothing worth protecting in the entire country.

Or - create the walled city of Kabul - surrounding by a moat, and then a one km wide sanitized area, level as a billiard table, devoid of vegetation, covered by miniguns. Strip search everyone entering or leaving. Call that city Afghanistan - and the rest of the country a tribal area. Cut the tribal area off from everything.

The entire US Armed Forces combined - all on the ground in Afghanistan at the same time - couldn't convert it into a permanently changed place. The bad guys live according to stone age time schedules - they can last five years, ten years, a hundred years - they have nowhere else to go, no big ambitions, and treat fighting - among themselves, or against outsiders - as routine sport and entertainment. What our troops see as a wasteland shit-hole - they see as as "the neighborhood".

Who are we kidding? Get out.

Posted by Lone Ranger 2008-11-18 00:44|| 2008-11-18 00:44|| Front Page Top

#3 Sounds like the ISI just wanted the Taliban resupplied first, and then NATO would get what was left.

Visions of that German train that was designed to be bait for fighter plane attacks jump into my mind as a countermeasure. Everything looked normal until all kinds of guns would pop out of the train and blow away anything that approached from the air.

Posted by gorb 2008-11-18 00:47|| 2008-11-18 00:47|| Front Page Top

#4 The entire US Armed Forces combined - all on the ground in Afghanistan at the same time - couldn't convert it into a permanently changed place. The bad guys live according to stone age time schedules - they can last five years, ten years, a hundred years - they have nowhere else to go, no big ambitions, and treat fighting - among themselves, or against outsiders - as routine sport and entertainment. What our troops see as a wasteland shit-hole - they see as as "the neighborhood".

Then push the bad guys out into the margins and give the rest something to protect.

Posted by gorb 2008-11-18 00:48|| 2008-11-18 00:48|| Front Page Top

#5 I really don't understand this need for us to do the majority fighting for one side of the continuing Afghan civil war. All we care about is that islamists don't retake power and use it to launch another attack on us. It was shown in 2001 that a few hundred US forces and air power were enough to overthrow islamist rule and install any faction we want. Very little footprint or cost.

Posted by ed 2008-11-18 07:57|| 2008-11-18 07:57|| Front Page Top

#6 Yeah, we gotta get out of the Nation Building business. We kinda suck at it, but we're hell on wheels in the Nation Breaking dept.
We should stick to what we're good at.

Posted by bigjim-ky 2008-11-18 08:50|| 2008-11-18 08:50|| Front Page Top

#7 I always wanted to see nation-building in a place like Afghanistan done in the following manner:

1) lay out lots and lots of gravel roads (not paved) in a hexagonal grid across the want-a-be nation.

2) have said grid of gravel roads trickle down to nothing about 10 miles from the border.

3) Do not build highways and other critical infrastructure. A nation with an insurgency should not have critical infrastructure rather self-sufficient distributed nodes.

Why?
i)Old coots are revered elders in remote backwards areas. If the youngsters can drift elsewhere then the old coots are just old coots and not revered elders.
ii) Highway type rectilinear road systems are easy to block. There is one major intersection everywhere that can be blocked to keep the youngsters on the farm (opium plantation?). With a hex grid of gravel roads you can always take a root-mean-square curve from anywhere to anywhere... and to block them in a town you have to mine/invest six intersections.....
iii) a side effect of increased mobility of the young is a sense of nation over tribe and family. This makes a nation out of a jumble of tribes and weakens more old coots powers.
iv) If the roads dribble off before boarders it makes it tougher for neighbors like say Pakiwakiland to have controlling interest in the development of a sense of nationhood. In addition, it makes it a bit harder for them to slip stuff in...
v) While at it .. if the space was Afghanistan ... mine the hell out of the border with Pakistan.
It makes it hard for the ISI to bring Taliban in and hard for heroin smugglers to bring stuff out.
vi) The nice gravel road network of hexs makes it easy to bring troops from the interior to border flashpoints. The increased number of paths to said flashpoints require more mine teams to knock them out so more men and expense for groups like the ISI/Talibunnies.

Oh and only give them decentralized type aid. Local wind generators and such. That way there is no strategic infrastructure to protect. (Powerlines... pipelines etc... ) If they let somebody into a village and they destroy the local decentralized infrastructure - why that community learns a valuable lesson. That being... Don't let people wreck your stuff or you have nothing... so better defend it yourself if it means something to you. With the gravel road system others will quickly hear what happens. Either the communities will get smart or live in the stone age...Darwin at work!

Posted by 3dc 2008-11-18 10:51|| 2008-11-18 10:51|| Front Page Top

#8 There's a term of art in real estate appraisal for Afghanistan:

Locational obsolescence.

LR is right; Get. Out. Now.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2008-11-18 11:14|| 2008-11-18 11:14|| Front Page Top

#9 Places like Afghanistan can be easily subdued, but it needs will. Use only mercenary forces with no ROE constraints.
Pay them by the number of testicles lodged after each operation.
As Nixon said "When you've got their balls, their hearts and minds follow"

Posted by tipper 2008-11-18 12:11|| 2008-11-18 12:11|| Front Page Top

#10 OK. Go ahead and get out. But arclight the tribal areas in Pakistan first. Arclight 'em good and then make no further aid payments to anyone in Pakistan. Leave them to understand that we can bomb the crap out of them again whenever we feel the need.

Posted by Abu Uluque 2008-11-18 12:48|| 2008-11-18 12:48|| Front Page Top

#11 Is Abu Uluque Arabic for Old Patriot?

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2008-11-18 13:08|| 2008-11-18 13:08|| Front Page Top

#12 OP - wouldn't a treatment of BZ gas accomplish essentially the same thing as an Arc Light with no violence and destruction and deaths to upset the squeamish?

Posted by 3dc 2008-11-18 15:08|| 2008-11-18 15:08|| Front Page Top

#13 No, NS. Abu Uluque is a mock nom de guerre for Ebbang Uluque6305. I came up with it when I was posting from a different computer that didn't have the Ebbang cookie. I couldn't remember that whole nym at the time and didn't know what else to do. Hope the mods don't mind too much. Hope OP doesn't mind that I used his term. My understanding is that it means heavy bombing from B-52s. Correct me if I'm wrong. I just think it'd be a good idea, if we're gonna pull out of Afghanistan, to take a few parting shots in hopes of getting lucky and actually hitting OBL. You never know when you might get lucky.

Posted by Abu Uluque 2008-11-18 16:13|| 2008-11-18 16:13|| Front Page Top

#14 Just kidding, Abu.

You're right about the ARCLIGHT definition, but I think you are both wrong about its value in this situation. If we had any idea where Binny is, he'd have a Hellfire up his butt with a much higher kill probability than with an ARCLIGHT.

That's why we'll probably never see one again. They're great against massed forces, but a great reason not to mass forces. The effect on troops subjected to the bombardment was truly devastating. I often wonder which was worse, ARCLIGHT or a WWI artillery bombardment.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2008-11-18 16:36|| 2008-11-18 16:36|| Front Page Top

#15 Even I picked up that Abu Uluque and Ebban Uluque are the same person, and Nimble Spemble is ever so much cleverer about such things than I, dear X Uluque. After all, I never twigged that NS = Rantburg's beloved Mrs. Davis -- he had to actually tell me, in words of less than one syllable.

Oh, and pop over to the O Club. We apparently have to have a drink any time Arc lights or Q ships are mentioned. ;-)

Posted by trailing wife 2008-11-18 23:40|| 2008-11-18 23:40|| Front Page Top

#16 Whoops! I almost forgot the comment I intended to make: I heard an interview on NPR today, a recently retired US lieutenant colonel, who said the Afghan army is up to 70,000 troops currently fighting alongside the internationals, and hopes to double that. He stated in no uncertain terms that we are capable of doing in Afghanistan what we did in Iraq via the Surge, and practically begged us not to prevent that from happening by bringing the troops home too soon.

Posted by trailing wife 2008-11-18 23:46|| 2008-11-18 23:46|| Front Page Top

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