Warre to the Knife

As 2008 closes the big news (after the Mumbai attacks and the global economic slump, both of which will be affecting things for a while yet) is Israel putting the boot in to the Gaza Strip. As of this writing, the media death toll stands at 375 dead Gazans with a thousand or so wounded.
There is the usual handwringing about civilians and children killed, how war never solved anything, and of course the “Muslim world” is (in some cases literally) up-in-arms about “Israeli aggression". The UN has condemned both sides and demanded a cease-fire, so you can expect more of their vigorous non-action in the days and weeks to come.

By any objective measure from the Israeli side, this is long overdue. The Israeli people are as sick of war and security crises as anyone, but Hamas has made it clear that ignoring them will NOT make them go away.

The Israeli government is stating that this is “all-out war” but I rather doubt it. Sure, it’ll look like that to a lot of people when the tanks, APCs and armoured bulldozers roll over the border after the mini “shock and awe” period is over, but I for one will be only actually shocked if the IDF does what is actually necessary to put Hamas, Al-Qaeda, etc. out of business in the Strip.
Back to the title of this post; the opposition will have to be ferreted out, root and branch and that will mean a LOT of bodies on both sides and levelling the Gaza Strip. Hamas will not stand out in the open and say “here, shoot me”, and will of course hide behind the civilians to make the Israelis look as bad as possible in the Press. Israel will only achieve their aim of knocking their opposition out if they are willing to kill a shitload of people, many of them not active combatants.

Ugly? Damned straight, but as per my favourite line from Pournelle/Niven’s Burning City, “Never start half a war.” When fighting someone whose stated aim is your extermination you hoist the old red flag (NOT the Communist one, the older one) and keep killing enemies until you can’t find any more. Quarter neither asked nor given.

Again, unlikely and really not my immediate problem. You will note that I have taken sides here, but I never claimed this blog was politically correct or impartial. The Israelis have their problems, but I’d far rather see them on top over there than, well, anyone else in the neighbourhood. My prediction is that the Americans will apply pressure to Israel to stop when the Yanks think the job is done. History since 1945 doesn’t suggest that the Americans have any idea any more when that point actually is, rather when international and/or domestic opinion becomes sufficiently outraged.

I am no strategic or geopolitical genius, so I’m sure there are a lot of people over there (‘tho less in the U.S.) who know this as well as I do, but of them, it’s only the groups that oppose us that are prepared to put it into action. Of course they’d first take out or take over the media, then start liquidating. Today it’s not all of the lawyers you have to kill if you want to do the dirty work. The IDF will of course not do that, but they can keep most of the media out. The BBC page I linked to is obviously also not impartial, proving the necessity of this.

Total blackout is of course impossible in the era of camera smart phones, etc., but I’ll be interested to see how this unspools.

Onward to 2009

I've been pondering the future of this space for some time. It being free and all means I lose nothing by leaving it fallow, "fallow" being hopefully the right word. I have stuff to say, but it seems increasingly like the same stuff, or close variations thereof which is less than motivating.

2008 has also on a personal level been not my best, but it being an anonymous blog even that isn't grist for the writing mill. In a small breach of that protocol, I did at least want to mention the passing today of my cat. Yes, my cat. She was with me for over 16 years, so her death (euthanized before she died of slow malnutrition due to diabetes, etc.) marks some sort of transition. Buggered if I know what, but it's a long time and deserves some more lasting mention than just telling people.

One thing I have hoped of this spot was to generate some discussion, but there was little or none of that. That isn't the end of the world, but even I get tired of listening to myself, so it's been tough to keep it going.

Things look like they may be stabilizing a bit for me in the new year (at least for a while), but either way I'll leave AotF up as long as Blogger will. I did some good stuff, and even my half-arsed pieces are worth reading, if only to note the deliberate logical lapses and other lazy things I do to try to get a rise out of "my" public. There may be more to come; in fact probably, but that requires spare time, Internet access and stuff that gets my goat.

The latter is abundant, but I really need all three to indulge this particular vanity/fancy. Don't hold your breath (sounds familiar; I think I've used it) but keep this spot in your peripheral vision, or at least the rear view mirror, 'cause it's not dead just yet.

Working for the Clampdown

A telco with one of my friends (and probably the biggest fan of this blog) today reminded me that I've not been on top of this thing, so just something off-the-cuff to keep from falling way behind.

The big stuff recently has been the complete meltdown in the U.S. mortgage markets, and the economic chaos that we are still in the middle of. What this means to me personally at this point is a shrinking of my long-term investments, and more immediately the price of gas is back to something reasonable ($o.85/L today). It's a good time to not be in manufacturing for sure.

Where do I see all this going? I don't know any more than the high-priced help (e.g. "experts") but I will say that I think things for us in North America will get (at least slightly) better if McCain wins, and worse if Obama does. McCain will at least not impose more socialism and big government on the U.S., the last things that country, and by extension those of us in it's economic fallout zone, need.

That election is almost here (finally) so that will be settled one way or the other. The recent Canadian election was unspectacular, so we stay the course on Afghanistan and whatever else it is that we're doing these days. Maybe when we're finally done with that mess we can deploy the troops into Toronto and sort those drive-by-shooting gangbangers out Panjwai-style.

A B-1 strike on Jane and Finch? Perhaps a bit much, but something has to be done, and more talk or banning guns that are already being used illegally is NOT it. I invite you to draw your own conclusions, but if you gave me command of the Battlegroup and access to Toronto Police intel, I'd solve most of this indiscriminate shooting bullshit in less than three months. You'd want to stay off the streets until I was done, but it would be safe to walk them again afterward.

No links, no research, but there is the state of my thinking at this juncture. I'll as always try to come back with some of my "usual" level of writing, but I'm very busy in my real life, so it'll be sparse for a while yet.

Better late than never

Now the PM has come out and said we will end our mission in Afghanistan in 2011, full-stop. Of course there will still be some of our people on the ground as mentors, likely Special Forces (JTF2, CSOR) as long as NATO remains there, but the Battle Group will be no more after 2011.

I couldn't find anything more current than the Decima poll done last November about the public's opinion on the war in Afghanistan, but I imagine it hasn't changed a whole lot since then. At that time, 60% in the poll disapproved of us being there to a greater or lesser extent, and only 15% of respondents thought it was even a priority to be there.

Mr. Davis in this article has said, well, here's what he said:

Jim Davis, whose son Cpl. Paul Davis died when his light armoured vehicle rolled over during a patrol in Kandahar in March 2006, said he was shocked by Harper's comments.

"I couldn't believe he would say something so irresponsible as that," Davis told CTV's Canada AM on Thursday.

Davis said it would be ideal to have Canadian soldiers home by 2011 but setting a deadline "undermines the work our soldiers are doing and it undermines the mission."

He said the deadline makes it difficult for Canadian soldiers to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people if they know troops will be gone in two years.

"I would never want to see another soldier go in harm's way so I can justify my son's death," said Davis. "But at the same time if we pull up stakes and come home when we're not ready to -- when the mission is not complete -- if we did that then my son died in vain."

There is a good deal of merit to Mr. Davis' statements, but with such an open-ended"mission" as this I honestly don't think it matters whether we put a date on it or not. It can't go forever, and in this day and age of technology and instantaneous communications there is no way to keep things secret for any length of time.

Therefore I think that the PM might as well have set a date which will let our allies realize that we aren't willing to support this sort of thing blindly and without end. There is very little prospect of any sort of happy ending in Afghanistan, so wasting more blood and treasure there to that end is just that, a waste. However, there is (as I've said previously) more to our decision to stick around and give more notice to leave than our progress.

The people of Canada don't really care, and the PM said that the military is starting to lose enthusiasm for the deployment in Afghanistan. The latter statement caught me slightly by surprise, but the spade is still a spade and I know a lot of people who have no have no interest in going back, so I'd say that both statements are on the money.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that putting a date on our exit is playing into the enemy's hands. In a very strict OPSEC way they are correct, but in the long term it will make no difference. It's another 3 years, so the Taliban shouldn't start celebrating just yet. That gives the Afghan government that much time with our help, and it will be by the end almost as long as we spent in both world wars.

This is the Americans' baby now. NATO has proven itself useless as an organization, as good as many of the (mostly smaller) constituent parts have proven to be. The Yanks will be doing their own "surge" into the 'Stan (and possibly Pakistan...) and we'll be there to help with that. If that can't be done in another 3 years, I say screw it and get out. If I had infallible prescience and knew we'd be no further ahead, I'd say get out now. No sense throwing good money after bad if you KNOW that's what's happening.

We are NOT the world's policemen, and I don't feel like being sucked into a never-ending security nightmare on the other side of the world. Canada has it's own interests, increasingly in our north, and we need to be in a position to do something there. Money that goes to Afghanistan is money we need for our Forces to be ready to more aggressively patrol the N.W.T. archipelago.

Besides, this way we are still keeping our word, and then some. We were supposed to be out in 2009, and we extended things until 2011. Plenty of time to fix what can be fixed, and now the troops and their families can have some hope that the Afghanistan treadmill will eventually end.

Too late for some, but you take the Queen's shilling and you know what the risks are. Our fallen and wounded are not diminished by the fact that it may be a lost cause, because at least they tried to do something and they put themselves on the line for it.

It's a post for another day, but go here and have a look at how whitebread the bulk of our casualties are. A cursory look shows six guys who'd be classified as "visible minorities", which doesn't really surprise me, but I was struck today by just how over-represented the much-maligned white European male is in our casualty lists.

It is a window on the Army (at least) and I do wonder if there is any way to make more-recent immigrants more engaged in their citizenship. A big can of worms indeed, but it's a political season so why not?

The ice man goeth? We'll see...

More doom and gloom from the global warming brigade. Obviously the Arctic sea ice coverage is less than it (recently) has been, but there is a lot of talk of "tipping points" and feedback loops.

(CTV) And with several weeks left in the melt season, 2008 could still surpass September 2007 for the lowest amount of sea ice since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979.

At last measure on Aug. 26, Arctic sea ice coverage was at 5.26 million square kilometers -- a decline of 2.06 million square kilometres from the beginning of August.

In September of last year, a record low was recorded, with 5.69 million square kilometres of sea ice recorded.

It's not a benchmark that Stroeve is proud of, but she's also not surprised by the chilling picture the numbers provide.

"I guess the main thing people should understand is this is just a continuation of that long term downward trend. I think whether or not we break the record it's just the continuation of what we've been seeing since 2002, where every year we're losing ice and we're not recovering at all," she said.

How a scientist can claim to be "proud" or otherwise about data I fail to understand. Information is information unless you were the one who created the data; built a big mirror in space and melted all the Arctic ice your own self, mayhap.

And again with the drowning polar bears:

Observers from the U.S. federal government doing a whale survey in mid August reported seeing nine polar bears swimming off Alaska's northwest coast.

The bears were between 20 and 100 kilometres from shore. Some were swimming north, apparently trying to reach the polar ice shelf, which was more than 600 kilometres distant.

While polar bears have been known to swim 100 kilometres, but can often become dangerously weak from the ordeal.

Stroeve said she has also heard reports of seals being spotted further north than ever before as they travel further and further north to find ice.

"It's scary. It's such a huge change that's happening very quickly and it makes me very sad because I just can't see how the species that rely on the ice can survive this," Stroeve said.

They survived the last time this happened, and unless we kill them off (more likely) they probably will again. If a bear is capable of swimming 100 km, it suggests that it has evolved in an environment where that can be necessary. The way to be sure is to throw a Grizzly in the ocean and see how it does, but somehow I don't see that happening, so we may never know. I will also point out that these observers have no idea why these bears are doing what they're doing; more speculation. As for seals, there are lots of them where there isn't any year-round ice so they may decline, but the little buggers were pretty good swimmers last I heard, and quite capable of pulling up on a beach.

I am not claiming that this is not happening, just suggesting that the hyperbole is well, hyperbole. Things are cyclic, and because things are trending one way does NOT mean it will necessarily keep going that way. It's been getting colder in the Antarctic at the same time it's melting up north, but the data is scarce and this part goes back and forth. A key thing though is that I've not seen anything creditable showing me that Greenland is melting like the pack ice, so there's still a big chunk of high albedo surface up there year-round.

I'm quite tired of hearing what "could" happen. All sorts of stuff could happen, but the chicken littles who keep warning of catastrophic sea level rise have yet to be even partly vindicated. If the NW Passage opens up that's a geopolitical problem, especially for us, but otherwise a slightly warmer northern hemisphere is the sort of thing that both we and the animaux can adapt to.

Sometimes I hate HTML

The last post seems to me a bit disjointed, but that is partially due to the technical problems I had with editing/posting it, derailing my train of thought.

To attempt to clear things up, for myself at least, this will serve as a bit of an addendum. I'd just edit the other one, but that gave me such a headache yesterday that I don't want to touch it again.

I feel that we've passed the point of diminishing returns in Afghanistan, see here. I have recovered (mostly) from the funk I was in when that was written, but the conclusions remain.
Our mission there(in my mind) is no longer really about fixing Afghanistan, as I don't think that's do-able by us or by anyone else. Afghanistan is the sort of marginal, faultline-of-empires kinds of place that will always be screwed up.

The current upswing in enemy activity in Afghanistan may or may not be sustainable, but it is a big mistake to rush to conclusions based on a few bad weeks or months. If they keep it up over the next year as well then it's time to reconsider.

Getting back to point two, the mission began as and has reverted to containment and damage control. Al-Qaeda took a pasting in Iraq and the survivors and wanna-be martyrs are turning to Afghanistan for another kick at the can. It might be necessary to maintain some sort of military/intelligence presence in Afghanistan long-term just to keep things from spilling outside of the current sphere.

How important that last objective is to us in North America is a matter of some debate, with myself falling on the "too bad for them, let them stew" part of the spectrum most of the time. All things being equal, I'd scale back our forces there and use it as a live-fire training scheme for our Special and highly motivated Regular forces on an all-volunteer basis. Piggyback on the American logistics and combat support system (more than we do now) and provide our best troops to respond to specific missions.

NATO is obsolete, but it remains important to stand by our real friends, and that sure doesn't include the Germans. THAT is the real mission for us now, although no politician would ever say that in public.

I sure as hell don't know how many dead or maimed Canadians Afghanistan is worth ("zero" comes to mind), but foreign policy doesn't have a price list. If you want my honest gut feeling on the matter, it's none of the public's fucking business how many of us get killed if they only use that information to grind whatever policy axes they may have. Ours is an all-volunteer Army, and no-one who feels that the risk is too high/not worth it can be forced to go. The Canadian Army is at war, but the country itself is not.

We'll get out eventually, but on the scale of our involment/comittment, it won't be at a point that is "too late". There is limited potential for disaster there, at least on the scale of the National Interest. Under no probable circumstances can we lose even a significant proprtion of our in-theatre forces. Even if the unthinkable happened and there was a repeat of the retreat from Kabul, 1842-style, Canada's geopolitical position would remain unchanged. The harsh truth is that our Armed Forces are already woefully inadequate to physically defend the country, so even losing 1/3 of our front-line soldiers and equipment would change little if anything in the event it was necessary to try.

I'll leave this on that cheery note. I'm not sure this clears up a whole lot as much as it opens more cans of wigglier worms, but I'm not getting paid for it, so what the hell? There are some other things going on, so I should see what else I can come up with. Not today though.

When the going gets tough, the tough stay put.

As a rule I don’t tend to share Mr. Trudeau’s politics, but I have to say I’ve no fundamental dispute with him here on our net results in Afghanistan, although I do have some problems with his overall view:

MONTREAL - Canada's "aggressive" war in Afghanistan is all about "teaching lessons with weapons" and will leave nothing behind "except the blood we've lost there," the journalist son of late prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said yesterday.
"Our aggressive military activities in Afghanistan are foolish and wrong," said Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau, 34.
"The Pashtun [people] have extremely different values than ours, values we may not agree with in any case, but it's not our business to try and teach them lessons with weapons," Mr. Trudeau told Canwest News Service. "Because, in fact, they'll be the ones teaching us lessons.
"We're going to have to leave the place or there'll be nothing left of us or of whatever we've done, except the blood we've lost there after we leave. So it's better we leave now."

Politically of course it is a disaster if we leave now, as we’d be letting down the few reliable allies we have. It does seem, and I’m looking at this is objectively as possible, that the situation is in fact deteriorating like a lot of analysts say.

ISAF has lost any tactical initiative that it may have once had, and I don’t see any prospect of that changing with the force levels we have in there presently. If the Americans send in a lot of the drawdown from Iraq, that will stabilize things, but that just means bringing the level of control back to that of the last couple of years. We are reacting to the opposition, and that is a sure sign that things are not going our way.

It will be interesting to see if in the wake of that big ambush the French suffered a few days ago if they step up and join the war with the rest of us. Sarkozy said the right things when he was there:

"The best way of remaining faithful to your comrades is to continue the work, to lift your heads, to be professional," Sarkozy told French troops at a base on the outskirts of Kabul. "I don't have any doubt about that. We have to be here. … We are not here against the Afghans. We are with the Afghans so as not to leave them alone in the face of barbarism."

I haven’t seen our PM fly into Kandahar at any time after we’ve taken a particularly hard knock, so good on Sarkozy for coming out, but (talk - action) = zero.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Afghanistan is a civil war and we have taken sides. Our intentions (once the understandable vengeance was out of the way post 9/11) are good, but ‘Sacha’ makes part of a good point about the values thing. The average villager in Panjwai, etc. is not so far removed from the ideals of the Taliban. This isn’t a warm and fuzzy factoid for domestic consumption, but it’s not a secret, and certainly no mystery to anyone who has spent any significant time ‘outside the wire’. If the locals have the choice of siding with their slightly more brutal cousins who are there for the duration, or the foreigners who rotate in and out and will eventually leave, which side do you think their bread is buttered on?

I simplify that greatly, but the details aren’t terribly important from this distance, as the end result will be the same. The Taliban will kill them ON PURPOSE if they don’t play ball, whereas we might kill them by accident while trying to get the Taliban. Who would you be more afraid of and consequently more likely to listen to in matters of life and death? Of course, with guys like the Taliban, everything is a matter of life and death (for you) and they will torture and kill you for co-operating with the infidels in any way shape or form.

This Taliban “surge” does ping my radar however. The fact that they have started this major offensive looks impressive to the layperson, heats things up for and unfortunately kills more of our people, but I doubt it’s sustainable at that level. The assaulting NATO outposts in particular is quite brazen, but it has to be said, expensive for the opposition. Lobbing a few rockets/mortar bombs, etc. is more their style because those leave a good chance to run away to fight again. A large scale assault on anything with even one soldier left with a radio means a lot of dead baddies.

The exchange ratio on this sort of thing is with few exceptions always heavily in our favour. To take out one Police Sub-Station ( arguably our most exposed posts) means not just killing all the ANP there (lamentably easy, historically) but all the NATO mentors as well, and quickly enough that they can’t call for help. If I had to do it with the resources the Taliban have, I’d want at least 50 guys, and I’d expect to lose most of them even if it went well.

So, tactically, things are pretty difficult this summer. The lull in the winter season may be enough for the OpFor to rebuild from whatever damage they do to themselves while hurting us. We just can’t kill enough of the bad guys quickly enough without taking too many ‘’civilians’’ with them. That is the Arithmetic on this Frontier, and it doesn’t work out in our favour.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

This is where the tactical becomes the strategic. Even our successes at the tactical level can’t change the fact that even a Pyrrhic victory is a real one when all of your dead go to paradise and the infidel is forced by his weak-stomached public opinion to pull out.

History quiz time, Tet, 1968; who won? The Americans and A.R.V.N. DESTROYED the Viet Cong and brutalized the N.V.A. units that tried to exploit the uprising. Looks like an American victory doesn’t it? Without TV it probably would have been as big a strategic triumph as it was a tactical one, but it was perceived by the public as an American defeat because of the upsurge in casualties, the highly-publicized temporary reverses they suffered, etc.

Not directly comparable to our current quagmire in Afghanistan, sure, but sound at all familiar? The Canadian Army is in fact learning the ‘’lessons with weapons’’ from Afghanistan at a moderate price in blood and treasure. The blood is lamentable but, to put it coldly, sustainable, and the treasure is replaceable. I do not think we are ‘’foolish and wrong’’ to use force there, it’s the only thing that has a chance of working, but I really can’t come up with a happy ending for Afghanistan. Refer to my earlier posts for my realpolitik proposals re: the problem of Afghanistan; I stand by them, but they will create new problems, albeit ones that I think we can handle better.

“Leave or there’ll be nothing left of us or what we did” is pretty dramatic, but even I don’t think things are that dire. Ultimately futile? Probably, but life is a struggle that inevitably ends in death, so you could make that argument for pretty much anything we do. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but while we’re walking it we’re trying to help, keeping faith with our friends, and (hopefully) learning a lot. There are usually a lot of reasons for doing/not doing something, and the fact that we won’t achieve our goals is rarely a politically decisive one.