Know your enemy, October 2009 edition.

This is absolutely breathtaking, reading as this guy circles back to make the point that Muslims want to conquer the entire world. What’s amazing is that he does this in the context of telling an interviewer that the UK’s policies aimed at curbing radicalism in and fostering better integration of the “Muslim” population there are so appalling. I quote:

‘We should be clear, "Prevent" is not a policy that will detect and deter future bombers. It is an ideological agenda built on the false premise that the more Islamic a person is, and the more politicized, the more chance they have of becoming a security threat. This may sound utterly ridiculous, but that is actually the strategy.

Earlier this year, a leak to the Guardian newspaper exposed that the government's definition of "extremism" which should raise suspicions includes belief in the implementation of sharia or Khilafah/Caliphate - anywhere in the world; belief that it is legitimate for the Muslims of Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan to resist occupation; and belief that homosexuality is a sin. So you can see its real aim is to start a coercive assimilation of Muslims - "converting" them to Western values, and subduing them to the will of the state.’


Well yes, I rather think that IS the aim of the policy! Read the first highlighted section and consider the “falseness” of that premise. I’d say he’s pretty much defined the prime candidates for jihad, but I’m profiling, aren’t I? Interesting how it looks from the other side, and if anyone thinks that there aren’t people who think like this (Islam will cover the world, universal Caliphate, etc.) I hold Dr. Abdul Wahid up as an example.

There’s another bit further on:

MA: Even mainstream British politicians have declared "multiculturalism" to be as good as dead; how will this impact British Muslims at local and national levels?

AW: I think the demise of the policy of "multiculturalism" has made it easier to vilify Islam. Things can be written and said about Islam and Muslims that could never be said of other races or religions. The net result is that more of the wider society, who are fed this diet of lies and misinformation, view Muslims as a suspect community or with hostility.

I would have to ask why anyone would go out of their way to be concerned about Muslims, as opposed to any other particular religious group; that is, if I didn’t already know. The Hindus don’t have plans to take over the world, ditto the Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Zoroastrians, etc. The Christians are largely past that, at least as a group, and the last I checked none of these groups riot and run amok en masse every time someone says something they don’t like.

Multiculturalism as official policy is an absolute disaster, as it says that everything is as good as everything else. The moral-relativists out there might not see the problem with this but I do. There has to be a hard centre that people can look to for continuity, a base for civil society. The constitution of that centre can vary by time and place (culture, etc.), but people have to know there are standards, and what they are.

Assimilation is best for domestic stability, but integration works quite adequately too. I like the food options, etc. that a diverse population brings, and I don’t care if there’s a temple or a mosque down the road any more than a church, as long as it’s there for the same purposes. I will not stand for our Common Law being changed by people from vastly different legal traditions, and Rule of Law (another cornerstone of civil society) can have only one set of rules for EVERYONE. Sure sharia has that too, but I don’t want to live under it, so it can stay where it is; anyone who wants so badly to live under it can live in those places.

The death of Multiculturalism is the only chance that the UK has to survive in any recognizable form, and at some point a decision will have to be made in a lot of other places too. There are rumblings in much of Europe that people are fed up with being forced to kowtow to the Islamists, but I’m not sure they’ll manage to stabilize things.

Time will tell, as always, but the above interview gives the informed a good idea of what the stakes are. For reference, consider living under witch-burning Puritan fundamentalists in the 16th Century. That would be a progressive regime by comparison with the Abdul Wahids of the world taking over.

It's inconvenient when the enemy makes a good point...

I am of course passingly familiar with the form and function of propaganda, and this Taliban press release is certainly a bit of it. That said, I have to say that it is quite free of the usual jihadi crap, and whoever is doing this for them is doing a good job. This part in particular I cannot disagree with:

“At the beginning, they were promising they would withdraw within three months, in their words, after eliminating the so-called terrorism. Contrarily, today eight years from that time have passed, but they have built up hundreds of military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. They say that they will raise the level of their troops to almost 110,000 troops. It is clear from this, that they have occupied Afghanistan for the execution of their expansionist plans in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Southeast Asia.”

CENTCOM and the US State Department can say what they want, but this is the truth. The US is WAY out of their sphere of influence in Central Asia, and one has to ask why they would plunge these sorts of resources into that part of the world. Containment of Russia and China could be reasons, but if so it's a stupid idea. Pipelines? It would be a hell of a lot easier to run one through once the dust settles and Afghanistan is running it's own show (for good or ill) and that will happen a lot faster if they pull out than if they fight an endless guerrilla war.

Please note that this doesn't represent a change in my position on Afghanistan. I have said from the get-go that we should have smashed the real problem children, established some bases in the Northern Alliance territory to guarantee no recurrence and to keep the Taliban away from the people who really didn't want them there.

I have to say that I believe them when they say that they have no designs on terrorizing the West. They figure that they can run Afghanistan better (read: less rampantly corruptly) than anyone else, and as long as you don't account for the enforced backwardness and misery, they probably can. The reason is that they keep things VERY simple, and punish transgressions mercilessly.

An earlier post of mine mused about just taking over the government. I'll showcase my incredible arrogance by saying that if you put me in charge I would do a better job than Karzai and his cronies. This assumes a mere Division of first-rate troops (10-15,000 depending on organization) with attendant air power and tactical transport. I'd be making deals left right and centre, and cracking heads in a big way when the deals were not held up. Walk softly and carry the biggest stick around. In other words, to run Afghanistan you have to be the biggest, baddest Warlord of the bunch.

I rather like not living in constant fear for my life, so this is completely academic, not a job application. One thing remains salient to this whole debacle: you can't make Afgthanistan into a stable democracy by any means that I see available to us. Exterminating the entire population and colonizing the place with less intransigent groups might be a start but isn't an option. People talk about an "exit strategy", but this is only important in terms of logistics. We have to bring our stuff home when we leave (tanks, guns, planes, etc.) but I guarantee if we told the Taliban tomorrow that we were leaving, there would be no attacks or bombs on our route.

The recent election showed the population what they can expect from Democracy, and they don't see a lot of difference from the old way of doing things. Karzai has the biggest stick (NATO) so he wins. That stick is not fully his to control so he can't hold the country. It would be interesting to see what Karzai would do if he had full tactical control of the NATO forces, but for now he plays us against the populace, reaming us every time we inevitably kill some "civilians".

A lot of people think Gen McChrystal is out-to-lunch with his COIN strategy, and a lot of others think this is the way forward. I think that if you need to double the number of troops in-country to even try this you should be thinking very clearly about the stakes involved. Again this is a time to "man up" and admit that we bit off more than we could swallow. We've lost the south, and we're losing parts that were initially friendly to us. We can recover the non-Pashtun parts, support them militarily to keep the Taliban from taking them over, maintain a presence to keep the pulse of the region, and it's but a matter of drawing some lines.

Pakistan you say? I don't have any answers there, but I will postulate that if they can't manage their internal security, nothing we do is going to help them. Get involved directly and we make more "Taliban", but a solid and dynamic military force to the north of "Talibanistan" would be a sword of Damocles over the Talibs in government to keep them (mostly) out of it. We can knock over their government any time we want to, the one lesson both sides should have learned from the "three month raid" we started out with eight years ago.

Logic and realism

If everybody subscribed to this philosophy the Dalai Lama would be right, but shit ain’t like that:

"Peace is not just the mere absence of violence. . . . Genuine peace is genuine restraint," he said.
The Dalai Lama pointed to former United States president George W. Bush, a man he called a "straightforward" and "nice" person.
But he said the "violent methods" used in Iraq and Afghanistan only give way to "violent consequences."
Only compassion and dialogue can solve differences, the Tibetan leader urged.
"Peace through compassion is logical," he said. "External, long-lasting general peace must come through inner peace."

In the absence of jerkwads wielding sticks, the carrot is indeed all you need. For the longest time I always wondered why the “good guys” are so frequently getting their butts kicked. We don’t always lose, but if good intentions are enough we should be doing better.

We’ll start with Israel. Which side of the good guy/bad guy fence they’re on is a matter of opinion, but on balance I’d say they’re “us” as opposed to “them”. When they show “compassion” (weakness) by pulling out of some contested area (South Lebanon, Gaza) this is not responded to with dialogue and understanding, but with rockets, mortars and attacks on outposts.

“Peace through compassion” is internally logical, but it is patently obvious to any rational person that if Israel ever totally drops its guard, it’s boned. The actual as opposed to theoretical logic of the situation is closer to “kill or be killed”. Restraint just encourages the terrorists and gives them time and opportunity to re-arm and reorganize. In fact, the restraint that they do show (not bulldozing Gaza and everyone in it into the Mediterranean) very palpably imperils Israel’s security.

“They make a desert and call it peace”. That, my dear exiled holy man, is as logical as it gets. If there are no people, there will be no conflict. Even if there are relatively homogenous groups there is relatively little conflict. People are NOT logical; logic is an overlay on our thought processes, and is a cultural artefact. If the Dalai Lama was correct, he wouldn’t be exiled, for example…

Bad guys will always have the advantage of having no interest in restraint. This can burn them in a couple of ways; people will turn against them and/or the other side will drop the gloves. The logic of these situations is also simple, and based on self-interest. Ideology starts wars and keeps them going, but people end them when they’ve had more than they can take. Most people like stability, which is a close analogue of peace, and will back whatever gives them the best prospect to achieve that. If the Taliban for example provide services where the government doesn’t, people will tend to back them even if they don’t like them.

As long as there are guys that are willing to commit atrocities to get what they want there is a completely different logic that applies. The Dalai Lama’s version is utopian, and the word “utopia” is Greek, from ou “no” and topos “place”. As long as we’re here and not there, war most certainly can be logical. Some people just need to die; it’s the only way to stop them since they don’t care about compassion or restraint.

How much restraint we should show in doing that is debatable, but I’ll put it out there that the last war our side won unequivocally was WW2, and then we used literally all the force that we could bring to bear. In modern conflicts you certainly have to at least be prepared to use more than the other side; if you kill them all, they can’t stop your development programs, again logical. Somehow I don’t think this is the logic the DL had in mind, but it’s simpler and makes no assumptions. Simple can be ugly, but it’s generally effective.

Put our money where our brain is, not our mouth.

A former head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security calls it "regrettable" that Canada plans to withdraw from the conflict in Afghanistan.

He is certainly entitled to his opinion, and the following is undoubtedly true:

Chertoff believes the challenge of this century is "ungoverned space," where there is no government that can maintain order. Those areas of the world can give terrorists room to thrive, he said.

This is the part that I take issue with, not the concept, but the scale and the execution:

"It would be very short-sighted to stint on the investment now and face the consequences in five years," he said. "So I think President Obama is dead-right in what he is doing."

I read something a few days ago about U.S. Special Forces troops sweeping into Mogadishu with helicopters, hitting a specific target, killing him, and extracting with no losses; it's like "Blackhawk Down" except that it worked. The key phrase in the article was "specific intelligence" and THAT is where the investment that Mr Chertoff talks about should be made.

If the place is ungovernable, who are we to think that we can make it so? Even empires had a hell of a time subjugating barbarians; beating them in the field, sure, conquering the place, sure, but holding it? Iraq might have worked if the Yanks had just decapitated the leadership, but I've made that argument before. Superimposing government can work, but building one in a vacuum? Ask another question, what is the Aim?

Yes, "Selection and Maintenance of the Aim" is the foremost of most Principals of Warfare that you will find, although the exact terms will vary. End state is what? Terrorists have no safe havens to attack us from with impunity? I can think of a lot cheaper (in blood and treasure) ways to achieve that than bogging ourselves down and making us the fixed target as we wallow about trying to rebuild a failed state.

The people who live in these places have more pressing motivation than we do for their countries to function, and if THEY can't make it work that doesn't augur well for us to do so. Cynical for damned sure, but I'm still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

If you want something done right...

In the aftermath (sort of) of the latest Afghan election, there is a lot of comment from various sources about the corruption of the incumbents. If anything, this is probably understated, as the most lucrative parts of the economy is the drug trade, and the Karzai family is deep into it.

I have talked to Afghans in the heart of Taliban territory and they aren't happy when we wreck their stuff and kill them by accident, but they don't want us to leave. Part of that is economic; we break something or tear up their fields, we pay for it and that's a better source of hard currency than they'll get pretty much anywhere else. Bigger than that though, the Taliban are as miserably austere a group as have ever walked the earth and even conservative Pashtuns don't want to live under their rules.

Leaving the problem of how best separate the wolves from the sheep for the moment, back to running the country. The question I have (and I don't have an answer!) is; should we just kick out the government and run the place?

Afghans are famous for uniting to drive out foreign invaders, so on the face of it it sounds like a fantastically bad idea. In the current situation, where their government is seen as a corrupt Western puppet anyway, I don't see what we have to lose.

The people kowtow to the Taliban partly in desperation for any kind of stability, partly in fear, and partly because they know that we (and consequently the Karzai government) won't be sticking around forever. In the meantime we pour in blood and treasure in an ultimately fruitless attempt to get the country on it's feet.

My proposal: decapitate the government and replace it with competent Westerners. Use the British Raj as a model as far as possible and keep locals where you can, replace them where you can't. You have to keep the Bremers out but I really don't see it as being either more expensive or more dangerous than what we're doing right now.

The ANA is already stood up, although it has a long way to go and honestly it may never get all the way there. The police are a disaster that is being somewhat managed, and the biggest challenge is to damp down the corruption to something reasonable (for that part of the world). Right now the public distrusts the government despite its' "nativeness". My gut tells me that they would not rise up against a foreign administration as long as it got the job done.

This does not suggest that things will be all rainbows and frisky puppies if we kick Karzai et al to the curb, spray the opium fields and cut out the middlemen from our aid to the country. I just don't think it would be worse, and people might do what they did in Iraq and start talking to us if they think we can get the job done.

Michael Yon described the US military in Iraq as a "tribe", specifically a powerful one which could be trusted to be neutral and just. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq, and that isn't a good thing in this case. The educated middle class of Iraq doesn't exist in Afghanistan, so we'd have to work with warlords, but if you have the biggest stick on the block you can keep them in line. Be "professional" about running that place and you might gain that (probably grudging) respect from the public.

Incredibly difficult, complex and most certainly bloody, but a sliver of long-term hope. We can extrapolate from what we're doing now, and everybody says it'll take a generation at least. I say throw the dice; go big or go home, and soon at that.

Third one’s a charm…

Holy fuck, this AGAIN!

Omar Khadr's lawyer says his client is being unfairly punished by the Conservative government, which has steadfastly refused to request his repatriation from Guantanamo Bay despite court rulings ordering it to do so.

I have addressed this schiesskopf (and to a lesser extent his whole family) here, but it just won’t die. As for me I’ve not a lot new to say, but opinions/observations follow.

1. Khadr was shot twice by American soldiers. This suggests (and there is a lot of other evidence as well) that the 5.56x45mm NATO assault rifle round has insufficient killing power and should be replaced. Obviously you have to shoot people three times at least to make sure they don’t come back to bite you.

2. His lawyer says that the “Harper Government” picks and chooses which Canadians it’s going to help. Of bloody course they do. The “Canadian” in question was an enemy combatant fighting an allied army in a country replete with terrorist training camps, one or more of which Khadr and his dad were attending. This is no mere passport problem, and it CERTAINLY has nothing to do with him being “a person of colour”.

3. The comments section of the CTV article I linked to is revealing. Roughly 2/3 of posters are quite happy to keep Khadr out of the country, probably permanently, but for sure long enough for the Americans to try him. These same people (and I’m one of them, go figure) forecast Khadr suing the government (hence you and me) for some massive amount whenever he arrives back.

I don’t want him back, but I’ll look at it as impassively as possible: as long as it costs us less to keep him out than to bring him back, we should. He’ll get to Canada eventually, and let’s face it, he’s a lot less dangerous than any number of other people who are already here. No reason to hurry that along though; Guantanamo is as much jail time as this bad apple will see and a bit more will be good for him.

We will remember them, but who are "we"?

LONDON -- Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.

Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."

Mr Patch was the last fighting soldier of any nation in that conflict, and with his passing the Great War (WW1) will soon pass almost into myth.

I was asked last Remembrance Day to give a speech as a veteran to a local high school. I accepted rather reluctantly, not because it's not worth doing (quite the opposite) but because I can't put my experiences in the same league as the men who fought in the World Wars. This being said, I was all they had so I stepped up.

A key point I tried to make to the kids was that the veterans of the mass-army wars of the 20th Century are nearly gone. That is pretty parochial I suppose, as there are lots of survivors of the Iran-Iraq war, loads of American soldiers who saw a lot of shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the wars for the soul of Western Civilization are the ones that really got our attention.

Time will tell if those of us who served in the GWoT in it's various guises will be accorded any sort of equivalence for what we were trying to do but I'm guessing not. There are several reasons for that.

First is that it's not the epic struggle that were the World Wars. Korea was on that scale, at least locally, and even that first successful example of the Cold War strategy of "containment" (remember Communism?) never caught the public the same way.

Second, and not really separate from the first, is the sense of sacrifice. Right now, Canada's Army is at war, but the country (and even the other branches of the CF) is not. There is no rationing, no conscription, no "We Want YOU" posters everywhere, and bluntly, not enough soldiers are dying. This is war reduced to personal, not national, tragedy and it directly effects hardly anyone.

Third, it's the lack of a sense in the public of an existential threat to our way of life. Part of that problem is that few people give much thought to what exactly is "our" way of life, and our Diversity agenda has a lot to do with that. Beer companies are about the only thing I can think of offhand that present a "Canadian" identity, but the "I am Canadian" spots etc. aren't the sort of thing that will draw the youth of the country to the colours to defend it. Osama Bin Laden is no Kaiser Bill (except that they're in all likelihood just as dead), and not a lot of people are concerned about the jackbooted tread of Islamic zealots stomping over our precious institutions.

What we have now is "The Long War", which will never be one to end all others. I don't know that Remembrance Day will mean much to most people in 20 years when the last of the WW2 vets has passed away. I guess that it'll be left to people like me, but I can't imagine the King, PM, etc. will make much of an address when the last of us passes away.

That's for the best, as it would mean that there was never again the mass slaughter of the WWs, but I hope that people won't completely forget those generations when they're no longer around to speak for themselves. They did a lot for us and suffered terribly for it.