Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Michelle Bachman: Traitor or fool?

She babbles, you decide. Yochi J. Dreazen at The National Journal...
"[H]er comments on Pakistan’s nuclear program represent either a news-making leak of previously unknown classified information or another in her recent series of seemingly-random, and highly inaccurate, public comments."
I suppose "and" should be an option...

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Monday, May 09, 2011

Why, oh why, oh why, oh why...

...because, because, because, because.

Juan Cole. Go read.

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Friday, November 13, 2009

Just wondering…

…where the Iraqis in this group are (Mohammed's a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani)...
Four men—the two Yemenis, a Saudi and a Pakistani-born Kuwaiti—will face trial alongside Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of helping finance and plan the attacks of 11 September 2001 in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
I mean, I get why we went into Afghanistan originally. They were harboring criminals from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait and Pakistan, but we short-sheeted Afghanistan to invade Iraq. And that was because….?

Another one, I suppose, for the "What if there were no rhetorical questions" file.


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Wednesday, September 02, 2009

OK, be clear…

…but you'll have to try again, because clarity seems to have eluded you this time. Adam Bink writes at Open Left…
Let me be clear: I'm for having the necessary amount of troops on the ground to win the war, within reason. My problem is with the Administration's refusal to lay out what is victory and how we will achieve it.
Of course, it's not really fair to pick on Mr. Bink. It wouldn't take long to come up with a list of similar expressions, but his is both timely and exemplary. It's based, I think, on the longstanding progressive critique of the Bush/Rumsfeld administration's abandonment of the "good" war in Afghanistan in favor if the Iraqi adventure. It's a critique that President Obama himself advanced during his campaign, and has been the base of his policy in office. As the conditions on the ground have changed over a period of eight years, though, it's led too many to the kind of self-contradiction expressed above.

How, I wonder, can you be in favor of having any force, necessary and/or reasonable, if you don't first know what victory is and how we will achieve it. Isn't the size of the force, it's need and rationality, dependent on the goal, the definition of victory?

They say the memory is the second thing to go, and I'm getting on, but as I remember we entered Afghanistan with three identifiable and arguably defensible goals. The first was to destroy it's capacity as a training and operational base for Al Qaeda. We accomplished that swiftly and handily. The second was to punish the Taliban government that had given them safe harbor by deposing them. That, too, was the matter of a brief and decisive battle. Finally, in the wake of an unconscionable attack on American sovereign territory and the death and destruction attendant to those attacks, we set out to kill or capture as much of the Al Qaeda high command as possible, and in particular their spokesman, strategist and financier, Osama Bin Laden.

The second goal, though apparently swiftly achieved, continues to be a stumbling block for adherents of the disgraced former Secretary of State Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule." The rule fails in Afghanistan, though, because we didn't break it. It's been broken for centuries, and centuries of outside interference have caused the debris to spread far beyond Afghani borders. Some of it spilled into ours, and we swept it out of our path. If Afghanistan were to organize itself in such a way that it could accept and distribute humanitarian aid, it would certainly be a candidate with other countries that receive American largesse, whether publicly or privately provided. The level of American military force that would be required in order to effect and enforce such an organization of Afghanistan, though, in time, treasure and blood, would defy any possible conception of "within reason." Its impossibility, by the same token, renders its need moot. We didn't break it. We needn't buy it. And we're only making it worse.

Still there's concern. AT Vet Voice, Richard Smith expresses some of the resulting frustration, writing that…
...the status quo is unacceptable, and allowing a Taliban faction which would again allow al-Qaeda free operation is as as well.
Smith's hardly the only one concerned that the Taliban are the most, or the only, likely candidate to fill the vacuum of an allied withdrawal. Less often mentioned, it seems, is what that says about the prospects for any "victory" that would produce a Taliban-free Afghanistan. Why anyone, especially the Taliban themselves, who have been the direct targets of the shock and awe of American brute force, would imagine that they would, or could, "again allow al-Qaeda free operation" particularly puzzles me. Any Afghani government should by now be very aware that.

Finally, there's Osama. The missed and missing target. The guy Bush let go when he went after Saddam. While killing or capturing Bin Laden and his leadership cadre wouldn't address any of the actual causes of international fundamentalist terror, it would produce the promised pony that so many Americans have shoveled so much manure in search of. The problem with the search for Osama et al is that it's no longer an Afghani problem, but a Pakistani problem, and his presence in Pakistan, ostensibly an American ally, presents a different, and in some ways more difficult, set of problems. None of those problems can be solved by sending more Americans to kill more Afghanis who will in turn kill more Americans.

The "necessary" number of troops approximates zero. Victory seems to looks just like withdrawal.

The right way in Afghanistan is out.

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Thursday, April 23, 2009

From the "Me neither." file.

Rep. David Obey, (D-WI)...

"I have absolutely no confidence in the ability of the existing Pakistani government to do one blessed thing."
Me neither.

Another reason that the right way in Afghanistan is out.

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Monday, February 16, 2009

From the "Elections have consequences" file.

Richard Holbrooke, US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan...
"It is absolutely clear that Iran plays an important role in Afghanistan. They have a legitimate role to play in this region, as do all of Afghanistan's neighbors."
Wow.

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Monday, July 21, 2008

Ya' know…

…handling the "situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border" is probably the kind of job the old dude is up to. Maybe we could send him there...

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Thursday, April 10, 2008

Ruh-roh.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has signed deployment orders that will send U.S. military trainers to Pakistan this summer, CNN has learned.
And, you know, maybe a brigade or two to protect the trainers when it turns out the locals don't completely appreciate their sacrifice, and some air support, of course, for those brigades, and, well, a division to help stabilize the new government that suddenly exists and…

I think I've seen this movie.

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Sunday, January 06, 2008

But I thought...

that 'covert' meant, you know, kind of secret. The kind of thing you don't see in the papers, you know?



Be vewy quiet, we're hunting tewwowists.

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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Never mind.



Via Shakespeare's Sister
In a dramatic U-turn, Pakistan government has "apologised" for claiming that former premier Benazir Bhutto died of a skull fracture after hitting the sunroof of her car during a suicide attack.

Caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan has asked the media and people to "forgive and ignore" comments made by his ministry's spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema which were slammed by her Pakistan People's Party as "lies" and led to an uproar at home and abroad.
They meant to say she slipped and her head fell on a bullet.

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

It's terrible, sure…

…but that doesn't make it terrorism.

Benazir Bhutto seemed to be a confounding blend of courage, controversy and corruption, but I think it's more accurate to describe her death as a plain, if plainly tragic, political assassination rather than an act of terrorism. If every act of political violence is labeled terror, then soon the horror behind the label will become diluted, if not invisible.

Trying to fit this into some kind of GWOT framework is dishonest and an insult to the memory of Ms. Bhutto and the very real risks she willingly faced for her country.

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Yep…

My man John
"Compromise and conciliation is the academic theory of change. It just doesn’t work in the real world. Fighting for conviction is the historic reality of change.”
And how 'bout this?
Edwards was the only candidate to speak with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf today.

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Saturday, November 03, 2007

Duty calls…

…if you can call a day involving beer, burgers and football 'duty'. Sadly I pour, not drink the beer, and cook, not eat the burgers, but the football's on a big screen. It's something.

Meanwhile, Pakistan scares the hell out of me.

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