(13)

... this guy needs to buy a cat and take some well deserved 'chill time' for, oh, the rest of his life maybe?

"So I got down with my back to the grenade and used my body as a shield. It was a case of either having four of us as fatalities or badly wounded - or one. I brought my legs up to my chest in the brace position and waited for the explosion."

The short version: he set off a booby-trap (the old tripwire/grenade shtick) in the middle of his patrol, jumped on the grenade and his body armour and the stuff in his backpack took the brunt of the explosion. Other than getting blown through the air, this Royal Marine walked away pretty much in one piece. Fortitude and insane luck are a very cool combination.

Let me offer the Lance Corporal a career suggestion: head back to civilian life and get a job doing endorsements for a certain backpack manufacturer.

(43)

Just came across some footage of a Dutch Apache helicopter gunship facilitating some interesting 'inter-civilisation dialogue' with a couple Talibs in Afghanistan.

I find myself watching YouTube more than TV these days.

(135)

The Ministry of Defence is to be commended (not often I write that) for the way they have handled Prince Harry going to Afghanistan. Aware that knowledge of his presence would greatly increase the risk to him and those serving with him (killing a Royal Prince would be a propaganda coup for the Taliban), they hid the fact for ten weeks, which is no small feat in this day and age. Their tactic was to both appeal to reason and to in effect 'buy off' the highly competitive UK media by promising juicy photos of Harry if they kept their collective cakeholes shut whilst he was deployed... quite clever really and it is a credit to the wiser heads amongst the UK press that they could see there was no broader 'public interest' at stake here (quite the opposite in fact).

I am all for the media and new media reporting the news and in particular news that the powers-that-be might be discomforted by. However reporting a wartime operation detail likely to increase the chance particular group of serving soldiers will attacked by the enemy (namely revealing the presence of a political 'high value target' in the war zone) fall way outside acceptable behaviour. Even if you oppose the war, such behaviour suggest you are not so much against the war as actually on the other side. It is at the very least socially despicable and quite frankly giving aid to an enemy in wartime. Unsurprisingly that is something far beyond the ken of a dim bulb like that self-important idiotarian ass Jon Snow.

Matt Drudge and the German Newspapers were not the first to mention where Prince Harry had been deployed, that dubious 'honour' goes to the Australian publication New Idea, who have at least expressed regret that they blew Prince Harry's cover, suggesting they may be guilt of a lack of thought rather than callous disregard for someone's safety in a war zone. The MoD kept quiet when New Idea first broke the story, suggesting they rather sensibly assumed an Australian woman's magazine was probably not high on the reading list of many Muslim fundamentalists and indeed it took over a month for it to get picked up elsewhere. But the person who really moved this into wider circulation and got the story picked up globally was Matt Drudge. Although the Berliner Kurier and Bild also reported this, Drudge was at some point claiming this as an 'exclusive' and claiming the 'credit' for himself, so I will take him at his word and call him an honourless shit in that case.

(13)

A wonderful snippet from a BBC radio reporter (Ed Stourton) in Afghanistan for the Today programme: A new bus-stop has been built in Lashikar Gah as part of the 'reconstruction' effort.

The report does not say whether it is a replacement for a pre-war bus-stop. Somehow I doubt it. It is very well-equipped, having its own mosque and a pharmacy, as waiting times "can be rather long".

An odd approach. In most of the world a bus-stop is a place where buses happen to stop. Of course bus-stops, like ports and railway stations all round the world provide opportunities for traders, places of worship, bars and cafes and so forth, but they seldom have them built in. Bus companies and their passengers are primarily interested in selling and buying travel. The pause at the roadside to move from foot to wheel, wheel to foot, refuel, refresh, is just procedural necessity.

Even in the first world, where there are some fabulous bus stations and garages, mostly this is an utilitarian afterthought, contingently well-designed. Everywhere (I thought) the buses are the transport network, not the stops. You have a shed for the buses at the end of the route, and signs to show where the buses are supposed to stop. Many places they do without the shed, not least because the buses are always on the move maximising their passenger-, luggage- and livestock- miles.

But a government bus-stop is built to different, higher, standards. A throwaway line at the end of the report reveals just how long those waiting times are: "There are no buses yet."

(34)

An article about the exploits of the Royal Anglian Regiment reminds us that the fighting in Afghanistan has been very sharp indeed: over six months the Royal Anglians suffered one hundred and forty four casualties (nine killed and one hundred and thirty five wounded), in return for one thousand Taliban killed (which according to the traditional 5:1 ratio which would probably be more accurate for the technologically unsophisticated Taliban, implies at least a further five thousand wounded).

Yet I cannot escape the feeling that the quality of the politics has gone a long way to undermining the quality of the military efforts. Why oh why are we trying to stop people in that poor country from growing the cash crop they have grown since time immemorial and thereby making enemies of people who just want to make money? And as paying people to not plant opium is a demonstrable waste of time, if the governments of the west are so keen to stop opium ending up on the streets of western cities, why not take the vast ocean of money wasted on odious subsidies to affluent western farmers in Europe and the USA, and instead just buy whatever opium the Afghan farmers can grow? At a stroke the Afghan economy is improved in the short term, distorting subsidies removed from western economies and Afghan farmers and warlords alike given a very good reason to maintain good relations with their western patrons (i.e. addict them to subsidies).

(54)

By caving into the demands by the Taliban to get their troops out of Afghanistan in return for the return of South Korean hostages, the Korean government simply entourages more of the same tactic. Clearly the US seriously erred accepting military 'assistance' from Korea given that the South Korean government are not just utterly craven, they seem to have no concept of cause and effect. The only way to demotivate hostage taking is to respond in the opposite manner to what is being demanded.

If I was the US government I would be making a simultaneous complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea, timed to coincide with the departure of Koreans forces from Afghanistan. Quite why a wealthy nation like South Korea requires US forces to keep its psychopathic neighbour at bay is unclear anyway. Perhaps this incident will shake loose any residual attachment to the value of subsidising South Korea's defences in the minds of US taxpayers and politicians. There are parts of the world that it may well suit the US to defend but surely South Korea is more that wealthy enough to look after itself given how primitive North Korea is.

(12)

I would like to emphasise that we by no means strive to seize full power and to dominate the Afghan policy. Our aim is not to have the upper hand in Afghanistan. No at all! What we struggle for is something else: there should be Afghanistan where every Afghan finds himself or herself - irrespective of sex - happy. I am deeply convinced that this can only be ensured by democracy and a democratically elected government, based on consensus. It is only then that we can indeed solve a number of problems that have been besetting Afghan people. The true solution lies only in such a political and social situation and only with such a type of administration when all the tribes, all the ethnic groups and all people will see themselves fairly represented.

- Ahmed Shah Masoud, the 'Lion of the Panjshir', one of the greatest guerilla leaders and in my view the most admirable one since the American Revolution, from an interview shortly before his assassination by Islamofascists.

(19)

There seems no end to the absurdity of US planners as to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan... surely the way to victory in all military conflicts is the unswerving pursuit of a single core objective (in this case the destruction of the Taliban and its power base) with ruthlessness and focus.

Yet what do we see? A demented conflation of the entirely justified war against the sponsors of the 9/11 attack on New York and Arlington, with the preposterous 'war on drugs'. At a stroke, attacking the income of Afghan farmers and warlords alike thereby more or less guaranteeing that these people will make common cause with the Taliban on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

(10)

There is an excellent bit of reportage in The Guardian by James Meek, covering the experiences of British troops in Southern Afghanistan that gives a good troop's eye view of things.

(24)

UK military authorities are claiming the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan has been 'tactically defeated', which can mean quite a variety of different things. Certainly the accounts of what has been going on there indicate bloody hard fighting down to bayonet range on occasion and given the lack of resources at their disposal, any significant victory against the casualty insensitive Taliban reflects rather well on the British Army.

Now if only the UK government would get rid of some of the many utterly pointless government departments, say for starters the Department of Trade and Industry and the truly preposterous Department of Culture, Media and Sport), we could spend more on the military and still reduce the level of taxation. Well, one can wish...

(29)

Last year I suggesting it was time to think about pulling out of Afghanistan as one has to balance the positive effects of Western forces on the security situation with the negative effects on Afghan opinion of having foreign troops there for so long that they start looking like occupiers rather than allies.

However the Taliban has shown that it is not quite ready to lay down and die, as the various reports over the last few days have demonstrated the fighting is far from over. Nevertheless there is no real prospect for a Taliban return to power and in most of the country the security situation seems tolerable.

And yet... I worry what the actual objectives are in Washington and London. If the main strategic goal is to produce a stable Afghanistan (by local standards) in which the Taliban has no significant chance of being more than a minor insurgent irritant, then that is almost certainly an objective well within reach. That will leave the bulk of the country divided up between sundry (narco-)warlords and the 'government' of Hamid Karzai (or the 'Mayor of Kabul' as many call him), which in Afghanistan seems to be the natural order of things and, most importantly from a western view point, is hostile to the Taliban.

But if the objective really is a unitary nation-state run from Kabul, with a strong central government capable and willing to eradicate Afghanistan's large drug cash-crop economy, then the planners in the Pentagon and Whitehall are, to put it bluntly, out of their collective geo-strategic minds. To recap the obvious, unlike Iraq which was invaded by large US/UK forces without any local allied elements, Afghanistan was largely 'liberated' by an alliance of Afghan warlords with massive US air support and an important but numerically small force of US/UK/Canadian/Australian spec ops and light infantry units... in other words the great majority of the manpower to overthrow the Taliban was provided by the same warlords who now run most of the country in loose feudal vassalage to Kabul.

Whilst Afghanistan is hardly a human rights paradise (the Abdul Rahman apostasy case comes to mind), it is still a great deal better off than it was under the Taliban. Provided the western objectives are not really 'nation building' but simple 'tyranny wrecking', I see no reason why this cannot all end up going down in history as a highly successful episode just so long as the dementing influence of the unwinnable 'war against drugs' is not allowed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

(26)

I must concede that I was pessimistic regarding the outcome of the Abdul Rahman apostasy case. The row over the Muslim-turned-Christian saw international pressure brought down upon the head of Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan. A difficult job; he is wedged between the expectations of Afghanistan's overseas backers and the desires of a relatively conservative Muslim society - the same fractured society who the oft-described "mayor of Kabul" needs to establish authority over if the Afghani nation-building project is to be successful.

I rather suspected that the latter imperative would win out and Abdul Rahman would face a barbaric and outrageous death at the hands of Islamic zealots. This fate may well befall him if he is allowed to leave the relative security of a solitary confinement cell. However, for the time being it now appears likely that he will be freed. If this is the case, it is indeed wonderful news. It means that someone, somewhere has almost certainly had their arm twisted, and the most likely culprit hails from the executive office of Afghanistan. This could represent a weakening of Sharia's weighty influence on the legal system in Afghanistan. Government meddling in the courts is rightfully deplored by friends of inalienable human rights, rule of law, due process and the separation of powers. It is a reflection of just how bad things are in Afghanistan when covert government intervention in the legal system represents a step forward. Regardless, this is an event to inspire a glimmer of optimism.

(125)

This story seems to be making the rounds...

The US military said Wednesday it was investigating a report carried on an Australian television network that claimed American soldiers in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters and then used the action to taunt other Islamic militants

...and my response is why oh why is this news? Just to state the obvious, the Taliban bodies in question were dead prior to being burned, so who cares?

I guess is that if they had not burned those bodies, the same people making a big deal of this would be penning articles with the title:

US forces start epidemic in Afghanistan!

As for this being an 'affront to Islam', if the object was to 'smoke out' the enemy by enraging them, again... so what? The job of US forces is to KILL members of the Taliban and I fail to see why it is unacceptable to outrage their sensibilities and perhaps even hurt their feeling prior to punching them full of 5.56mm holes.

(56)

The Taliban is history and Al Qaeda is a mere shadow of its former self, so the question is why are US (and UK) forces still in effective control of Afghanistan? The latest example of appalling behaviour by US interrogators (who appear to have tortured a taxi cab driver to death at Bagram for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is starting to turn local opinion against the over-mightly US presence. Not only do the people responsible need to be suitably called to account a good way up the chain of command, clearly there are some serious institutional problems in sections of the US military that need to be stamped on pretty harshly.

Given Afghanistan's history, the fact locals have reacted so well to the US presence for this long is remarkable (and of course understandable considering we enabled the 'Northern Alliance' to destroy the Taliban), but staying for much longer is counter-productive. There is no need to kill every single Taliban/Al Qaeda supporter in Afghanistan (or Pakistan come to that) as the infrastructure that supported the September 11th attacks has been well and truly smashed.

Also, the preposterous attempts to curb narcotics production is both utterly doomed to fail and hugely counter productive in that messing with people's lucrative livelihoods is just about the surest way to guarantee armed opposition to the allied presence in that part of the world. Sure, in an ideal world we would have no heroin and no armed factions willing to tolerate/support Islamic terrorists but in the real world it is likely to be a choice between one or the other. So please, enough with the preposterous obsession with narcotics! If the US and UK states cannot stop tonnes of the stuff coming into their own countries every year, what chance do you think they have of doing so in far off Afghanistan? The effort will of course fail dismally just as it has failed in Columbia but with the extra added 'goodness' of encouraging resistance to the pro-Western regime on Kabul. Sheesh.

By all means leave a couple thousand 'liaison'/training teams behind to bolster the Karzai regime but unlike the clearly unfinished business in Iraq, it is time to declare victory and get the hell out.

Job done. Let's go home.

(3)

There is an interesting story in the Telegraph about a teenage Afghan arrested as a Taliban supporter and held in Guantanamo Bay. Although he was none too happy about being taken away from his parents, rather surprisingly he claims that he had a good time in the US military prison!

In a first interview with any of the three juveniles held by the US at Guantanamo Bay base, Mohammed said: "They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons." Mohammed, an unemployed Afghan farmer, found the surroundings in Cuba at first baffling. After he settled in, however, he was left to enjoy stimulating school work, good food and prayer.

What a funny old world.

(82)

James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).

James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.

Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:

I can’t help but come back to the central theme these edits imply: we should have left Iraq alone. We should have left this charnel house stand. We should have bought a wad of nice French cotton to shove in our ears so the buzz of the flies over the graves didn’t distract us from the important business of deciding whether Syria or China should have the rotating observer-status seat in the Oil-for-Palaces program. Afghanistan, well, that’s understandable, in a way; we were mad. We lashed out. But we should have stopped there, and let the UN deploy its extra-strong Frown Beams against the Iraqi ambassador in the hopes that Saddam would reduce the money he gave to Palestinian suicide bombers down to five grand. Five grand! Hell, that hardly covers the parking tickets your average ambassador owes to the city of New York; who’d blow themselves up for that?

Would the editorialists of the nation be happier if Saddam was still cutting checks to people who blew up not just our allies, but our own citizens? I’d like an answer. Please. Essay question: “Families of terrorists who blow up men, women and children, some of whom are Americans, no longer receive money from Saddam, because Saddam no longer rules Iraq. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Explain.”

The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.

Lileks' piece fits nicely with Thomas Friedman's op-ed in the New York Times, in which he reaches the reluctant conclusion that France is not our friend, is not our ally, but is instead acting as our enemy.

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

Now, I tend to have a different view of events than Friedman (France's obstruction at the UN did not prevent a "real ultimatum" from being put to Saddam; that had already occurred), but his larger point is, I think, sound.

Wars, among their many, many faults, do have this virtue: they are enormously clarifying. This war is revealing who places other causes, whether transnational progressivism, anti-Americanism, narrow political self-interest, or even the preservation of their age-old view of themselves and the world, above the cause of winning this war.

The stakes are very large. The immediate stakes are, of course, the extermination of the current terror network before it gets its hands on WMD. Rest assured that, without this war, the Islamists would obtain these weapons - they fervently desired them, had the money to obtain them, and had close ties to governments that have them and are seeking more. In the corrupt cesspool of Middle Eastern politics, it was only a matter of time.

The larger stakes are, of course, changing the "root causes" of Islamist terror. The so-called "neo-con" strategy being pursued by the US addresses the root causes of terror by identifying the prevailing corruption, oppression, theocracy, tyranny, poverty, and ignorance in the Mideast as the root causes, and attacking those root causes at the source - the governments of the Mideast. Without some change in the current cast of characters, no improvement in the Mideast will be possible and Islamist terror will continue to be with us. Regime change throughout the Mideast is a necessay, but not sufficient, condition for the end of the Islamist terror networks.

Opponents of the war bear the burden of either demonstrating that the terror network and its state sponsors are no threat to the West (palpably impossible after 9/11), or coming up with a viable alternative strategy for triggering regime change throughout the Mideast. I await such an alternative strategy.

Not every issue has to be seen through the prism of the terror war, but those who address themselves to the war, either as diplomats, heads of state, or pundits, need to understand that their actions will aid one side or the other, and need to think very hard about which side they want to see as the victor and whether they are helping, or hurting, whoever it is that they want to win.

(56)

The second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is as good a time as any to take quick stock of progress in World War IV:

(1) Afghanistan. The Allies (America and its ad hoc coalition) have driven the Taliban from power and deprived the Islamic terror network of one of its primary bases. The Islamists still in Afghanistan are now on the defensive, and are focussing, apparently, on trying to regain control of one of the world's poorest countries, rather than exporting their theology to other countries. Despite ongoing difficulties, this is a clear win for the West because Afghanistan is less of a threat now than it used to be.

(2) Iraq. Pretty much exactly the same analysis applies in Iraq. The Baathists are no longer funding any part of the Islamist terror network, and are no longer a potential source of WMD for the islamists. Based on current information, I would say that this is also a clear win for the West because Iraq is less of a threat now than it used to be. Ultimately, of course, Iraq still has miles to go, etc., but it certainly does not seem to be on course to be a net exporter of terror. Right now it is a net importer of terrorists, and that is fine be me - better to kill them in Iraq than in Iowa.

(3) International Islamist terror network. Clearly on the defensive and less capable than it was before 9/11. Many of its leaders or members are dead, in hiding and emasculated, or in prison. Many of its resources, including terrorist havens, are gone. Recent attacks have been directed, not against Western targets, but against Middle Eastern and South Pacific ones. Offhand, I can't think of any theaters where radical Islamism is stronger now than it was before 9/11.

(4) Middle East. So far, it is hard to say that the Islamists have gained any ground even in the Middle East. Syria is going multi-party and has made some, admittedly not terribly significant, stand-downs in Lebanon. Arafat is isolated and his days certainly seem numbered. The Saudis have executed a number of their princes that had ties to al Qaeda, and seem to be going after al Qaeda with a little more credibility since it broke its promise not to operate in Saudi Arabia. Lots of fulminating and bitching about the Great Satan everywhere, of course, but that isn't new and doesn't really count on the debit side of the ledger. It is still early days, of course, but all told, I would say that the Middle East is certainly no more hostile to the US than it was, and in significant ways is less dangerous, if no more friendly, than it was.

(5) Diplomacy. The common complaint is that the US has sacrificed or damaged many good relationships in order to pursue its war. I think that this is complaint is overstated, at best. Rather, World War IV has tested relationships and revealed which of them were shallow and weak.

I am willing, on the whole, to say that the diplomatic front has been a break-even for the US. On the one hand, many erstwhile "allies" are more vocal in their criticism of us, and possibly even have withheld substantive aid that they might have offered a different diplomatic team. On the other, the UN has permanently devalued, the true colors of the transnational progressives have been revealed, and many of the other impediments to a new and much more functional international order have been weakened or cleared away.

(6) Homeland security. Well, we Americans may or may not be marginally safer from terrorist attacks on our own soil than we were before 9/11. Its hard to say; in spite of the obvious idiocy of most of the high-profile homeland security measures, we haven't had a terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Measured against the baseline of 9/10/01, I think it is hard to say that we are much safer than we were. Measured against where we should be two years on, I would say that homeland security is a major disappointment.

But the war won't be won or lost based on America's homeland security. That is purely a damage control issue, because no matter how good the homeland security is, we will surely lose the war if we do not succeed with our "forward defense" of draining the Islamist swamps where terrorists breed.

The schwerpunkt of America's offensive is in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both of those campaigns were crushing military and strategic victories for the US, victories that have not (yet) been frittered away. They may not turn into little Swedens, but there is really very little chance that either nation will return to being a terrorist haven bent on exporting mass murder to its enemies. That counts as victory in my book.

At this point in history, the Islamists cannot defeat America, but America can certainly lose the war through loss of will and resolution. So far, the will is there.

(23)

My first reaction to this story was "Aha! Another reason to despise the UN and its tranzi fellow travellers! As if I needed one." And indeed, there is plenty to despise in this story. It turns out that a thriving market in endangered animal skins has sprung up in Afghanistan to serve the demands of the UN and NGO personnel assigned there.

When I asked him if he had any coats made of snow leopard skin, he said no. But the reason was far from reassuring - he had sold out.

They have become so expensive for us - $500. Too expensive for Afghans but foreigners can buy them," he said.

We have asked most of the foreigners not to buy these things and if there is not a market from the foreigners the Afghan people probably don't need it," [Afghan Environment Minister Yousef Nouristani] says.

"It's the market created by the foreigners - particularly those who are working with the UN or other NGOs."

The tooth-grinding hypocrisy of UN and NGO personnel flouting international law banning the trade in these skins is bad enough. The fact that most tranzis are also pious "movement" environmentalists is merely salt in the wound.

However, for dedicated libertarians, it raises one of the perennial dilemmas: what to do with wild animals? Laws restricting the harvesting and sale of wild animal skins, organs, meat, and whatnot would appear to run afoul of libertarian principles espousing free trade and free markets, and indeed the Afghan government is trying to reach the benchmark for protection of these animals set by, gulp, the Taliban.

The dilemma is sharpened in Afghanistan because the dire poverty of many people there puts their interests in direct conflict with protection of endangered species.

Snow leopards are most commonly found in north-eastern Afghanistan in an area known as the Wakhan.

I spoke to Ali Azimi, the author of a report on Afghanistan's environmental problems, who has just returned from a 10-day trip to the area.

"I was struck by the abject poverty of the people," he said. "Most can barely afford to have one meal a day.

"And the meal usually consists of a type of grass that grows in the Wakhan six months of the year. Six months it is snowbound.

"What they eat is what has been collected over the summer months - and it is a desperate situation for them. So they're facing poverty and starvation in the Wakhan."

This poverty and starvation is forcing people to hunt animals that would normally be the prey of the snow leopards - and the thousands of dollars that some people are prepared to pay for their skins is encouraging poachers to hunt these rare and beautiful creatures.

The long-term solution to these environmental issues is, of course, to raise the level of income and wealth in Afghanistan so that no one is forced to compete with wild animals for survival, and so that the "luxury good" of protected lands and species becomes affordable. In the shorter run (and in the long run as well) it is difficult to see how wild lands and, especially, wild animals can be protected from the tragedy of the commons without some form of state intervention, whether it is via market regulation outlawing the trade in animal products, the purchase and "protection" of lands, the regulation of hunting activity, or some variant or combination of all three.

Thanks to the inevitable and ubiquitous Instapundit for the first link to this story. Thanks also to (this hurts, folks) the BBC for originating the story.

(11)

The ubiquitous Instapundit, who is accumulating a stable of international correspondents, posts a missive from Afghanistan that is sure to remind you of why you loathe transnational progressives, their NGO tools, and all associated parasites, hangers-on, and do gooders. A juicy bit, to whet your appetite:

It's not all monotonous or pointless in Kabul; at one French NGO housed in a stunning antique-laden chalet, I’ve devoured a seven-course meal prepared by a 4 star chef. Then there's always the sumptuous UN House, where one can take a dip, mingle poolside among scandalous bikinis and dowse dehydration with inspired cocktails fashioned by our languid Euro masters. Unfortunately, since "American UN employee" is an oxymoron, our one attempt to storm the formidable barricades is a spectacular failure. We're rudely turned away, despite flashing $20 bills to the Afghan UN security. My companion, a fierce Pushtoon-American licensed to pack a very visible Glock 19, glances back at the sunbathers as we're escorted out: "We've paid for all this with our taxes, you bastards!"

One has to shake one's head at the pistol-packing Pushtoon's naivete; since when has the fact that a taxpayer funded something ever triggered appropriate feelings of gratitude and respect from our betters in government 'service'?

It's not quite MASH but it's blogging from the war zone. Thanks to Instapundit for this one.

Staff SargentSanchez appears to be almost as heavily armed as our own Perry de Havilland!

Canada is treating its soldiers disgracefully. The fighting in Afghanistan is not a gentlemen's game between sportsmen, it is a fight to the death with desperate terrorists. If some dead Al Qaeda/Taliban soldier was posed for a photograph with a cigarette and a placard around his neck saying 'fuck terrorism' then I say so what? It is okay to kill a man, to blow a hole in his body with a 50 cal slug, to shoot him dead, at the behest of your government... but not to disrespect the terrorist supporting son of a bitch's corpse? Ludicrous.

In today's Times, war correspondent Anthony Loyd reports on the current counter-insurgency sweep through an 'undisclosed' valley in Afghanistan by British Royal Marines of the 45 Commando battlegroup, called Operation Ptarmigan.

He also moans at some length that [emphasis added]:

Whilst promising greater detail on the operation after it has finished, the coalition's information policy has been a mixture of assumption and contempt. Morning press briefings at Bagram begin with a US officer stating how many days have passed since the September 11 attacks. He then gives the name and family details of one attack victim. A short statement follows and relevant questions by journalists are quashed as glibly as they are by Pentagon spokesmen in Washington with the words: "I won't answer that."

The justification for this silence is "operational security concerns". In reality it appears that the US and Britain are using the ferocity of the September 11 attacks as carte blanche to be all but unaccountable to press and public.
[...]
This policy will probably work admirably until official silence is revealed to have hidden an unpleasant truth.

So he thinks the US and British military are accountable to the press? Interesting concept. Now Tony Loyd is actually a reasonable reporter (he is certainly a million miles from the ludicrous Bob Fisk and his ilk), but such petulant foot stamping on his part is unbecoming. The newspapers have been roasting the US for allowing Al Qaeda and ex-Taliban forces to slip away, and for failing to achieve operational surprise during Operation Anaconda... and now they are going to roast the coalition military for taking operational security seriously?

Here is an interesting, much footnoted and rather less upbeat take on Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by Brendan O'Neill on Sp!ked, a site I find useful and maddening in equal measure.

There is also an interesting article (also by O'Neill) about the domestic political mess that the hapless Karzai is presiding over called When nation-building destroys. However this last article rather misses a major point: firstly regardless of the occasional ill-advised propaganda blurb by the Americans, they are not there to 'nation build' other than en passant... they are there to kill the people responsible for September 11^th. If Afghans insist on killing each other, that is primarily a problem for the Afghans. However it does highlight the madness of getting too deeply involved in Afghanistan's domestic woes as both Dale Amon and I pointed out quite some time ago.

I've just been perusing the stats in a CNN poll of Americans taken recently and thought this line is worth sharing:

Q23: Now I'd like to ask you a few questions about the U.S. response to the September 11th attacks. Do you approve or disapprove of the military attacks led by the United States against targets in Afghanistan?
               Total     Rep    Dem    Ind            Feb02a
Approve      88%    95%   87%    81%           87%
Disapprove    9%     2%   11%    14%            85%
DK/NA          3%     3%    2%      5%              5%

This is perhaps one of the few times in my life I've found myself in agreement with 9 out of 10 people, although I'd like to at least think I agree more strongly than most.

I sometimes find myself agreeing with Steven Den Beste's articles but sorry Steven, this is one of the dumbest pieces you have written in a while.

When he is right, he is sometimes very right and when he is wrong, he does tend to descend into crude history-by-Hollywood-stereotype. The picture he displays of two Royal Marines sparing with boxing gloves and an automatic weapon toting US soldier in the background is indeed symbolic... of the fact Steven does not know the slightest thing about modern British attitudes to war, British military culture or British military history.

The symbolism isn't fair to the two Europeans [by which the 'Canadian' Den Beste means British] in the picture. They are members of the Royal Marines who just arrived there, and if they were to go into real combat they'd be armed similar to how the American is. But in a larger sense, it seems to epitomize the difference now in approaches that Europe and the United States want to take to the war: Europe is trying to fight it according to Marquis of Queensbury rules (i.e. "International law", UN resolutions, and all the rest) because honor is the most important thing; the United States, on the other hand, is fighting to win.

People would think Britain had not won a war in the last 100 years if they got their history by reading what Steven writes, let alone in 1982. The Germans, Austrians, Argentines, Malays, Indonesians, Kenyans, Irish, Italians, French, Turks, Greeks, Japanese, Afghans etc. etc. etc. probably have a rather different take on British military culture. There is a reason Britain won in Malaya during The Emergency and the US lost in Vietnam under similar conditions. Marquis of Queensbury? Get real.

Here is a picture I think rather better sums up Britain's 'Red and Green War Machine'

Update:
Note to Steven: Britain, an island off the European coast, may be part of the European Union at the moment, but the EU is not a military alliance in any meaningful way. Any reading of British or European newspapers should make it obvious there is considerable acceptance of the British/European distinction, even by those who lament the fact. Thus your remarks are at best misleading. To describe the British troops in the picture as 'European', given that they are there under British, not 'European' auspices, does rather suggest you think there is no difference between the military or political cultures of mainland Europe and Britain. This is not just incorrect but pretty obviously so.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Academy of Drivelling Idiots is proud to announce its award for Best Writer in a Terrorist-Supporting Role. And the nominations are:

Ted Rall for How We Lost Afghanistan

"The principal goal of this adventure in imperialistic vengeance, it seems obvious, should be to install a friendly government in Kabul. But we're winning neither hearts nor minds among either the commoners or the leadership of the current regime apparent"

Robert Fisk for The Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People

"And then how easy was our failure to recognize the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans or any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber."

John Pilger for Inevitable Ring To the Unimaginable

"Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth"

Susan Sontag for The Disconnect

"The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."

And the winner is.....(rustle, rustle, rustle).....ROBERT FISK

(Whoops, cheers, wild applause)

FISK: Thank you. Thank you. I am not worthy of this award. I am not worthy of being so honoured. For I, too, am guilty. I, too, am an opressor (wipes way tear). Save your awards and your honours for all the hapless victims of global capitalism and American imperialism. They are the real heroes and I accept this award on their behalf. I thank you

(More whoops, cheers, wild applause, standing ovation)

In this report in the Times of India, US reduces reward on Bin Laden, we see the strangest manifestation of the backward bending demand curve I have ever seen!

Update: As a couple people have ask me to simply explain what a 'backward bending demand curve' is, it is a strange and counter intuitive phenomenon in which sometimes as a product gets cheaper, people buy less of it or if a product gets more expensive, they buy more of it. This does not seem to make sense but it does occasionally happen.

Example 1: A high price designer 'name label' dress is offered at a reduced price... still out of reach of the 'woman in the street' buyer. Paradoxically the high end target market buy less of the dresses, presumably because the reduced price indicates it is probably 'last years design' (even if not true, the price is used as the primary source of information by the potential purchaser as to 'what is hot').

Example 2: Soviet made wristwatches, made to uncharacteristically high quality and standards were marketed in Britain in the early 1970's. They were every bit as good as other high quality wristwatches available at the time but were almost half the price. Even though Soviet products were a relative rarity in the UK, British buyers stayed away in droves, presumably taking the view that any watch that cheap had to be complete rubbish. The Soviets were baffled but on advice from a British consultant raised the price to just below the typical UK price and they stared to sell.

Thus, the US is lowering the price on the head on Osama bin Laden in the hope the new level of reward is something rural Afghans can actually relate to in the real world. In each case the specifics are different but price is just a form of information and sometimes if the price of something is unexpectedly high or low, the effects is the opposite of what one might normally expect. That is what I mean by a 'backward bending demand curve'!

Also on reflection, I was thinking of this in terms of the US doing the 'selling' of an outsourced service here (terrorist removal)... but I suppose one could argue that this is a backward bending supply curve: the US is offering money in the hope some impoverished Afghan will 'supply' a dead or bound-hand-and-foot Osama bin Laden

Yes, I know that the UK has been far and away the most 'involved' of the USA's allies in the war against Al Qaeda, with almost the entire Special Air Service (SAS) being deployed in Afghanistan at one point.

But the latest commitment of 1,700 Royal Marine Commandos to a offensively tasked Brigade forming in Afghanistan is a significant step that indicates a much more robust policy of aggressive engagement by Britain.

Some libertarians will grimace that the state is sending men far away to march to the sound of an American drum, but I for one am delighted, for the enemy in question is the enemy of modern civilisation itself. I live in a major metropolitan area that would make a lovely target for a small nuclear weapon and thus am of the opinion that the only good Al Qaeda is a dead Al Qaeda and I do not much care where the men armed and equipped with my tax money have to go to find them. Godspeed Gentlemen.

The Royal Marines, with their specialised arctic and mountain warfare training and equipment, years of extreme weather training in Norway, air mobility and formidable élan make a very high quality addition to the corkscrew and blowtorch warfare that is to come as the remaining cadres of Taliban/Al Qaeda are exterminated.

Over on the excellent blog Flit, Bruce has done a good 'back of the envelop' bombing survey that highlights some interesting facets of 'smart' bombing vs. 'dumb' bombing vs. 'real indiscriminate' bombing (i.e Al Qaeda). The article pointing to Bruce's survey "U.S. Aerial bombing: a statistical summary" provides a simple interpretation of what the numbers mean.

This sort of short but thoughtful factually based commentary really does the blogosphere credit and is an excellent example of high quality original content blogging.

Way back when, I pointed out that DEBKA were making some highly questionable contentions about thousands of Al Qaeda soldiers being airlifted out of Konduz before it fell to the Northern Alliance forces of Generals Daoud Khan and Rashid Dostam. World Net Daily has belatedly picked up on this DEBKA theory.

First of all let me lay my cards on the table and say I think DEBKA are by and large a waste of pixels. Almost nothing they say cannot be deduced from open source data that is also available to anyone with a search engine and a working computer. Their analysis ranges from 'okay' to 'wild conjecture'. What is more, to put it bluntly I am not sure I really trust them or their alleged 'military sources' given the quantity of dubious calls they have made in the past.

Military sources have solved the mystery: The planes belonged to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. Under cover of the Pakistani airlift, 3,000 of the group's fighters were secretly lifted to safety from the besieged towns of Konduz and Khandabad about 15 miles to the south. The double airlift lasted five nights. The planes arriving to ferry Pakistani fighters home were closely shadowed by a phantom airlift extracting al-Qaida personnel.

The rescued Pakistanis were flown to air bases in northwest and central Pakistan. The al-Qaida men were taken long distance to the Persian Gulf emirates, landing, according to Gulf sources, in Abu Dhabi and the Somali town of Baidoa.

My objections to this whole weird scenario remain unchanged from when I first suggested my interpretation of what probably happened in Konduz, which I posted to the Samizdata on November 27^th. This section is relevant and nothing I have read has changed my mind since I wrote it

Likewise I think we can assume no pilot is crazy enough to try to land a large multi-engined jet on an unlit cratered dirt strip at night, so we can safely eliminate any of the large multi-engined Antonov jets.

My guess is that the aircraft in question will turn out to be an Antonov An-26. The Pakistani Airforce operates a single An-26 and it would be perfect for a rough strip landing under less than optimal conditions. My money is on that particular one being the specific aircraft involved in 'The Great Escape'.

DEBKA does not explain where the 'Al Qaeda' air assets came from, how they avoided detection by the USAF/USN and how they managed this feat of night time airmanship with the larger Antonov's than an AN-26 that would be required to get those sort of numbers out of the Konduz pocket. In two other articles on November 28 ^th, I discussed DEBKA's view that it was the Pakistani ISI behind it (and I agreed) but pointed out their numbers did not really add up.

In the very next Samizdata article after that, I pondered the views of Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ, who was saying much the same, only on the basis of sources probably far more reliable th