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20:00 GMT. SkyNews reporters in Konduz are sticking to the story and have uncovered additional details. It is amazing to me how slow the other major media outlets have been at picking up this story! I was just watching CNN and not so much as a whiff of it. For sure, it is the blogs such as this that have run it first on the Internet.
For three nights the Antonov transport aircraft landed at Konduz between US airstrikes (which were said to have been occurring at night at predictable intervals), at around 02:00 am each night. This was attempted again last night but as Northern Alliance forward combat elements had worked their way to the very edge of the airstrip, it was driven off by ground fire and did not land.
It would seem that some Al Qaeda fighters have indeed pulled off a ‘great escape’. A small comfort may be gained from the knowledge that if the Antonov came back again last night unsuccessfully then there still must be Al Qaeda people on the ground who did not make it out on the last flight.
Clearly someone on our side has well and truly dropped the ball for this to have happened. Whilst Al Qaeda may be our loathsome enemies, one can still be struck by the sheer audacity of what they seem to have pulled off. We underestimate these guys at our peril.
Whilst I am only speculating now, my guess is that it was the same aircraft each night (I mean, just how many large Antonov transport aircraft can Al Qaeda have access to?). The fact it came back four times suggests that not only were we not shooting their airlift down but the pilot must have ice water for blood. Landing on an unlit crater pocked airstrip at night, within range of Northern Alliance guns, through a sky ‘owned’ by USN F-18 Hornets? Not a job I would have cared to apply for.
It seems I am getting my wish and I am not the least upset about it. The Mazar-e-Sharif prisoner uprising appears to be accomplishing the best we could hope for. According to an article in Fox News:
Alim Razim, an adviser to Gen. Dostum, said 40 Northern Alliance troops were killed in the fighting. He added that any prisoners still alive wouldn’t be for long.
“Those who are left over will be dead,” he said. “None of them can escape.”
This avoids the messy problem of sorting, trying and executing them: an exercise that would almost certainly lead to freedom for many trained villains. It is much to our advantage they have opted to let Allah do the sorting for us.
I’m still hoping for a futile last stand in Kunduz, followed by Marine Mayhem in Kandahar. I’ll hold judgement until there is confirmation of the Antonov. Even if true, there is nothing to say those aircraft aren’t piles of smouldering wreckage in various remote valleys. Our fighter jocks haven’t had near enough air-to-air practice this last month or two.
It’s only fair.
16:15 GMT. A SkyNews reporter was told by one of Northern Alliance General Doud’s forward battlegroup commanders that as his forces rolled into Konduz this morning, they were surprised by the lack of hardcore Al Qaeda fighters. They then discovered from locals that for the last two nights, large Antonov transport aircraft have been landing at the airstrip in the isolated Taliban pocket and airlifting out the trapped foreign Al Qaeda fighters, along with their weapons, flying them to safety under the very noses of the Northern Alliance and Americans.
If this report is true,and the hardcore of Al Qaeda personnel in Konduz have slipped away to points unknown, it is a major setback for the ‘war against terrorism’.
The new developments in the war against Taliban/Al Qaeda could well be the end game, not of the war against global terrorism, but of the first stage of that war. In some ways, the ‘Afghan Interlude’ might actually be the easiest part (a few weeks ago I never thought I would be writing that remark). At least we have a relatively clearly defined enemy in Al Qaeda and their Taliban patrons.
There is still some hard fighting and dirty politicking to be done before Afghanistan is ‘finished’ but I suspect that once the appetizer is well and truly digested, it will be time for the main course: Iraq
Hi Saddam, Condaleeza here. Did you think we had forgotten that Mohammed Atta met with the station chief of Iraqi Intelligence in Prague right before heading off to the USA?
A Christmas Song Since it is that time of the year, I thought to set my keyboard to bits to bring forth some cheering thoughts for the Holiday Season and the New Year. Cheerful that is, for those of us who are not living in caves…
al Qaeda roasting on a mountain road
Rangers shooting off their toes
Broadside blasts coming down through the air
And Taliban in body bags
Everybody knows a JDAM and a laser light
Help to make the bunker bright
Tiny bombs blowing shards all around
Will make it hard to sleep tonight
They know that Sam is on his way
He’s loaded lots of bombs and bullets
On his planes
And the al Qaeda boys
are gonna die and find out
Houris really think they were dumb
And so I’m offering this simple phrase
to all the ones who want us dead
Although it’s been said many times
Many ways: Dear Osama
Fuck You
03:15 in the morning GMT. First reports are coming in on satellite and cable channels of a major airmobile helicopter insertion at an airfield near Kandahar by over 1000 US Marines, followed by artillery and other heavy equipment being brought by C-130 Hercules transports. This is clearly not just a raid.
Semper Fi. Godspeed to you all, gentlemen.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
– Herbert Spencer
Whilst I understand what Dale Amon is saying and largely agree that the American public will be far more resolute now than has been the case since the Vietnam War, I think you should not underestimate the capacity of George Bush’s political enemies to make mischief.
If you think the likes of Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, Charles Schumer et al. are going to stand resolutely by the President if large numbers of body-bags start coming home, then I think you vastly overestimate their attachment to the interest of American society as opposed to their own narrow political interests. What is more, there are large sections of the US media who will do their damnedest to undermine the Republican Party the moment they no longer think it will be commercial suicide to be seen as ‘unpatriotic’.
For all its many and varied flaws, the British media and the elements of the body politic that actually matter are wired rather differently. That is the reason I made those remarks in my earlier article.
Unlike many of the more inbred nitwits in the British media (i.e. the Daily Mail), I do not subscribe to the idea that all the US military’s special forces all have two left feet and that the United States will immediately recoil with horror at the first sight of American blood. I have lived in the USA on many ocassions and have met enough people in the SpecOps community that I know otherwise. I agree with you that Al Qaeda did a very good job of delivering aversion therapy to the US public regarding casualties. But do not underestimate the vipers within when things start to get messy. They will play the ‘bring the boys back home card’ the instant they they think can safely do so. Perhaps I am wrong about them, but I suspect otherwise.
For those who have been following the ghastly career of Bert as he spreads evil, fear, despair and bizarre haircuts across the face of the globe, here is proof that there is no blow too low for this once loved character gone bad.
Read the full horror of Bert’s treason for yourself.
Perry de Havilland raised a point that:
Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties
Which is only true within a certain context. Americans don’t really much care to go off somewhere and die for their foreign policy. That is absolutely true. But Americans in defense of America are quite capable of sustaining terrible punishment without flinching. A documentary “The Battle of Midway” aired on the BBC last night and shows the levels of courage of our recruits and the levels of carnage that the home front will endure when we’re really pissed off.
It’s that damn libertarian streak in the country. We just won’t go marching off to die just because some damn fool has a flag and wants a parade.
That is al Qaeda’s mistake. They successfully moved their issues from the foreign policy arena (ho hum) to the personal. We took 9000 casualties (notice that no one in the media is giving casualties in the usual way, total dead and wounded?) in a matter of hours. I think you have to go back to Gettysburg to get numbers like this in a single day. They got our attention alright, but not in quite the way they had hoped for.
With 9000 casualties on our own territory, a few thousand more won’t phase us. We’re even mentally prepared for the possibility they might kill another 100,000 of us with a dirty little nuke. That would be a very bad idea on their part because then we’d REALLY be pissed off. It is not in the best interests of anyone on this planet for us to get that ticked off.
So no. We aren’t afraid of casualties when we are fighting for ourselves and for our right to live our own way in our own place. Those who have made the Japanese mistake are in for a severe lesson. When riled as a people, we are without a doubt the meanest, nastiest, hardest-assed sons of bitches on the planet, bar none.
I’ve been a Belfast resident for over a decade, long enough to be familiar with the sounds of mortar bombs, thousand pound fertilizer based explosions, gunfire… and walking in funeral processions. So I know about war zones, although I would be the first to admit that I missed the worst of it by far. I am an American ex-pat, not so much because I left the USA as that I came to Ireland. In the decade plus that I have lived here, it has become my home. But on September 11, 2001 I could not ignore the fact that my people were attacked and slaughtered by madmen. The killing rage I felt was of a depth that I’m sure was a bit difficult for some around me to fathom. It was distant news to them.
The United States is big. It’s just so mind boggling big you can’t imagine… but at the same time it’s a small town. People travel widely; they don’t stay put so the interconnection of people from one coast to the other is extensive. Probably very few people in the country did not at one point or another entwine their lives with one of our war dead. For myself, the closest I am aware of (so far) are some alumni from my University, one of which I probably knew in my college days: Carnegie-Mellon University was and is a small world.
I grew up in a small town named Coraopolis just outside of Pittsburgh; I studied in Pittsburgh and I was involved in technology startups there before going to Ireland. I often travelled to Washington to lobby for the space program. I lived in Burke, Virginia for the better part of a year while on a joint project with Computer Sciences Corporation at an office just inside the DC beltway. My current companies largest customer, prior to the dotCrash, was in Manhattan. I spent nearly half of my time between 1997 and 2000 there and usually lived in the Lower East Side. I froze my behind off in Time Square for the New Year 2000 celebration. I joked with others about the manhole covers in Times Square being welded shut.
I know Somerset. I had friends out that way. I went to school with people from there. I skied up at Seven Springs every chance I could get.
I know Arlington. I drove by the Pentagon and across the bridge into DC night and day; I worked there, I played there, I had friends who worked for the DOD and in the Pentagon. I drove by it as recently as March because my other major customer is just down the road in Alexandria.
I know Lower Manhattan. I lived there. I sometimes watched the lines of aircraft in the landing pattern for La Guardia coming up from the South past the Twin Towers at dusk while I sat in my flat on Rivington and read after work. Or used the always visible towers to navigate my way home on foot after a night out in a newly discovered pub. My business partner and I walked around the World Trade Center just this last March on the way back from a business trip to Washington DC, before we caught a taxi to the airport for our flight home to Belfast. I was part of the tech staff on an internet broadcast from the Trade Center for the Western Governors University kickoff. I hauled racks of electronic gear in through the basement world of the WTC.
I know the places. I know the people. It wasn’t distant news. Atta and the other war criminals didn’t strike at some distant unknown place. They didn’t strike at my government. They struck at me and mine.
That is why I want the al Qaeda dead. All of them. Their excuses and complaints are of no interest: my heart is “hardened like a stone and my ears are deaf” to them. I wish them hunted down like the animals that they are, hunted as the Jews have hunted and hounded the Nazi monsters, hunted even when they become feeble dying old men. I will never forgive and I will never forget. An image of 5000 of my own people dying before my eyes on a video screen is seared into my soul and that of 280,000,000 other very ordinary americans. Our government has no choice in the matter. It will comply with our will or else we’ll elect one that will. It is that simple.
Our anger is deep and wide and very, very cold. We will give no quarter. We feel no mercy. We don’t want their surrender, we want them dead. To the last man. Dead.
…it is much, much worse.
Thomas M. Sipos writes from experience. He is an American attorney who has seen it all from the inside. His exposé article How to Make Money in Soft Tissue Injury makes compulsive reading. It is written in a style that rather reminds me of a less stoned version of Hunter S. Thompson: brutally cynical with an air of detached surrealism.
Highly recommended.
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