Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts

April 1, 2011

BHL's War

Stephen Erlanger reports in the NYT that the man who claims, so far without dispute, to have set the Libyan War in motion by talking Sarkozy into it, who talked the American ladies into it, who talked Obama into it, is ... neo-socialist celebrity philosopher adventurer Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Oh, boy ...

Here's an interview from February with Lévy about how awesome he is. And here's Garrison Keillor's 2006 review of Lévy's book on America.

Before starting a war, a President of the United States should have a little checklist of questions to ask his advisers, such as:

What's the goal?
Is that goal worth killing people?
What's the strategy to achieve the goal?
Why do you think that will work?
What's the Plan B?
What's the exit strategy?
And, by the way, just to make sure, this war isn't Bernard-Henri Lévy's idea, is it?


March 31, 2011

Obama's War

Two weeks ago, Barack Obama started America's war with Libya. I can recall my amazement as I typed the title for my blog post: Are we at war with Libya?

As with so much about the President, his big picture reasons for starting Obama's War remain opaque.

Did he do it to flex the muscle of American power in front of a quaking world?

Or, did he do it to tie down the Gulliver of American power by setting the precedent that the terrifying Pentagon is now the errand boy of the United Nations in general and the enlightened Europeans in particular?

Or did he just not know he was sending America to war? Perhaps he has actually believed all the nonsense he has talked about how this isn't a war and, if you don't believe that, well, this isn't America's war?

And thus we come again to the question of who Obama really is: bleeding heart or cold-blooded power-seeker? And what attitude toward American power has Obama inherited (I mean, besides that he should be in charge of American power)?

When George W. Bush decided to finish his father's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein, well, it wasn't very good idea, but at least, from an commonplace understanding of the psychological dynamics of the Bush dynasty, you could see where he was coming from. The younger Bush's view was that his imposing father had wimped out and lost re-election by not taking out Saddam Hussein. 

But on the larger question of the goodness and usefulness of American power, it's clear the two Bonesmen were in agreement (although the elder held a more nuanced view of its limits). The Bushes are from the old hereditary ruling caste, The Good Shepherd good blood, good bone elite.

But, Obama's mother, father, and stepfather were part of such an exotic caste -- the CIA-affiliated international left -- that it's hard for anybody to get a handle on him. And the subjects that fascinate Obama most -- his race and inheritance -- are exactly those that most stultify thinking among almost everybody else.

That a man figured out how to exploit the softheadedness of America's reigning civic religion by making himself "a blank screen" for our fantasies, that he managed to make himself the most powerful man in the world, the man who can start a war on a whim without anybody else having much of an idea what his whims are, remains among the oddest and most under-reported stories of this century.


March 25, 2011

The No-Drive Zone

Obviously, the "No-Fly Zone" in Libya is a bit of a euphemism: it's really the "We Fly, You Die Zone."

What will actually decide the war is the "No-Drive Zone." The linear nature of Libyan geography and the lack of forest makes it fairly easy to starve out the government-held cities in the oil fields of eastern central Libya by bombing supply vehicles heading east from Kaddafi's Surt. Of course, starvation will be tough on the civilians in those cities whom Obama supposedly started this war to protect, but the election is coming, so whaddaya gonna do?

Obama's Libyan end game isn't really that confusing

Obama's "Don't Look at Me, I Don't Make the Decisions around Here, I'm Just the President" act is wearing thin. The press has finally woken up to the fact that very little that the Administration has said about Mr. Obama's War makes much sense. The lead article in today's New York Times, "Allies Are Split on Goal and Exit Strategy of Libya Mission," is full of fun phrases:
inchoate ... remains divided ... complicated the planning ... ill defined for now ... days of public quarreling ... divisions among the alliance’s members ... frayed almost immediately ... papering over the differences ... questions swirling ... larger strategic divisions ... reservations percolated in Congress... In fact, Mr. Obama has not made clear what will happen ...

Yet, the bottom line about what will happen isn't really all that confusing. What matters most is that Obama has an election coming up in 19 months. He can't afford to go into the campaign known as The President of the United States Who Started a War with Muammar Gaddafi and Failed to Win. He'd be better off getting the word LOSER tattooed on his forehead.

So ... Obama is going to keep dropping bombs on Libya until Khadafy is gone.

That's it. That's the goal / strategy / end game / whatever: don't lose the election by losing the war.

I'm not saying that Obama had this all figured out from the moment he agreed to start the war or that he's even figured it out after a week, but it will eventually dawn on him that his alternatives are now:

1) Lose to Crazy America-Hating Terrorist Moamar Khadaffy, or
2) Drop More Bombs.

So he will choose what's behind Door #2.

Of course, after Qadafi is gone, a whole bunch more stuff will happen in Libya, but, seriously, who cares? How much does Obama care about Libya versus how much does he cares about his fabulous career? It's Libyatown, Jake.

March 23, 2011

Libyan Liberation leads to ethnic cleansing

One of the first things the Kosovo Liberation Army did after Bill Clinton bombed Serbia back to the industrial stone age for them in 1999 was ethnically cleanse Serbian-speaking Gypsies, on the grounds that A) They spoke Serbo-Croatian and thus probably sympathized with the Serbs, and B) Hey, they're Gypsies. This Wikipedia account says 90,000 Roma were expelled from Kosovo by the KLA.

David Zucchino reports from the rebel capital of Benghazi for the LA Times that something similar is, unsurprisingly, happening in Libya:
For a month, gangs of young gunmen have roamed the city, rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.

Over the last several days, the opposition has begun rounding up men accused of fighting as mercenaries for Kadafi's militias as government forces pushed toward Benghazi. ...

One young man from Ghana bolted from the prisoners queue. He shouted in English at an American reporter: "I'm not a soldier! I work for a construction company in Benghazi! They took me from my house … "

A guard shoved the prisoner back toward the cells.

"Go back inside!" he ordered.

The guard turned to the reporter and said: "He lies. He's a mercenary." ...

The opposition has acknowledged detaining an unspecified number of sub-Saharan Africans on suspicion of serving as Kadafi mercenaries. Human Rights Watch has described a concerted campaign in which thousands of men have been driven from their homes in eastern Libya and beaten or arrested. ...

One of the accused shown to journalists was Alfusainey Kambi, 53, a disheveled Gambian wearing a bloodstained sport shirt and military fatigue trousers. He said he had been dragged from his home and beaten by three armed men who he said also raped his wife. A dirty bandage covered a wound on his forehead.

Khaled Ben Ali, a volunteer with the opposition council, berated Kambi and accused him of lying. Ali said Kambi hit his head on a wall while trying to escape.

You know, that while-trying-to-escape thing happens a lot.
He commanded the prisoner to comment on his treatment in the detention center. Kambi paused and considered his answer. Finally, he glanced warily up at Ali and spoke. "Nobody beat me here," he said in a faint, weary tone. "I have no problems here."

And don't you forget it.

Latest Libyan War tactics and strategy

American war tactics seems to be evolving in the direction I suggested last night. The essential strategic issue for American, British, and French politicians is that their decision to launch the war was so offhand and irresponsible that they need to win (i.e., remove Kaddafi) or face embarrassing questions. If you get to declare victory, however, then those question diminish. As Gen. Patton liked to say, "Americans love a winner."

The NYT reports:
Having all but destroyed the Libyan air force and air defenses, the allies turned their firepower Wednesday on the military units loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that are besieging rebel-held cities.... Loyalist forces have surrounded two rebel-held cities in the west, Zintan and Misurata, and the strategic eastern city of Ajdabiya ...

In Ajdabiya, which has changed hands several times, residents said relentless shelling by loyalist troops had forced them to flee. One report called the city a “ghost town.” 

You'll notice the American sleight-of-hand here: Unlike some cities in the west that are rebel controlled and besieged by loyalists, whose relief could, theoretically be justified as humanitarian, Ajdabiya is loyalist-controlled and besieged by rebels. Gaddafi would be happy with a cease fire in Ajdabiya. But Ajdabiya is the key to taking the oil fields away from Gaddafi. Presumably, the colonialist powers' coalition's most favored outcome is a quick coup in Tripoli followed by a new regime that makes democratic-sounding noises and gets the oil flowing again. But, perhaps, Gaddafi won't be overthrown in Tripoli as long as he holds onto the oilfields.
“It’s an extremely complex and difficult environment,” Admiral Hueber acknowledged. “Our primary focus is to interdict those forces before the enter the city, cut of their lines of communication and cut off their command and control.” In military terms, “lines of communication” include supply lines.

As long as the regime’s forces are fighting in and around cities where the allies have ordered them to back off, he said, coalition attacks would continue. He said the allies are in communication with the Libyan units about what they need to do, where to go and how to arrange their forces to avoid attack, but that there was “no indication” that the regime’s ground forces were following the instructions.

I'm guessing that these instructions are that Gaddafi's forces can drive in a convoy toward Surt and maybe we won't kill you, but it would be useful to see them printed out. Further, how much would you trust the Americans if you were hunkered down inside a city that the Americans would be reluctant to flatten and you're hearing some kind of message that they want you to come out on the open road and drive through the desert. Uh, no thanks, we prefer staying alive. I wouldn't trust the American air force to not kill me on a Highway of Death unless Obama himself appeared on Al-Jazeera and promised in front of the Arab World that here's the deal: you drive at such and such an hour in such and such a direction and we won't kill you.

The LA Times has a story that is somewhat contradictory of the NY Times story:
Pentagon officials said Wednesday they were not attacking Libyan units inside cities because of the danger that such tactics would cause civilian casualties. They also said their orders were not to destroy the Libyan army or to provide air cover to opposition forces, limiting the types of strikes they can undertake.

Instead, they said, they were striking Kadafi's forces before they entered urban areas, as well as supply lines and headquarters facilities, in hopes of pressuring them to halt attacks against civilians. But the officers offered no timetable on U.S. pursuit of this strategy, with Kadafi's attacks in civilian areas apparently escalating

Overall, the high level of dissembling and blatant spinning by American politicians and generals during this war is likely to drag out the bloodshed. If Obama were to come out and say, "We're in it to win it. We will apply overwhelming firepower to make Gaddafi go away. The faster he goes, the fewer bombs will be dropped on his supporters. Gaddafi will lose, so the only question is whether he goes the easy way or the hard way," the clearer the message would be. Instead, Obama has constantly talked about "the U.S. stepping back" and other misdirection and feints for domestic and international consumption that confuse the message being sent to Libya.

Instead, the current mishmash of messages suggests to Gaddafi's mercenaries that they need to get out of the desert and hunker down in cities, which is the opposite of what the war was trumpeted as accomplishing.

March 22, 2011

This whole dying thing is getting old

From the LA Times:
An uneasy stalemate settles in eastern Libya as rebel units hold back until troops loyal to Moammar Kadafi run out of supplies or allied airstrikes destroy their weapons advantage.

... For now, though, the fighting here has reached an uneasy stalemate, with Kadafi's forces retaining just enough firepower to beat back sporadic rebel attacks. The ragtag rebel units seem content to wait until the government troops run out of supplies or allied airstrikes destroy their weapons advantage.

Thus far, rebel fighters, many of them civilian volunteers, have been unable to exploit the airstrikes that have crippled forces loyal to the Libyan leader. Government forces holed up in Ajdabiya, a city of 120,000, continued to punish the rebels with volleys from tanks and rocket batteries. ...

Troops manning government tanks and rocket batteries are now trying to hide from allied warplanes by setting up next to homes and shops, rebels said. But the opposition forces seemed inadequate to the task of driving Kadafi's men out of the city unless airstrikes first pave the way.

The U.S. has a couple of options to help the Eastern rebels: provide close-air support or declare that they will blast vehicles heading east from Gaddafi's hometown of Surt toward the oil fields to starve out Gaddafi's frontline forces. Since the Obama Administration hasn't yet done either one, I suspect they don't particularly want the Eastern rebels to win and are instead hoping for a nice quick little coup back in Tripoli so they can declare victory and the Libyans can get back to selling oil. 

But who knows? They're just making it up as they go along, assuming that U.S. air supremacy will let them get away with whatever they come up with. They're probably right.

March 21, 2011

America's New Strategic Allies, Part 2

According to Google Maps, it's 1,013 kilometers from Benghazi to Tripoli. Bypassing Kaddafi's hometown of Surt by swinging through the desert adds another 100 klicks. Judging from the spectacular see-saw nature of the Desert War of 1940-1943 and the rebels' new friends' air supremacy, things could change rapidly.

On the other hand ...

From the NYT today:
Rebel fighters trying to retake the eastern town of Ajdabiya said they were driven back on Monday by rocket and tank fire from government loyalists still controlling entrances to the city. Dozens of fighters retreated to a checkpoint around 12 miles north of Ajdabiya, and rebels said at least eight others had been killed during the day’s fighting, including four who had been standing in a bloodied pickup truck that the fighters showed to reporters.

There were conflicting reports about whether the allies had attacked loyalist forces in Ajdabiya. While planes had been heard overhead, the rebel fighters said there appeared to have been no attack on the pro-Qaddafi forces holding the entrance to Ajdabiya on the coastal highway leading north to Benghazi. Ajdabiya is a strategically important town that has been much fought over, straddling an important highway junction and acting as a chokepoint for forces trying to advance in either direction.

The retreat from Ajdabiya appeared to have thrown the rebels into deep disarray, with one commander at the checkpoint trying to marshal the opposition forces, using a barely functioning megaphone, but few of the fighters heeding his exhortations. 

"Dozens of fighters retreated"? "Dozens" is not a good word in war when discussing your ally. For example, during WWII, there were downsides to having the Soviet Union as America's ally, but at least the word "dozens" didn't come up much. At this point, the rebel army sounds like they'd have trouble with the forces of The Humongous and Wez in Road Warrior.

I realize that this war comes at a busy time of the year for Obama -- March Madness! -- but there are certain basic questions that the President needs to answer, such as "Are we in it to win it?" "What does 'win it' mean?" and "Who's 'we,' anyway?"

Highway of Death: 20th Anniversary Tour

Just over 20 years ago, U.S. aircraft shot up retreating Iraqi forces on the Highway of Death out of Kuwait, making clear the supremacy of air power over armor, especially in deserts. 

Nine years before that, in 1982, Israel's air force, using its own and U.S. technology, had quickly attained air supremacy over Syria's Soviet-equipped air defenses in Lebanon, demonstrating (to the horror of Soviet Air Force generals) that ground-based radar networks were a sitting duck for countries with the best airliner-based radar networks. In other words, the era when a country-- other than America and its close personal friends -- could use tanks to conquer another country (or even a rebellious province, as in Yugoslavia in 1999) without Washington's permission was drawing to a close.

This awareness dampened the arms race, such that by the outbreak of feverish speculation over Hezbollah's 2006 Schmutzkrieg assault on Israel, America was accounting for almost half of world's military spending. (For example, Libya was spending 3.9% of its GDP on its military, compared to 4.06% for the U.S.)

Israel's subsequent sobering enwallowment in Lebanon was an early hint of a second major lesson of post-modern warfare: that, even if you are America or its close personal friend, conquering another country these days usually turns out to be less fun that it sounds.

If you are a foreigner, therefore, the smart thing to do is to buy friends and influence people in the DC/NYC world imperial capital: you can call it the Prince Bandar Strategy. Gaddafi's strategy of buying friends in Rome was 2000 years-out-of-date.

March 19, 2011

Obama's Jonah Goldberg War

In April 2002, in "Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two," Jonah Goldberg declared:
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

Goldberg attributed this to a speech by his friend Michael Ledeen.

March 17, 2011

Are we at war with Libya?

From the NYT:
Diplomats said the resolution — which passed with 10 votes, including the United States, and abstentions from Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India — was written in sweeping terms to allow for a wide range of actions, including strikes on air-defense systems and missile attacks from ships. Military activity could get under way within a matter of hours, they said.  

In theory, this shouldn't be all that hard to blast Gadaffi's air force and tanks in open desert. There's a difference between a land war in Asia and a land war in North Africa. We already won one of those 68 years ago, against a better general than anybody working for Gadaffi.

But, then what happens? I don't know.

Let's say, best case scenario, there's immediately a military coup in Tripoli and the Colonel goes away. Whoo-hoo!

Except, then, whose side are we on? Two weeks ago, the Eastern rebels would have likely taken over following the U.S. Air Force's arrival because they were sort of winning at the moment and they held the oil fields, which is the whole point of Libya, anyway. They had momentum.

So, that would have been a simple solution, except that the rebels would have started fighting amongst themselves over the oil.

But since then, the Eastern rebels have proven pretty incompetent. So, are we going to back the member of Gadaffi's inner circle who tells Gadaffi to go, yet then continues to hold onto the oilfields against the rebels? The promise of oil can motivate a lot of fighting as we saw in Iraq.

Or is this just to save the rebels in Eastern Libya? But what good are they without the oilfields on the east central Libyan coast?

Further, as a commenter notes, if the rebels win, the Libyan people will likely try to ethnically cleanse from Libya the sub-Saharan black immigrants Gadaffi invited in and is using as mercenaries

And what does this imply for Bahrain, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is headquartered? And what does Bahrain imply for Saudi Arabia?

Should be interesting.

March 8, 2011

Is there an Egyptian Bonaparte?

Here's something that almost certainly won't happen, but which could make the situation in the Middle East quite interesting if it did.
The rebels in Libya currently control most of the oil fields. But they aren't very good at war, at least not yet. On the other hand, the Libyan Army isn't very strong either, because Kaddafi didn't want to get overthrown by it.

The strongest military in North Africa is that of Egypt, which borders Libya's Eastern rebels. A dynamic young Egyptian general, announcing he was coming to the aid of the Arab Revolution in Libya, could push Kaddafi's army back to Tripoli without much trouble. If he did, would he give up the oil fields? Would he push on to the Atlantic as the liberator of North Africa?

Of course, the concept of a dynamic young Egyptian general is probably something that Hosni Mubarak was at pains to make sure doesn't actually exist. The real Bonaparte emerged from after years of Darwinian struggle set off by the French Revolution.

December 15, 2010

Alternative History Questions

Imagine this scenario: Imagine that Hitler and Stalin both died in, say, 1935 and replaced by unaggressive Euroweenies of the Gorbachev sort. Without Hitler's bad example, the leaders of the Japanese Navy arrest the leaders of the Japanese Army and Japan gives up the crazy idea of fighting America. Or imagine whatever you want (Edwin Starr Sr. records "War! What Is It Good For?" in 1938, if you like), as long as it leads to WWII and the Cold War never happening. By 1939, Europe and East Asia have already settled into their long post 1989 peace that we know from our world.

In that situation, would anybody have gotten around to inventing the atomic bomb? Who? When? (Something to consider is the question of whether, in this world, nuclear weapons were ever truly reinvented?)

Now, imagine another scenario in which it's 2010, but nuclear technology has remained at rudimentary 1930s levels ever since the 1930s. Everything else is the same about the world of 2010 -- They've got computers, lasers, titanium, Powerpoint, Twitter, whatever -- just that nobody ever got around to working on nukes. 

Then, some country in this Alternative Present decides to build an atomic bomb. With all the 21st Century advantages, would they do it faster than the Manhattan Project? Would they even set one off by 2020?

November 25, 2009

Afghanistan

I don't understand why some Americans are simply unable to grasp how important these tribal struggles over the best goat pasturage in the Hindu Kush are to the American national interest. I would refer you to the various outlets of the Washington Post Co. for voluminous elucidation on the vital goat lands issue.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 23, 2009

Afghanistan: The Future Is Feudal!

For most of the decade, I've been pointing out that feudalism would work better in Afghanistan than nation-building. Europeans came up with feudalism to defend themselves from the Vikings after the breakup of Charlemagne's empire. It's cheap, it doesn't require much organizational capital, it doesn't need a national language, and it doesn't require a Charlemagne. Feudalism doesn't work particularly well, but, for minimal security needs, it does work.

Now, they're finally thinking feudally in Washington. Fred Kaplan says in Slate:
... special-operations forces have begun to help anti-Taliban militias in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents are concentrated. These militias have risen up spontaneously in certain tribal groups, but U.S. commanders hope that they can use the example of these revolts "to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland." ...

... it has drawn high-level attention to a 45-page paper by Army Maj. Jim Gant, the former team leader of a special-ops detachment stationed in Konar province. The paper, called "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan," recounts his experiences with organizing "tribal engagement teams" to help local fighters beat back the Taliban—and it spells out a plan to replicate these teams across the country. ...

The premise of his paper is that Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will." Rather, its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes—and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well. The United States' approach of the last seven years—focusing on Kabul and the buildup of Afghanistan's national army and police force—is wrongheaded and doomed. ...

A tribe-centered strategy may appeal to Obama in several ways. First, it keeps the Afghan people, not American occupiers, at the center of the operation. The U.S. soldiers live alongside the tribes, build trust, train them, supply them, gather intelligence from them, and fight with them. We are supporting players, not the lead.

But what happens when our friendly tribes stop fighting whoever it is we want them to fight, and start fighting our other friendly tribes?

That's where feudalism comes in.

Gant has no illusions about the difficulty of working with tribes. He spells out the risks of getting enmeshed in internecine feuds. Several times during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, our guerrilla allies called in U.S. air and artillery strikes on what they said were "Taliban targets" but in fact turned out to be gatherings of rival tribes.

An explicit and essential part of Gant's strategy is to draw the individual tribal teams into a network of tribes—first across the province, then the region, then the nation—tied in to the Kabul government through a web of mutual defenses and the supply of basic services. He's less clear on the mechanics of how this "bottom-up" approach to national unity takes hold, but he recognizes that without it the Taliban can gain advantage by playing the tribes off against one another.

Or, then again, maybe in Afghanistan the future is always futile.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 10, 2009

U.S. Military Deaths in Afghanistan by Ethnicity

You used to hear all the time about how minorities are more likely to die fighting America's wars than whites are, but the ethnic distribution of military deaths no longer interests the mainstream media. This Pentagon document lists military deaths in Operation Enduring Freedom (i.e., Afghanistan) from October 7, 2001 through February 28, 2009.

Leaving out the five ambiguous cases (mixed or unknown), minorities have suffered only 20 percent of the military deaths in Operation Enduring Freedom, despite making up 38 percent of the 20 to 24 year olds in 2008. Per capita, Non-Hispanic whites have been 2.47 times as likely as minorities to die in Afghanistan.

How could this statistic be spun so it's "appropriate" for the mainstream media? Here's a feasible headline:
Minorities Discriminated Against at VA Cemeteries
Whites Get More Free Burials

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 6, 2009

Is Obama being mau-maued in Afghanistan?

Tom Wolfe's classic study of War on Poverty handouts to "community organizers" in inner city San Francisco pointed out that most of the demonstrations and confrontations were largely staged to get money out of the government:

Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it. ... That was one reason why Summer Jobs was such a big deal. ... Nevertheless, there was some fierce ma-mauing that went on over summer jobs, especially in 1969, when the O.E.O. started cutting back funds and the squeeze was on. Half of it was sheer status. There were supposed to be strict impartial guidelines determining who got the summer jobs--but the plain fact was that half the jobs were handed out organization by organization, according to how heavy your organization was. If you could get twenty summer jobs for your organization and somebody else got five, then you were four times the aces they were ...

Reading the Afghanistan War website of Michael Yon, an ex-Green Beret who has been an embedded reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, for some reason got me thinking about Mau-Mau the Flak Catchers. Especially the parts where people who are likely Taliban-affiliated show up at the British Army base where Yon is embedded and demand medical care for a wound no doubt suffered fighting the Brits or show up demanding compensation for their house that got blown up because guys were shooting at the Brits from it.

For a lot of the Pashtuns, no matter what side they nominally are on, the war seems to be not just about killing people and breaking things (which, being Pashtuns, they consider good clean fun), but, also, it's a living. If the war ever ends, will the rest of the world continue to funnel money and weapons into Afghanistan? Will they then have to get, like, jobs?

Moreover, consider the lessons the Afghans likely drew from the Iraq "Surge." Here in the U.S., the received lesson is that adding 15% more soldiers made all the difference, but what actually made the difference was what I'd been advocating all along: bribe the Sunni rebels to stop fighting us and start fighting the foreign fundamentalists.

If you are an Afghan, you probably figure that the same logic will play out in Afghanistan as in Iraq: the more problems you cause the Americans now, the more they will bribe you to switch sides, the same as the more you intimidated federal poverty bureaucrats in 1969, the biggerthe bribe they paid you.

Does Obama grasp that? This is one case where his pre-Presidential career experience ought to equip him to understand what's going on.

Yon's perspective is different. He implies that American soldiers didn't like the Iraqis, but at least they were civilized, in the sense that they mostly lived in houses that were designed with the expectation of some degree of law and order in Iraq. In contrast, while American and British troops tend to like the Afghans more on a personal level, they're basically uncivilized. Everybody in Afghanistan who can afford it builds his family a mud fort to call home, a mini-Alamo, because the expectationis that normal life in Afghanistan is Hobbesian.

For some reason, though, this doesn't discourage Yon:

We must face reality: Our reasons for continuing are not the reasons we came for. We are fighting a different war now than the one that began in 2001. Today's war is about social re-engineering. Given the horrible history of Afghanistan, and the fact that we already are here, the cause is worthy and worthwhile. ... Today, the war is still worth fighting, yet the goal to reengineer one of the most backward, violent places on Earth, will require a century before a reasonable person can call Afghanistan "a developing nation." The war will not take that long - but the effort will.

Well, as Sam Goldwyn would say, include me out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 29, 2009

Afghanistan is becoming Mr. Obama's War

From the AP:
An American service member died Friday when his vehicle struck a bomb in eastern Afghanistan, making August the deadliest month for U.S. forces in the nearly eight-year war.

The grim milestone comes as the top U.S. commander prepares to submit his assessment of the conflict — a report expected to trigger intense debate on the Obama administration's strategy in an increasingly unpopular war. ...

That brought to 45 the number of U.S. service members killed this month in the Afghan war — one more than the previous monthly record, set in July.

American casualties have been rising steadily following President Barack Obama's decision to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to combat a resurgent Taliban and train Afghan security forces to assume a greater role in battling the insurgents.

Obama's decision was part of a strategic shift in the U.S. war against international Islamic extremism — moving resources from Iraq, which had been center stage since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion but where violence has declined sharply from levels of two years ago.

A record 62,000 U.S. troops are now in the country, with 4,000 more due before year's end. That compares with about 130,000 in Iraq, most due to leave next year.

Since the fresh troops began arriving in Afghanistan last spring, U.S. deaths have climbed steadily — from 12 in May to more than 40 for the past two months as American forces have taken the fight to the Taliban in areas of the country which have long been under insurgent control.

At least 732 U.S. service members have died in the Afghan war since the U.S.-led invasion of late 2001. Nearly 60 percent of those deaths occurred since the Taliban insurgency began to rebound in 2007.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 28, 2009

America needs college football in NYC and DC

Typically, college football rankings are dominated by public "flagship" universities (e.g., the University of Oklahoma) rather than second tier public universities (e.g., Oklahoma State). There are some well-known football powerhouse exceptions to this nomenclature rule, such as Penn State, which is actually the public flagship university of Pennsylvania (the University of Pennsylvania is private) and Ohio State (Ohio University doesn't emphasize big time sports).

Oklahoma State has had some good moments in football, such as when they had Barry Sanders, but the U. of Oklahoma has had more success. That rankles State alumnus T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire energy tycoon and financier, so he has given $265 million to State's athletic program. Pickens is an octogenarian, so he wants to win now. Oklahoma State is ranked 9th and 11th in the preseason polls.

I have to wonder how many opinion journalists somebody could buy for $265 million. (Answer: oodles.) Who cares about football, when for $265 million (assuming it was spent judiciously), you could more or less rent the U.S. military for your own personal war.

Personally, I think it's wonderful that across a broad swathe of America, incredibly competitive guys like T. Boone Pickens put their money into a non-lethal brand of pretend war.

Once again, I must point out that a major structural problem with American foreign policy is the lack of major college football programs in New York City and Washington D.C. to harmlessly absorb the competitive energies of the local personality equivalents of Pickens.

The problem with pro sports is that, other than taking the extreme step of buying a team, you can't give much money to an NFL team. You can buy season tickets, you can buy souvenirs, but you can't buy them a quarterback the way you can in college football.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 5, 2009

Gaza and Barrage Balloons

When a war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah in South Lebanon in the summer of 2006, war fever in the America press reached frightening levels. For a few weeks, there seemed a very real threat that this frenzy would push America into war with Hezbollah's supporter Iran.

So, that month I spent a lot of time writing about how ridiculous this all was, how it's not 1938 again, how the Middle East is less a powder keg than a powder thimble, how America has roughly half the defense spending in the world, how Iran barely has an air force, how war is decliningly profitable, etc etc. In the indirect way my writing works, I may have helped deflate that dangerous war bubble.

This time around, fortunately, there doesn't seem to be as much media mania in the U.S.

I wonder why?

Perhaps it's just the even more extreme one-sidedness of the conflict; or the lack of a credible Muslim sponsor country for the enthusiasts to demand that America bomb; or the sense of deja-vu, the feeling that this is just depressing and boring business as usual. Weirdly, I have a vague hunch that the lack of insanity in the press is in some way connected to Bernie Madoff, ridiculous as that sounds.

All that said, Gaza is an important worst case stress test of the advantages of separatism. The Israelis built a fairly effective fence around Gaza that more or less prevents suicide bombers from getting into Israel. They've removed the Israeli settlers from Gaza. Now, their main problem is Gazans lobbing explosives over the fence into Israel. It's in everybody's interest to help them come up with an effective solution for that.

We know that the long term solution is, in the words of newspaper magnate Lord Copper in Waugh's Scoop, "the Beast stands for strong, mutually-antagonistic governments everywhere." Nobody in Jordan or Syria shoots stuff at Israel anymore because the governments of Jordan and Syria know that the Israelis will come and break the government's shiny war weapons, so the governments keep their hotheads under control. I'm not sure how they do it, and I'm not sure I want to know. But, they do it.

Unfortunately, that's a long way off in the case of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The problem is that the political process by which strong governments will eventually emerge in these lands will no doubt be through a long struggle with Israel in which various bravos demonstrate their courage and patriotic bona fides by attacking Israel, bringing about Israeli reprisals, which in turn stoke anti-Israeli fanaticism, etc.. Presumably, somebody will eventually come out so securely on top that he can then call it off and start living above ground again, but that could be a long, long way off.

So, I've been trying to think of a technical solution to the problem of people in the Gaza Strip shooting locally-made unguided missiles at Israeli towns nearby. From 2001 through 2008, 15 people have killed by Qassam rockets fired from Gaza.

This has not been a gigantic problem so far for Israelis, in part because most of the missiles are so short range that they can only reach a single Israeli town, which the government of Israel has been fortifying. The Israelis have the technology to track a rocket back to its launch site and place an explosive on that spot within a few minutes. This means that the Palestinians typically shoot and scoot, which in turn means that they can't calibrate their fire. With unguided high trajectory weapons, such as mortars, artillery, and the Gazans' rockets, to actually hit your target, you need to stay in one place and, taking guidance from forward observers, fire again and again, methodically walking the impacts up to the target. But the Gazans are terrified of dying from Israeli counter-fire, so they prop up their missile in an orchard, point it in the general direction of that Israeli town, and drive away. So, their accuracy doesn't improve.

If the Gazans were to get a guided missiles (with longer ranges), this could prove to be a much larger problem for Israel. On the other handed, those are expensive, and the Gaza Strip doesn't currently have the industrial base to make them so they'd have to be imported. But Israel's fear of Palestinians importing better missiles encourages Israel to keep a clampdown on Gaza imports, with much economic pain inflicted, which just encourages Gazans to fire missiles at Israel.

So, an effective Israel anti-missile defense system would be beneficial.

Israel intends to implement by 2010 in the Gaza neighborhood the "Iron Dome" anti-missile missile, but there are some drawbacks. First, it won't be able to protect the Israeli town closest to the border, since it takes 15 seconds to get launched and the total flight time to that local target is less than that. Second, each Iron Dome anti-missile missile costs about $100,000, so it's an expensive solution to use against home-made rockets.

I've long wondered if guns wouldn't be more cost-effective anti-missile weapons than missiles. The usual advantage of a rocket is that it continues to accelerate after launch, allowing it to achieve higher ultimate speeds, whereas a gun's projectile achieves its maximum speed as it leaves the barrel and subsequently declines. When you need very rapid response, however, perhaps guns are the better technology, perhaps combined with some sort of guidance system for the projectile? One downside of guns is that they tend to have high fixed costs, while missiles have high variable costs, but this kind of chronic situation seems ideal for a few fixed high-tech guns. Also, in the Gaza area, they could be aimed so that their projectiles that miss could come down in the sea harmlessly.

Anyway, I don't know whether current gunpowder guns would work at all, or whether this kind of anti-missile gun defense would be dependent on the final development of a practical railgun, which was one of those war-winning wonder weapons the Germans tinkered with way back in WWII instead of developing a tank with the cost-quality effectiveness of the Russian T-34.

However, there's another old defensive technology that might be updatable with modern electronics to be even an better solution: barrage balloons. During the Blitz in 1940, the British launched 1,400 balloons anchored by heavy cables to damage German airplanes flying under 5,000 feet who collided with their metal cables. They were modestly effective against the plague of V1 buzz bomb cruise missiles that Germans fired at London later in the war, destroying 231 of them. The Germans, however, cleverly built wire cutters into the wings of the V1.

My thought is that high-tech barrage balloons could defend Israeli towns against missiles in a different way than simply relying upon impact with the cable (a method that assumes the flying attacker has wings, which missiles don't). Instead, they could be used to pre-position anti-missile shrapnel charges at various altitudes. As a missile from Gaza is launched, Israeli radar could choose which of the floating charges to detonate.

Does that make any sense?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer