Is that goal worth killing people?
Why do you think that will work?
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 ...
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.
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."
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.”
“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.
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
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
... 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." ...But what happens when our friendly tribes stop fighting whoever it is we want them to fight, and start fighting our other friendly tribes?
... 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.
Or, then again, maybe in Afghanistan the future is always futile.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.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Minorities Discriminated Against at VA Cemeteries
Whites Get More Free Burials
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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