Flit

February 09, 2010

Observations on Williams case

A couple mundane observations about this one, which I'm really only posting about to acknowledge it:

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February 08, 2010

CSM: Zhari fight just beginning

Four years after Canadians first deployed to Zhari district, here is one writer's synopsis of all that we achieved:

"In many places, as in Zhari, the battle is just beginning."

Interesting that current American forces are currently held up 4 miles (7 km) east of "Mullah Omar's mosque", aka the village of Sangisar. In 2007 there was an ANA patrol base in Sangisar, which shows how much of a fighting retrograde our time there really was. Seven km east of Sangisar would mean the Americans of the 1-12 Infantry are still basically confined to the area within weapons range of the Bazaar-e-Panjwaii-Zhari district centre road, Zhari's primary north-south route (I won't use its NATO name here, but it started with an "S" and ended with a "t"), built by Canadians and the area where we were largely limited to in 2008-09 and where a couple big battles to get the initial lodging were first fought back in 2006.

As for the insurgent leaders mentioned, Kaka Abdul Khaliq and Jabar Agha, yeah, I know those names, too. You gotta give 'em credit for keeping alive this long with all the effort put into hunting them over the years. Slim customers, those two.

Sigh...

Jonathan Kay has trouble connecting dots, apparently. Quote 1:

"The smug left-wing take on the Tea Party movement is that its members are nothing but shell-shocked racists....I saw no evidence of that sort of bigotry in Nashville."

Quote 2, same story:

"As the weekend progressed, it became clear that a speaker could hurl literally any slur he wanted against Mr. Obama, and people would scream enthusiastically and smack their hands together."

About says it all, really.

On that global warming thing

I'm not normally a big fan of Bjorn Lomborg, but he's talking a lot of sense here:

"Carbon taxes could play an important supplementary role in funding research and development, but they are not the primary fix. Indeed, putting a high price on carbon first, then hoping that alternative technology will catch up, is not a sound policy. Until the technology is ready to compete on its merits, carbon taxes will simply bleed the economy, while providing no real benefit to the climate."

I don't place much stock in the various attempts out there, including those Lomborg has been associated with, to discredit the science. Scientists are human, and work in an milieu that always has in itself aspects of competition, exclusivity, and reticence, and generally always looks unimpressive under the kind of hyper-close examination climate science is under right now. Strangely, though, they still seem to come up with iteratively closer and closer approximations to reality in their theories, and I have little doubt that's the case here. Eventually the self-correcting tendencies will kick in on this issue, as well.

It's the politicians and particularly the people trying to make a buck for their country or themselves out of the various forms of wealth transfer to polluters to get them to stop polluting that I remain extremely skeptical about. Mark Schapiro's piece in the current Harper's on what's really happening with carbon credits lays out some of the problems with that idea already clearly in evidence. There seems no likely way you could ever pay people on a global scale not to pollute efficiently and equitably, and it really seems folly to continue to try.

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February 07, 2010

On the Palin flag thing

I was initially impressed with ex-Gov. Palin's ability to ride a populist movement to her own profit. By the figures in this story, the Tea Party convention made $500K at the gate, of which she nabbed a cheque worth 20%. Nice work if you can get it.

I am baffled, though, why she would then think it was proper, let alone a good idea, to wear a flag of Israel on her lapel for the event. Not that I object to Israel in any way myself, but for the hyperpatriotic puppet figure at an ultrapatriotic convention, the move only makes sense as a "dog-whistle" to the "Left Behind" end-times crowd. Which it probably was.

I mean, as far as political stupidity goes, she really is the story that keeps on giving, but come on.

(This will be undoubtedly be written off by Palinites as analogous to politicians born abroad honoring the country of their heritage with a lapel pin of their own. Leaving aside that Palin has no Israeli ancestry I'm aware of, I'll only say that such behaviour, if it occurred, would be not only deeply antithetical to the American self-image of leaving your ethnicity behind before leaving Ellis Island, but that it is impossible to consider, say, a Kennedy, wearing an Irish flag while making a key political speech aimed at all Americans. It just. Wasn't. Done. And so the weird slow-motion train wreck the rest of the world watches with horror from afar called "American politics" continues.)

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A class act, you gotta admit

Credit where credit's due: no matter how you feel about the guy on the issues, if you were ever a public figure who had to reveal on TV your struggle with a potentially fatal disease, you could take lessons from Jack Layton. My best wishes to him.

Well, so much for that idea

Taliban says no to negotiations.

My prediction, made several times here before, is that so long as the Afghan army is still seen by the insurgents as a joke, this will be their position. That's not just a matter of PR, either. There really needs to be some indication of permanent local governmental strength after the West's future drawdown for the situation to change.

UPDATE: Milnews.ca reads the tea leaves slightly more hopefully.

Dorronsoro mislink?

There's an article by Afghan commentator Gilles Dorronsoro on the current situation in Afghanistan on the website of Foreign Policy that is not up to his usual standards. He doesn't have a lot new to say, really, and the argument's marred by an odd mislink, where he defends his position that Afghan army building is going to go nowhere by linking to a 10-month old Christian Science Monitor piece about the failure of tribal militias.

"The security of a growing number of provinces will also come under the responsibility of the Afghan army after 2011. It all sounds nice on paper, but these policies are not remotely realistic, and as Anand Gopal reported in the Christian Science Monitor in April 2009, they have all been tried and found wanting already."

Gopal's piece doesn't actually talk about the Afghan army or police, but why other approaches to security ("arming the tribes") don't work in Afghanistan. So it's actually on the opposite tack to Dorronsoro's argument. Oops.

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February 03, 2010

The Flynn briefing

Lang has a link to the unclas brief by Gen. Flynn, the senior U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan, on the state of the insurgency there. It's quite good, both as a current model of the craft and for its content.

February 02, 2010

Other stuff I have been up to

I see my piece in the Conference of Defence Associations Institute periodical On Track is live (page 35 of PDF). It's a highly abridged version of some remarks I gave to that CDAI meeting back in the fall in Ottawa, but I think it still holds together. My appreciation to Col. (retd.) Pellerin and his staff for the opportunity.

On kites and intelligence

C.J. Chivers, on the fight in Helmand:

Mixing modern weapons with ancient signaling techniques, the Taliban have developed the habits and tactics to evade capture and to disrupt American and Afghan operations, all while containing risks to their ranks.

Seven months after the Marines began flowing forces into Helmand Province, clearing territory and trying to establish local Afghan government, such tactics have helped the Taliban transform themselves from the primary provincial power to a canny but mostly unseen force.

The good news then is that the fight in Helmand in 2010 has begun to closely resemble the fight in Kandahar Province in 2007, basically the default state for insurgents facing overwhelming firepower, nothing but IEDs and small arms harassment. Hey, I didn't say "great news." The bad news is that as Kandahar shows it's possible to keep that fight going a long, long time.

The only quibble I have is with some of of the low-tech "signals" Chivers offers. One of the photo captions refers to shepherd's whistles, and the article refers to kites. This is probably an indication either Chivers or someone he interviewed has been paying too much attention to the fever-dreams of fobbits.*

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February 01, 2010

Jenio firing: yep, it was a slide

It's confirmed: as first reported by this site a week ago, an American LTC responsible for a critical Kandahar district and one of the key leaders working for Canada's top commander there, and his most senior NCO, were sacked for an offensive PowerPoint joke, one of those "demotivational posters." Sigh. You can't make this war up. Gulliver has more.

Afghan army training stories: CBS and WashPost

Okay, Lara whatshername with Special Forces mentors on 60 Minutes... is there anything to say that Josh and Tim have not?

The lack of displayed language facility by these Green Berets was disturbing. There are lots of good Pashto words for "f--ktard." Urdu ones can even do in a pinch, I found. And the frustrated, hectoring behaviour of American military trainers with the commandos in garrison is hardly unusual, or surprising. The real trouble there is the power dynamic because of the involvement of interpreters, when you don't even have a basic "yes/no/stop/go" language ability.

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A point of clarification

In case anyone was wondering, yes, I was Capt. Rob Semrau's S2 in Afghanistan*. I regret I don't know him well personally, and I was a long way away and out of comms when the action over which his court martial is centred occurred. So I'd have very little useful info to add in any case, even if I wasn't being mindful of the prohibition on Forces members commenting publicly on matters under investigation or before the courts.

One point that does bear clarification, though: Peter Worthington's column on the issue is the latest press piece to call Semrau's military action the result of an "ambush" on a "patrol." This couldn't be further from the truth.

The battle on the day in the question, which was primarily fought by 200 soldiers of 2nd Kandak, 1st Brigade, 205 Corps of the Afghan army, with Canadian advisors imbedded, was a north-to-south clearance operation, as straight-up a "cross the start line, two companies up" type deliberate offensive maneuver as one is ever likely to see in Afghanistan. It was what we used to call a battalion-level "advance to contact", one part of a larger brigade-level deliberate operation that day. The actions in question I understand occurred during what we would have called back in officer training as "consolidating on the objective." There was no "patrol", and no "ambush". The Afghans were attempting and succeeding, to seize and hold key terrain held in strength by a prepared enemy, terrain which was being used to launch a series of fairly indiscriminate indirect fire attacks into the city of Lashkar Gah, across the Helmand River to the east. Save the big difference of the closer tactical air support, a Canadian survivor of any of the major textbook Canadian battles of either of the two great wars, or Worthington's time in Korea, would likely have been right at home on the day.

The Helmand fight, which our Afghan brigade sent troops to twice during my tour, sometimes seemed as different from Kandahar's for them as night and day. At least in 2008-09, there were actual setpiece battles, and pins-on-the-map tactical maneuver, in a way the ANA in Kandahar Province rarely saw. I don't believe that in any way influences the material facts of this trial, but it would be nice if the press could report it accurately without all the misleading terminology.

*And of any of the other Canadians who may have witnessed or reported the alleged incident, for that matter.

Spin Boldak: it's kinda like Deadwood, but with AKs

Worth a read: the Washington Post on corruption in Kandahar Province. Good piece.

Americans are just getting their first introductions to these characters, who Canadian war-followers have long known about. There was a good piece in Harper's recently, as well.