The Poor Man Institute

This is funny.  Not funny “ha ha” but funny in an “our war propagandists say the darndest things” kind of way.

Just how often has the U.S. and NATO killed the Taliban in groups of 30 during 2009? The answer may surprise you:

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But the much more important point remains: how could we possibly have any idea how the war is going, here or anywhere else, when the bad guys seem only to die in groups of 30? The sheer ubiquity of that number in fatality and casualty counts is astounding, to the point where I don’t even pay attention to a story anymore when they use that magic number 30. It is an indicator either of ignorance or deliberate spin… but no matter the case, whenever you see the number 30 used in reference to the Taliban, you should probably close the tab and move onto something else, because you just won’t get a good sense of what happened there.

Toot fans might recall another interesting run-in with the number 30 and the topic of airstrikes.  30, it appears, is the new black:

In a grisly calculus known as the “collateral damage estimate,” U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost.

We don’t know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon’s former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, “the magic number was 30.” That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OKd by the legal and military commanders on the ground.

My guess, and it’s nothing more than uninformed conjecture, is that there is probably some other test in terms of ratio of Taliban to civilians, such that 30/30 keeps the trigger pullers from any unnecessary paperwork.  Which is a total drag, and a costly distraction from the morally uplifting and vital task of liberating the Afghan people, 30 at a time.

See, also.

Pretty much:

In his first major policy speech since being sworn in for a second term, Afghan president Hamid Karzai made a solemn pledge Wednesday to combat the rampant corruption of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. “Let me be clear: I will not rest until I bring an end to my graft and backroom deal-making,” said Karzai, later adding that he will personally head up an investigation into allegations that he authorized massive voter fraud in order to secure his own victory in August’s presidential election. “The blind eye that I continue to turn to drug trafficking, embezzlement, and human rights violations will no longer be tolerated, and I will do everything in my power to finally bring myself to justice.” Karzai also announced the appointment of several relatives to a new commission that will tackle the problem of nepotism within his administration.

This is no way to run an empire.

You take what you can get I suppose.  But Teh Zilla has a point:

While Obama’s speech last night largely comported to what his aides spent days anonymously previewing, there was one (pleasantly) unexpected aspect:  he commendably dispensed with the propagandistic pretext that we are fighting in Afghanistan in order to deliver freedom and democracy to that country and to improve the plight of Afghan women.  Many Democrats (the self-proclaimed “liberal hawks”) love to support American wars on the self-righteous ground that we’re going to drop enough Freedom Bombs to liberate millions and invade other countries in order to re-make other peoples’ cultures for their own good.  In order to maximize support for his escalation, Obama — like Bush so often did — could easily have relied on that appeal to our national narcissism and exploited justifiable disgust for the Taliban in order to manipulate “liberal hawks” into supporting this war on human rights grounds.  During the build-up to the speech, it was predicted by several influential Obama advisers that he would do exactly that.  Indeed, when announcing his prior Afghanistan escalation in March, Obama played up the humanitarian rationale for this war.

But there was almost none of that in last night’s speech.  As Ben Smith correctly notes, Obama did not even mention — let alone hype — the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan.  There were no grandiose claims that the justness of the war derives from our desire to defeat evil, tyrannical extremists and replace them with more humane and democratic leaders.  To the contrary, he was commendably blunt that our true goal is not to improve the lives of Afghan citizens but rather:  ”Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda.”  There were no promises to guarantee freedom and human rights to the Afghan people.  To the contrary, he explicitly rejected a mission of broad nation-building “because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests“; he said he “refuse[d] to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests”; and even vowed to incorporate the convertible factions of the Taliban into the government. 

Not only did he refrain from those manipulative appeals, he made explicitly clear that we are in Afghanistan to serve our own interests (as he perceives them), not to build a better nation for Afghans.  Nation-building, he said, goes “beyond … what we need to achieve to secure our interests” and “go beyond our responsibility.”  We’re there to serve our interests and do nothing else.  That should throw cold water on all on the preening fantasies of all but the blindest and most naive “liberal war supporters” that we’re there to help the Afghan people. 

Independent of motive, it is also quite unlikely that helping Afghans will be the unintended result of our ongoing war there.  Just as was true in Iraq — where we bribed and befriended religious extremists and others we spent years demonizing as “Terrorists,” and now protect a government that is extremely oppressive to women, Christians and gays, and brutally violative of human rights in general — we will do whatever benefits us and serves our interests in Afghanistan, even if that means empowering brutal, oppressive and misogynistic fanatics as long as they are willing to carry out our geopolitical directives.  Many of the warlords and other local religious extremists on whom we’re already relying and will now use even more are hardly distinguishable from the Taliban on human rights issues.  We’re not there on a charity mission but are there to advance what we think are our interests.  That’s why some of the most oppressive governments in the Middle East will continue to be our most stalwart allies. [...]

But if Obama’s approach — reflective of the Republican “realists” to whom he seems to listen most — slays the pervasive, preening “liberal hawk” fantasy that we invade and bomb other countries in order to help them, that will at least be an important value.  With some extremely rare historical exceptions, governments start and wage wars in order to benefit themselves, not to “help” the people in the countries which are being invaded and bombed.  We’ve proven so many times as to place it beyond dispute that we’re more than willing to support and empower foreign leaders who do our bidding regardless of how they treat their own citizens.  That didn’t change when we had a swaggering, cowboy-hat-wearing, evangelical moralizer in the Oval Office, and it’s not going to change just because he’s been replaced by a charming, nice, eloquent, East-Coast-educated Democrat. 

The claim that we must stay in Afghanistan in order to reduce genuine threats to our security is at least cogent, though ultimately very unpersuasive.  But the claim that we’re fulfilling some sort of moral responsibility to the plight of Afghans by continuing to occupy, bomb and wage war in their country — and by imprisoning them en masse with no charges — is sheer self-glorifying fantasy.  Some credit is due Obama for refusing to promote that fantasy last night when doing so might have helped his case.  Now that the “Commander-in-Chief” who is prosecuting the war has largely dispensed with this fictitious rationale, will other war supporters do so as well?

To be clear, it’s not that improving the lives of the Afghan people is an unworthy goal, it’s just that we were never particularly interested in doing so, war is an extremely bad vehicle for attempting to achieve that aim, and we probably lack the means regardless (in any lasting and significant sense of the word “improve”).

However, to pretend otherwise is to believe our own hype – to confuse  reality and our own exceptionalist fantasy.  That leads to at least two pernicious maladies of thought (though certainly many more that I will fail to discuss):

First, you have the situation where people like Tom Friedman et al scratch their heads and wonder, in a general sense, why there is so much anti-Americanism in the world and, in a more specific sense, why the Muslim world is so angry with our foreign policy choices  (See, also, why are the Iraqi people such “ingrates”?). 

Second, because the liberal hawks buy the theory that war is a many splendored thing – a remarkably versatile panacea for what ails the target (and targeted) population —  they tend to hop on board with any plan to give the gift of shrapnel (sometimes inventing new and creative ways of incorporating a little blood and guts).  The result is almost always not the intended happy ending.

Ultimately, I prefer my foreign policy discussions straight up, with no chaser.  The better to understand the world, and our place in it.  And the better to understand the actual effects of making war.

Tommy Friedman wonders why the Muslim world is so unappreciative of America’s selfless and magnanimous offer of forced fellatio. 

What Tommy doesn’t understand is that those crazy exotic Arabs prefer you to ask them out to dinner before bombing their countries, killing hundreds of thousands of their countrymen/co-religionists, creating millions of refugees and otherwise leading to unthinkable suffering.  To prove a point about our machismo.

Dinner and a little pillow talk Tom.  It goes a long way.

I find myself reflexively stroking my chin, nodding and offering a harumph when I read this.

One of President Barack Obama’s closest Republican allies in the Senate urged him to put health care reform on the backburner and focus on Afghanistan.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), a trusted GOP voice on foreign policy matters, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that in light of a forthcoming increase in troops to Afghanistan, Democrats should turn their attention to matters of war and money.

“[W]e’re not going to do that debating health care and the Senate for three weeks through all sorts of strategies and so forth,” said the Indiana Republican. “The war is terribly important. Jobs and our economy are terribly important. So this may be an audacious suggestion, but I would suggest we put aside the health care debate until next year, the same way we put cap and trade and climate change and talk now about the essentials, the war and money.”

Besides, government provided health insurance will never work, while transforming Afghan society, quelling multiple interlocking civil wars and insurgencies and pacifying the region permanently (as an outside and distrusted power) is totally doable. 

With proper focus, we should be able wrap up that cakewalk within, say, the next year or so.  Then we can turn back to this fanciful notion of “government provided health insurance.”  Good luck with that.

My friends and fellow Christians, it is a most solemn and mournful day when we are forced to postpone the start of another war due to the onerous and demanding commitments of two other simultaneous wars.  Is there another way to describe this Tantalus-like torment other than, “the work of Satan”? 

The US is too bogged down in Afghanistan to engage Iran militarily over its nuclear program, an ex-CIA South Asia expert and current adviser to US President Barack Obama said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

Bruce Riedel, a senior Brookings Institute and Saban Center fellow for political transitions in the Middle East and South Asia, addressed scholars and journalists at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

He warned that the US was fighting a losing battle against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and that Washington would soon have to make difficult choices on beefing up troop levels there.

“Israelis need to understand that there’s going to be a huge drain on resources, attention and capital, and that will have implications,” Riedel told The Jerusalem Post before his talk.

He acknowledged that those implications would primarily affect the Iran question.

During his address, Riedel referred to the US’s commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said, “We’ve got two wars. You’ve got to be bold to say, let’s start a war against a third party, particularly when the third party can hit you in the first two fronts.”

The US has learned that it “can’t fight two medium-sized wars simultaneously,” he said.

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

We must rage against these self-imposed limitations.  Just think of how soft our society will become, how morally decadent, how bereft of meaning our lives will be if we limit ourselves to just two wars at a time.  Or, heaven forbid, less!

Just as the country suffered from the Vietnam Syndrome in the decades following that war, a malady that led us to abstain from all armed conflicts (excluding Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, countless ugly proxy wars, etc), we must not succumb to the Iraqghanistan H1N1 Dove Virus, which will cause us to fret about the limitations of multi-wars.

Time to think outside the kill zone. 

What about three small wars?  Or one jumbo and one very small war (say, Grenada)?  What if we change the name of one war so it’s no longer a war, thus freeing up necessary manpower and resources for another war? 

Something must be done, and fast.  We are dangling on a precipice - dangerously close to (and I don’t want to have to say this) taking an option off the table.

The middling crustacean dips it all in the drawn butter of wisdom:

Had Nidal Malik Hasan been launched from a remotely-piloted Predator drone into a Pakistani funeral procession, it would have been a bold victory in the War on Terror; had the major been dropped onto a village in Waziristan or fired into an Afghan wedding party, it would have represented an efficient and effective display of tactical military superiority; had he exploded in a shower of cluster bomblets over a Gaza refugee camp or been dispersed in a cloud of corrosive gas through an Iraqi city, we could all celebrate this triumph of American technical ingenuity over the forces of barbarism. Instead, Major Hasan will be tragically remembered as a piece of prematurely detonated ordnance, accidentally claiming the lives of people rather than those of numbers.

Modern metaphysics teaches us that the human soul, curiously enough, exists only within the arbitrarily-defined borders of certain political entities…these, we can be sure, are the domains of real people, capable of self-awareness and the perception of pain. The hordes beyond, however – science tells us nothing of them, and that’s probably for the best…

Frank Rich scrapes at a different portion of our noble war’s soft underbelly:

The invective aimed at these heinous P.C. pantywaists [in the US Army/Intelligence community] nearly matched that aimed at Hasan. Joe Lieberman announced hearings to investigate the Army for its dereliction of duty on homeland security. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, vowed to unmask cover-ups in the White House and at the C.I.A. The Weekly Standard blog published a broadside damning the F.B.I. for neglecting the “broader terrorist plot” of which Hasan was only one of the connected dots. Jerome Corsi, the major-domo of the successful Swift-boating of John Kerry, unearthed what he said was proof that Hasan had advised President Obama during the transition.

William Bennett excoriated soft military leaders like Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, who had stood up for diversity and fretted openly about a backlash against Muslim soldiers in his ranks. “Blind diversity” that embraces Islam “equals death,” wrote Michelle Malkin. “There is a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream of Islamic life around the world,” wrote the columnist Jonah Goldberg. Islam is “not a religion,” declared the irrepressible Pat Robertson, but “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world.” [...]

…Their screeds about the Hasan case are completely at odds with both the Afghanistan policy they endorse and the leadership that must execute that policy, including Gen. Stanley McChrystal. These hawks, all demanding that Obama act on McChrystal’s proposals immediately, do not seem to have read his strategy assessment for Afghanistan or the many press interviews he gave as it leaked out. If they had, they’d discover that the whole thrust of his counterinsurgency pitch is to befriend and win the support of the Afghan population — i.e., Muslims. The “key to success,” the general wrote in his brief to the president, will be “strong personal relationships forged between security forces and local populations.”

McChrystal thinks we might even jolly up those Muslims who historically and openly hate America. “I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven,” he told Dexter Filkins of The Times. “In my view their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior.”

Whether we could win those hearts and minds is, arguably, an open question — though it’s an objective that would require a partner other than Hamid Karzai and many more troops than even McChrystal is asking for (or America presently has). But to say that McChrystal’s optimistic — dare one say politically correct? — view of Muslim pliability doesn’t square with that of America’s hawks is the understatement of the decade.

As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government?

It’s not that they hate Muslims.  It’s that they love them to death. 

Worse still, it’s not just that our Afghan hawks and various McChrystal humpers hold this incompatible hatred of Muslims/staunch support for a military strategy premised on winning the hearts of the despised, but that same animosity and contempt infects the ranks of our soldiers on the ground.  Many of our troops in the field just don’t have all that much love for the “Hajis.” 

And yet, for McChrystal’s strategy to work, these same soldiers need to act the part of ambassadors and friend-makers – each and every one, with even a handful of trigger happy racists able to undo progress in the main. 

As usual, counterinsurgency doctrine looks great on paper, but in practice, the messiness of the real world is less kind.  And what’s messier than war.

Quote of the Day (GOP Minority Outreach Edition).  From the Right Reverend and All Powerful Living God Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, an editorial on Obama’s totally unprecedented rather ordinary bows before foreign dignitaries.  It sure does finish with a flourish:

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy ’60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to “hope” for “change.” It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

Sired: Like a thoroughbred?  Either way, he ended up with a diluted “blood impulse.”  Fuckall if I know what that means, but apparently Sun Myung Moon’s got it.  By virtue of fuckall if I know.

Men of the Third World:  I think I bought that calendar last year.  Pretty damn mandingtastic IIRC , but then I’m a child of true children of grunge (c: Grandgrungechild?).

Hawaii: Foreign apparently.  Couldn’t even make a list of 57 states.  Must be all those dusky third world types lazing about in their unabashed immoral lassitude.  Upside: Sounds like an idea for another calendar.

Legendary catch by mm. Hurry, hurry. And, yes, it’s as good as you knew it would be.

I don’t understand this Facebook. There’s like all these people, and there’s a “News” feed and a “Live” feed, and they’re different, but hell if I know what the difference is, let alone what’s so newsy or lively about them. And I have a “Wall” for some reason, which I guess I’m writing on? Or something? Am I writing on a wall? Is this news? Am I live? Don’t anybody try to explain it to me, because I’m not listening, and I refuse to RTFM. This is supposed to be a web-site, and web-sites aren’t supposed to have FMs. They should explain themselves. So I’m taking a stand here because, dammit, somebody should. I’m making a stand because I don’t know what I’m looking at or who’s looking at me or where I left my shoes. I feel like a 90-year-old grandmother trying to install Linux on the space shuttle. But for unrelated reasons.

I sort of suspected this is something for “The Kids”, as it were, and now I’m suspecting these suspicions were correct. Does Facebook come with a “Lawn”, somewhere, over my “Wall”? Because I want everybody off it.

Related.