This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Foreign Policy

  • France’s role in Afghanistan to change

    I love France, it’s a beautiful country with wonderful food, lots of historical sights to visit, but the only problem I have with it is that France is full of French people. And they lived up my expectations yesterday when they elected a Socialist, Francois Hollande to be President, replacing their relatively conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy. The French committed to join us in the war against terror in Afghanistan, but even Sarkozy was withdrawing from Afghanistan a year earlier than he had agreed (the end of next year).

    Hollande promised during the campaign to withdraw France’s 3,308 troops by the end of this year, according to Stars & Stripes;

    “I will not comment on any possible decisions that the very newly elected French government might take in the future,” German Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said at a news conference Monday. “But France has committed itself very clearly in one of the first strategic partnership agreements with Afghanistan to a long-term commitment way beyond 2014.”

    Funny to see the words “France” and “committed” being used in the same sentence without a mention of three month vacations and 30-hour work weeks, doesn’t it? The French are already fighting the war against terror in their streets, a war that followed them back from Afghanistan, so I guess they’re comfortable with that.

    When I was in Paris, the tour guide told us that there were ten bombs going off every day in Paris. I have no evidence to confirm that, but I know that we had to go through metal detectors and hand searches to get into a Parisian department store, so I don’t doubt it. If that’s the kind of life they enjoy, more power to them.

  • Lesson 1: Pay your hooker

    ADDED: I snagged this from Facebook;

    It looks like those 12 Secret Services agents on the president’s security detail who were shipped back to the States because one of them didn’t want to pay his hooker in the morning, are paying for their partner’s mistake, according to Fox News;

    The Secret Service has revoked the security clearances for the 11 agents accused of misconduct over a prostitution scandal in Colombia — as the Pentagon looks at broadening its own investigation into the incident, which the top U.S. military official calls an embarrassment.

    The fallout from the alleged misconduct has spread across both the Secret Service and the U.S. military. On the Secret Service side, a senior law enforcement official confirmed to Fox News that all 11 who were recalled and placed on administrative leave have had their clearances revoke[d]. The official added that among the 11 are two supervisors and three members of the counter-assault team, indicating that senior officials are involved.

    On the members of the military, who were also caught up in it, the Stars & Stripes reports that there may be more than the initial five who were involved, and it reaches across the different services;

    With the dragnet widening in the wake of apparent misbehavior at a South American presidential summit, more servicemembers than previously thought could be caught on allegations of improper behavior.

    Over the weekend, the Pentagon announced five servicembers were under investigation for violating curfew at a hotel where 11 Secret Service agents were sent home early from Cartagena, Colombia, after allegations of involvement with prostitutes at the hotel.

    Now, information flowing from a preliminary investigation at the hotel, where a military support contingent to the Secret Service also stayed, is causing the number of troops being investigated to rise, though military officials could not give a total at midday on Monday.

    It’s nice to know that when there are little brown hookers involved, there’s no inter-service rivalry.

    But apparently everyone was having a good time this weekend in Colombia. Of course, when I vacation in Latin America, I always have to pay my own way. Maybe I should join the State Department or the Secret Service.

  • Member of British government puts bounty on US Presidents

    In what has historically been seen as an act of war, a left-wing Labour Party member of the upper house of British Parliament has apparently put out a $16 million bounty on President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush. The Baron Nazir Ahmed, a life peer of the House of Lords, placed the bounty in response to the US bounty on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the head of Islamist terror organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. HuffPo is reporting that Labour has since suspended his membership in the party. The Baron Ahmed is the first Muslim life peer in the House of Lords.

    It’ll be interesting to see the results of this investigation. Booting a life peer from the House of Lords is incredibly difficult and he’s a darling of the radical anti-war left. If it can be substantiated he said what he’s accused of saying and he really did place a unilateral bounty on the head of two US Presidents I’m even more interested to know what the Obama administration’s response will be. Being an election year we could even see the notoriously flexible Obama find some spine.

  • The gang who can’t shoot straight

    I was watching Al Extremo last night on TV Azteca. What? Show me another news program that has little brown women operating their cameras in bikinis and I’ll watch them instead.

    Anyway, they were prattling on about how the Mayans predicted the end of the world (like they do every night between chupacabra sightings) and they mentioned that the North Koreans might be the ones who destroy the world. Obviously, this was before the failed launch. I’m pretty sure that the only people on the planet who should be afraid of a nuclear armed North Korea are the North Koreans.

    Fox News reports on the launch;

    North Korea’s much-anticipated rocket launch ended quickly in failure early Friday, splintering into pieces over the Yellow Sea soon after takeoff.

    North Korea acknowledged in an announcement broadcast on state TV that a satellite launched hours earlier from the west coast failed to enter into orbit. The U.S. and South Korea also declared the launch a failure.

    A senior U.S. official told Fox News the rocket broke apart between 90 seconds and 2 minutes after launching.

    So, Kim Jong-un, henceforth known as “Needle Dick the Bug F*cker” on these pages, has failed to successfully launch his presidency as well as a rocket. Even Stone Age-dwelling Pakistan has launched a satellite into space. I wonder how many of the scientists involved in that launch are still working at their jobs.

    I’ll sure be glad when my son gets home from his tour of Korea next month.

  • AW1 Tim; Egypt: When the Money and Food Run Out

    Our buddy, AW1 Tim wrote a post at his blog about a subject that’s too complicated for this old brain to comprehend, which is why I’ve pretty much steered away from Egypt since Mubarak stepped down. But Tim does the hard work;

    Asia Times has a warning article online today that ought to be read by anyone with a passing interest in current events. It details what is likely to happen when Egypt’s money and food run out, something that is likely to happen sooner rather than later. Hoarding of both hard currency and consumables has already begun and it’s only going to get worse.

    You should go read the whole thing.

  • LTC Ralph Peters (Ret) unloads on the Generals

    For those not familiar with Ralph Peters he’s an old MI guy and unapologetic supporter of the war in Iraq who later came out in opposition to the surge, before conceding it worked. His record, as with most fallible humans, is mixed. He’s been know for inflammatory quotes such as:

    “Make no mistake: the anti-war voices long for us to lose any war they cannot prevent”

    and

    “We’ve mired ourselves by attempting to modernize a society that doesn’t want to be — and cannot be — transformed. We needed to smash our enemies and leave. Had it proved necessary, we could have returned later for another punitive mission. Instead, we fell into the great American fallacy of believing ourselves responsible for helping those who’ve harmed us.”

    He’s also had some rather choice assumptions on potential POWs.

    In a piece titled “Soldiers Murder Afghans, Generals Murder Soldiers” Ralph Peters goes all out on the argument that the War in Afghanistan is irredeemable and has far exceeded its expiration date. He makes quite clear that our service members with stars on their shoulders carry much of the blame for this state of affairs.

    If there’s a “battle cry” in Afghanistan, it’s “Blame the troops!” Generals out of touch with the ugly, brute reality on the ground down in the Taliban-sympathizing villages respond to every seeming crisis in Afghan-American relations by telling our troops to “respect Afghan culture.”

    But generals don’t have a clue about Afghan “culture.” They interact with well-educated, privileged, English-speaking Afghans who know exactly which American buttons to press to keep the tens of billions of dollars in annual aid flowing. The troops, on the other hand, daily encounter villagers who will not warn them about Taliban-planted booby traps or roadside bombs, who obviously want them to leave, who relish the abject squalor in which they live and who appear to value the lives of their animals above those of their women. When our Soldiers and Marines hear, yet again, that they need to “respect Afghan culture,” they must want to puke up their rations.

    …

    Right now, our troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don’t know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it’s virtuous to rob the Americans blind).

    What are our goals? What is our strategy? We’re told, endlessly, that things are improving in Afghanistan, yet, ten years ago, a U.S. Army general, unarmed, could walk the streets of Kabul without risk. Today, there is no city in Afghanistan where a U.S. general could stroll the streets. We may not have a genius for war, but we sure do have a genius for kidding ourselves.

    Personally I’d swap out much of the “Generals” with “politicians”.

    He also goes into the Robert Bales incident but that’s really just a foil for a bigger point he’s trying to make, be it right or wrong. Give it a read, it’s worth the 10 minutes of your life. I promise.

  • Gertz: Coup in China?

    If it was anyone except Bill Gertz, I wouldn’t even mention it, but in his column today “Inside the Ring” in the Washington Times, Gertz says that bloggers are reporting gunfire and tanks in the streets in Beijing near the Politburo;

    The Internet discussions included photos posted online of tanks and other military vehicles moving around Beijing.

    The reports followed the ouster last week of senior Politburo member and Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, who was linked to corruption, but who is said to remain close to China’s increasingly nationalistic military.

    Chinese microblogging sites Sina Weibo, QQ Weibo, and the bulletin board of the search engine Baidu all reported “abnormalities” in Beijing on the night of March 19.

    Of course, Chinese censors removed the comments on blogs soon after they posted. It’s good that the Chinese are preoccupied with their own problems for a minute or two.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for the link.

  • London Review of Books: “Lone gunman not the exception”

    Again one thing that is nice about having many different people on Facebook is that I get a broader view of what is being said around the web. In this case comes from the website called London Review of Books. In this article by Tariq Ali called “The Not So Lone Gunman” goes to paint every Solider as another crazy GI gun spree waiting to happen.

    In most colonial wars people are arrested, tortured at random and killed. Not even a façade of legality is considered necessary. The ‘lone’ American gunman who butchered innocents in Afghanistan in the early hours of Sunday morning was far from being an exception. For this is not the act of a deranged maniac killing schoolchildren in an American city. The ‘lone’ killer is a sergeant in the US army. He’s not the first and won’t be the last to kill like this.

    It seems by this being in the US Army is worse then being a deranged maniac killer. Good to know. It gets better.

    The Russian occupation of Afghanistan also witnessed ‘lone gunmen’ behaving in this fashion, but better-educated than many of their US counterparts they would write about the whys and wherefores in anguished diaries after they had been withdrawn

    Yep lets through in the dumb GI meme while we are at it.

    The ‘enemy’ is not hidden. It is the public. So wiping out women and children is part of the war. Helicopter gunships, bomber jets and drones are more effective killers than ‘lone’ gunmen.

    So were we have been conducting a massive kill all women and children campaign since 2001? I thing that anyone that ever did a Combat Air Patrol over Afghanistan would be quick to disagree. But he don’t let reality disprove another baby killer meme. I am not even sure how to respond to the last paragraph outside of profanity. I wonder if anyone here can do any better.

    So what is to be done? Get out now. These wars that dehumanise the ‘enemy’ also dehumanise the citizens of warmongering nations. We are made to live in a state of ignorance, but by our apathy contribute to making sure that such a state continues indefinitely. The individual gunman will soon disappear from our thoughts and we can then settle down to the routine killings that take place every day, carried out collectively on the orders of politicians that we elect.