Maybe you can help me with this. I’m having a reading comprehension problem or something. First, read these initial four paragraphs of a story at the top of the front page of today’s New York Times:
LOY KAREZ, Afghanistan — When Haji Lalai Mama, the 60-year-old tribal elder in these parts, gamely tried to organize a village defense force against the Taliban recently, he had to do it with a relative handful of men and just three rifles. "We were patrolling and ready," he recalled.
But they were not ready enough. The Taliban surprised them under cover of darkness by using a side road. One villager was killed, and 10 others were wounded by a grenade. Two Taliban fighters were captured in the clash. The rest disappeared into the night.
The men at Loy Karez were exceptional in making a stand at all. Few in southern Afghanistan are ready to stand up to the Taliban, at least not without greater support or benefits from the Afghan government.
In fact, four years after the Taliban were ousted from power by the American military, their presence is bigger and more menacing than ever, say police and government officials, village elders, farmers and aid workers across southern Afghanistan.
OK, now, let’s review the facts as related about the incident with which the story leads:
- An old Afghan man bravely decides to organize his village’s defenses against Taliban raiders. All he can muster is "a relative handful" of fighters with only three rifles among them.
- The enemy achieves tactical surprise and outflanks the defenders.
- When the shooting is over, the Taliban is not in possession of the village. They have apparently — and I say "apparently" because of the sketchiness of the details — been driven away, with one villager killed and 10 wounded. Two Taliban have been captured, and the rest "disappeared into the night."
So please explain to me, how is it that Haji Lalai Mama and his plucky band "were not ready enough?" It sounds to me like they were not only plenty ready, but flexible and tough. It sounds to me like they just plain outfought the Taliban. You pretty much have to overwhelm an enemy to capture two of them and run the rest off.
So it was a defeat because, before fleeing into the night like a scalded dog, one of the raiders managed to heave a grenade, killing one and wounding several others (or maybe the one killed was a separate incident; it’s hard to tell)? How do you figure? By what standard of post-battle assessment is that a defeat for the village? Sure, you don’t want to lose anybody, but come on.
For that assessment to be valid by a common sense standard, "But they were not ready enough" would have to be followed by an account of how the defenders were wiped out, their weapons taken, the village’s food stocks stolen or burned, most of the men killed, several of the women raped, and half the homes destroyed. Or something like that. Maybe the women wouldn’t have been raped, but stoned to death instead, these being religious fanatics and all. But you know what I mean.
If you don’t know what I mean, and you think that anecdote perfectly illustrates the overall problem of folks in southern Afghanistan not being "ready to stand up to the Taliban," please explain, so that I can understand, too. The overall problem may be just as the story indicates, but if so, that was a lousy anecdote to use to make the point.
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Your assumption is that Taliban’s immediate objective is to take control of the village. I think that it was more likely to make the village an example: don’t try to organize against us or we’ll kill you. One village paid the price. The rest probably got the message.
The story makes it plain that the villagers were poorly armed and entirely dependent upon themselves for arms and security. This isn’t the kind of situation that leads to a stable democratic government in the face of a well-organized and determined enemy force.
Put it together with the apparently flourishing narcotics trade and the resurgence of the Taliban. Dubya’s big talk yesterday in Afghanistan sounds familiarly like “all hat and no cattle.”
It doesn’t matter whether the Taliban wanted to occupy the village. The villagers still captured two while the rest fled. Sounds sort of like a rout to me, with the good guys doing the routing.
This is a defeat only if you accept the pre-9/11 U.S. definition, which goes: “One casualty on our side, and we’ve lost.” Consequently, a single, reasonably accurate sniper could stop the most powerful military in the world. But that was then.
The Patrol being suprised and ambushed is how I took the ‘not ready enough’ line.
Intelligence is a major part of any conflict, and if they ewre suprised, ther were not ‘ready’
In the next Paragraph the reporter then points out that the fighters themselfs were ‘ exceptional’. They were pusing that term in praise of their efforts to stand up, but it also applies to the combat efforts.
I will also point out that you made an assumption that I suspect isn’t valid. I doubt the Taliban wanted the village. suspect they just wanted to confront the patrol, to teach them a lesson about what happens when you do try to stand up.
I hope the leason was learned by the taliba. but I would nbot bet that way.
Also, RTH, you emphasize the point of the story overall, which I haven’t disputed. My assertion was that that was a lousy anecdote with which to illustrate that point.
Don’t you know? Everything that happens while Bush is in office is a defeat, regardless of the facts.
It may be due to Democrats bungling everything they touched with the military, so they cannot recognize success or admit it.
Hard to say, Brad, if it is that bad for the Taleban. Things in the East are never what they seem. I do know that the Taleban (to quote someone familiar with the situation) are “interested in raiding, intimidating, and creating
an atmosphere of discontent among the population against the government.”
They move around in big groups. They’ve got small little bands, sometimes even lone suicide bombers. They aren’t interested in taking over villages.
You’d be surprised sometimes who considers what a victory. The point is, the cultures are often so different from ours, we don’t really have a clue as to what is really going on.
In that last post, the third to the last sentence of the first paragraph should read, “they don’t move around in big groups.”
It looks like ordinary bad writing to me. Later in the article I read this comment:
‘A police commander in Kandahar, Mullah Gul, who has been fighting the Taliban for four years, described them as the black sheep of the family. “They are a problem,” he said, “but it is not something that we cannot handle among ourselves.” ‘
Not quite as desperate sounding as the first four paragraphs, is it? Maybe Ms. Gall just needs a good editor to have told her to keep a consistent tone throughout the article. Or maybe she took the easy out of presenting a “balanced” piece, which I find many news writers prefer to the effort of an objective piece. Truly objective writing is actually pretty difficult. At least I find it to be so.
There is a subtle lesson in this for all of those in the US who would disarm the population. The Taliban, essentially the Afghan equivalent of the German brown shirts, come into a village and are rebuffed by a population that at least had some arms to defend themselves. Some say that can never happen here, but with a disarmed US population, all bets are off. Many may not realize it, but this is a big part of the agenda of the left. Only recently, Mayor Nagin and the NO police arbitrarily decided to disarm the local citizenry “to protect them”. So it can happen here.
Actually, Herb, I wouldn’t be all that surprised at “who considers what a victory.” I’m familiar with the difference between the Clausewitzian notion of war and Sun Tzu approach. Roughly — very roughly — Clausewitz is embraced by the West, Sun Tzu (consciously or not) by the East. The Western notion, inherited from the ancient Greeks, holds that you stand and fight until one side or the other has clearly won, and it’s over. The Eastern approach is to hit and run away, hit and run away, nibbling at your enemy’s heels, never exactly winning or losing, until you wear them down.
Yes, I’m quite sure those Taliban did not mean to occupy the village, and that their purpose was to sow terror and discontent. But the villagers drove them off, and they did so in a way that there should be little wringing of hands about their ability to defend themselves. They were hurt, but not defeated. Far from it.
And yes, I’m looking at this in Western terms. I’m sure the Taliban see it another way. I’m also sure the surviving raiders are nursing their wounds and plotting their next hit-and-run. That said, there seems little question that in that little battle, they got licked — which was my point. The villagers were “ready enough.”
StrategyPage frequently updates a link-less Afghanistan roundup page. Its summaries indicate that the Taliban are an annoyance but not a major threat.
Rantburg, a site run by an old Army intelligence colleague of mine, focuses on the War on Terror and specializes in items from the foreign press. Today’s entries on Afghanistan focus on attack against Canadian forces. It appears the easiest way to search is by using Google with Rantburg as the site. Other than the witty pix often attached to posts, Rantburg’s other main virtue is that you can view summaries by date. Wednesday’s edition mentioned Bush’s visit and the prison riots.
Saddam Had WMD
2/24/2006
Now that Leno and Letterman have had their way with Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident and the port controversy, maybe we can get back to something really important — like Saddam’s WMD program.
Yes, the linchpin of opposition to the Iraq War — never really strong to begin with — has taken some real hits in recent weeks. And “Bush lied” — the anti-war mantra about the president, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction — looks the most battered.
Inconveniently for critics of the war, Saddam made tapes in his version of the Oval Office. These tapes landed in the hands of American intelligence and were recently aired publicly.
The first 12 hours of the tapes — there are hundreds more waiting to be translated — are damning, to say the least. They show conclusively that Bush didn’t lie when he cited Saddam’s WMD plans as one of the big reasons for taking the dictator out.
Nobody disputes the tapes’ authenticity. On them, Saddam talks openly of programs involving biological, chemical and, yes, nuclear weapons.
War foes have long asserted that Saddam halted his WMD programs in the wake of his defeat in the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam’s abandonment of WMD programs was confirmed by subsequent U.N. inspections.
Again, not true. In a tape dating to April 1995, Saddam and several aides discuss the fact that U.N. inspectors had found traces of Iraq’s biological weapons program. On the tape, Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, is heard gloating about fooling the inspectors.
“We did not reveal all that we have,” he says. “Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct.”
There’s more. Indeed, as late as 2000, Saddam can be heard in his office talking with Iraqi scientists about his ongoing plans to build a nuclear device. At one point, he discusses Iraq’s plasma uranium program — something that was missed entirely by U.N. weapons inspectors combing Iraq for WMD.
This is particularly troubling, since it indicates an active, ongoing attempt by Saddam to build an Iraqi nuclear bomb.
“What was most disturbing,” said John Tierney, the ex- FBI agent who translated the tapes, “was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission (or UNSCOM, the group set up to look into Iraq’s WMD programs).”
Perhaps most chillingly, the tapes record Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz talking about how easy it would be to set off a WMD in Washington. The comments come shortly after Saddam muses about using “proxies” in a terror attack.
9-11, anyone?
Brad, you and Mike really ought to charge tuition, you know. I mean I had heard of Clausewitz, but I wouldn’t have known him from Frederick the Great. And Sun Tzu? — wouldn’t have had a clue.
I’m determined to read through Will and Ariel Durant one of these days . . . .
Brad, you and Mike really ought to charge tuition, you know. I mean I had heard of Clausewitz, but I wouldn’t have known him from Frederick the Great. And Sun Tzu? — wouldn’t have had a clue.
I’m determined to read through Will and Ariel Durant one of these days . . . .
Stop reading those silly “newspapers”,listen to this instead:
Porest: Tourrorists! – (Abduction)
Porest
Fourth full-length release from Oakland, California’s one-man detonator,
Porest. Tourrorists! is a diabolical folk power-stew told through swirling
Mid-Eastern psych-rockers, contraband cut-ups, illegal pop epics, instrumental
songs of political sabotage and clever tales about travel, terror and more. This
album is a lit-fuse, bound to be banned! Discover the awful truth about becoming
a U.S. citizen. Bear witness to the tragic disco anthem of a Guantanamo escapee.
Discover the inner-secrets of an emerging global cannibalism trade and get
powerful information on some of the most exciting terror cells operating both in
and outside of the United States today! Also featured are special musical
guests including Finland’s Aavikko.
Also, RTH, you emphasize the point of the story overall, which I haven’t disputed. My assertion was that that was a lousy anecdote with which to illustrate that point.
What a very “pre-9/11” comment of you, Brad.
(And, how, hmmm… should I say “dense” or just “unperceptive”… of you not to recognize the whole pre/post 9/11 meme is a Rovian mechanism to instill the belief that Bush should be allowed extra-legal and unconstituiontal powers. But, I digress.)
In the 9/11 attacks we killed every one of the attackers. Yet, five years later, Americans are still traumatized. While the parallels aren’t exact, I think that they’re close enough.
9/11 wasn’t an attack meant to destroy tactically important targets (although destroying the Pentagon, White House or Capitol would certainly have impacted us severely.) Killing one resisting man out of a small village was well worth the price of two captured Taliban.
It got the terror message across to those villagers and people in the surrounding villages: the government can’t/won’t protect you and we can kill you at our leisure.
The VC used similar methods in ‘Nam very effectively. They didn’t have to occupy the village to have it under their control.
Was it a lousy anecdote? Not if you’re at all familiar with insurgent warfare as illustrated by numerous post-WWII conflicts. I think that it perfectly illustrates at least one reason why the Afghan government is losing to the Taliban.
Of course, we obviously can’t expect Bush’s neo-con ideologues to accept plain facts that don’t comport with their philosophy.
Now I really have to hurl, having heard the Bushites use the “pre-9/11” cudgel to beat anyone who dares object to their incredibly stupid actions. (Test ban treaty, anyone? Not after yesterday— another victim of neo-con stupidity.)
Sadly, I had expected more insight from you.
Yeah,like the plain fact that John Dean pointed out-that for the first time in history, we have a sitting president who has admitted to impeachable crimes.
Hey, Lee, any media outlet besides NewsMax, Faux News and the other RNC propaganda outlets picking up on these Saddam/WMD “revelations?”
Didn’t think so…must be part of the so-called Liberal Media conspiracy of silence against Dear Leader, huh.
Wait! A space alien just told me telepahtically that Elvis drove the WMDs personally to Syria.
Gotta call the National Enquirer right away!
Ready to Hurl –
The 9/11 attackers killed themselves to effect the attack, no? With the possible exception of the folks aboard Flight 93, we did not kill them.
But name-calling and whatever aside, I’m interested in your digression:
Specifically, are you engaging in rhetorical excess or do you believe that the 9/11 attack was caused by the Bush administration?
I ask because I find the fixation on Rove unparalleled. There are a number of conspiracy theories surrounding that guy named Karl, and I wonder if you subscribe to one or more. What’s interesting about him is that he’s quite straightforward in presenting his analyses and in many cases describing his initiatives.
I think that the Democrats have finally caught on. While many Democrats feigned umbrage at Rove’s recent address to Republicans in which he stated that security would be the Republicans’ winning card in the upcoming election — the Dem’s spin was that Rove was casting aspersions their way — they do seem of late to be trumpeting their security credentials and using the Dubai Ports thingy to move to Bush’s right. How well this plays to the Dem’s base, their fundraisers, and to the public at large remains to be seen.
I do agree that the bad guys are quite adept at information warfare / psychological operations / propaganda, exploiting a huge impact from one of their events. But they do get significant help.
The following isn’t related to this post, but I want you (especially Brad) to read a report by Jenny Hogan: Why it is hard to share the wealth. This report backs up the conservative view of wealth re-distribution. Here is a quote by Victor Yakovenko, one of the founding fathers of econophysics:
“It (the economic gas model theory) suggests that any kind of policy will be very inefficient,” says Yakovenko. It would be very difficult to impose a policy to redistribute wealth “short of getting Stalin”, says Yakovenko, who will talk in Kolkata next week.”
This report pretty much says that the only way that poor people can improve their lot is by increasing their savings rate.
I strongly encourage you (again Brad-please take a look at this if you get a chance) to listen to a lecture given by Yakovenko and to view his accompanying slide presentation. I could only get the “download whole audio file” link to work. Yakovenko has a heavy accent, but boy does he have an important theory and a bunch of empirical evidence to back up his arguments. Don’t worry about the math on the slides. Anyone can easily understand the presentation by viewing the graphs and listening to the theory.
If nothing else, please view the following slide: Thermal machine in the world economy
Since South Carolina universities are going to become research universities, I think it would be a great idea to further develop econophysics right here in our state. Econophysics can accurately explain the statistical dynamics of trade, income, and wealth. If we can understand what is really going in the large global economy, then maybe we can make policies to assuage the effects of Globalization.
I edited out the main link by accident. Here is the main link.
Mark –
The “conservative view of wealth re-distribution” is that one doesn’t. (This is of course the libertarian view; take that, add culture, and you have the conservative.) The government taxes only the bare minimum to provide national defense, conduct a frugal foreign policy, and do a few more things. Wealth re-distribution happens when government gives funds to an individual with few or no strings attached.
Income and wealth redistribution presuppose good folks who really do know what’s best for all of us and establish an economic plan that’s good for all. When plan after plan fails, folks start looking for someone to who can make a plan work. Hayek’s (this one, not the pretty one point in The Road to Serfdom is that a planned economy inevitably leads to the call for a strong man who can make the plan work.
As for the conclusion “the only way that poor people can improve their lot is by increasing their savings rate” is the second part of the answer. The first part is that if poor people did just three things, the poverty rate would be a fraction of what it currently is. Those three things are:
If they could postpone marriage and having kids a bit longer, they could attend college (technical or four-year) to accumulate more knowledge and skills, thereby increasing their value to prospective employers. Throughout their careers, they need to save as best they can, to build their own wealth.
Finally, they need to avoid those stupid things that harm earning potential and dissipate wealth: criminal activity, substance abuse, high-stakes gambling, and get-rich-quick schemes.
Good advice, Mike C, but it falls on deaf ears when the audience is a socialist who wants to take money from others, rather than earn it himself.
think your story has potential but needs some improvement. I’ve got a few suggestions, and if you give them a try, I’d be happy to remove this flag.