Jim’s Blog

Mark Steyn brilliantly skewers our Afghanistan policy.  He primarily blames Obama, though the rot set in under Bush.

Why would Putin, Ahmadinejad or the ChiComs take Barack Obama seriously when even a footling client such as Hamid Karzai can flip him the finger?

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The toppling of the Taliban was an operation conducted with extraordinary improvised ingenuity and a very light U.S. footprint. Special forces on horseback rode with the Northern Alliance and used GPS to call in air strikes: they’ll be teaching it in staff colleges for decades to come. But then the Taliban scuttled out of town, and a daring victory settled into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation, and then corroded further under the pressure of the usual transnational poseurs. After 2003, Afghanistan became the good war, the one everyone claimed to have supported all along, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their “principled moral opposition” to Bush’s illegal adventuring against Saddam. Afghanistan was everything Iraq wasn’t: UN-approved, NATO-backed, EU-compliant. It’d be tough for even the easiest nickel ’n’ dime military incursion to survive that big an overdose of multilateral hogwash, and the Afghan campaign didn’t. Instead of being an operation to kill one of the planet’s most concentrated populations of jihadist terrorists, it decayed into half-hearted nation-building in which a handful of real allies took the casualties while the rest showed up for the group photo. The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country—Turkey—and within a year they’d all gone back. Those 600 troops and three helicopters made no practical difference, but the effort expended on that transnational fig leaf certainly contributed to America’s disastrous reframing of its interests in Afghanistan.

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And so here we are, nine years, billions of dollars and many dead soldiers later, watching the guy we’ve propped up with Western blood and treasure make peace overtures to the Taliban’s most virulently anti-American and pro-al-Qaeda faction

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Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.

Israel is blockading Gaza.  Activists attempted to force the blockade with pathetically inadequate weapons.  Perhaps the intent was to suffer some pathetic casualties, that they could then whine about, or perhaps they were just stupid.

If you are going to engage soldiers and marines, you should either take no weapons at all other than moral force, which may not be all that effective, but will not get you killed, or else weapons capable of doing some good.  Hamas tried weapons that should have been capable of doing some good, but the Israeli Defense Forces proved otherwise.  This leaves moral force only.  If you take a knife to a gunfight, as these activists did, the appropriate response is to laugh at them and piss on their graves.

As a result of our defeat, Arab terrorists have moved into Korengal valley. Now Al Quaeda has safe haven in Korengal and their objectives will not be restricted to protecting the freedom of those in Korengal, but destroying our freedom in lands far from Korengal, murdering Jews and Americans, wherever we may be, anywhere in the world.

Here is the Taliban video of their great victory in Korengal valley: (more…)

The US has fled Korengal, Afghanistan, which is now under the uncontested control of the Taliban.

The US created the Kabul government, in order to do good to Afghans, so that they would love us. It attempted to build a road for the people in Korengal valley, so that they would love us. The people of the valley, all of them, promised to kill anyone who worked on the road, and anyone who used the road, and proceeded to do so.

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Bryan Caplan argues for avoiding war.  But bad people are always willing to fight.  If good people are not willing to fight, they will surrender in a succession of small steps, and bad people will rule.  Without England declaring war, the Nazis would have ruled by 1942.  Without Reagan encouraging a multitude of small wars, the communists would have ruled by 1990 (more…)

Fifty eight percent of those polled favor “aggressive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding”  for Umar Farouk.

He should be asked who gave him the bomb, and where they gave him the bomb.  We should then kill everyone in the general vicinity of where the bomb came from.  Not because we cannot afford to lose a few planes and a few passengers every now and then, but because we cannot afford to be successfully coerced by our enemies.

War is hell.  In war, one must kill the innocent.  Those who will not use such means, lose.

It is doubtless more important that the innocent go free than that the guilty be punished.  It is, however, considerably less important than that evil does not gain power over us.

During the Malayan war the British imprisoned everyone who looked Chinese.  That hundreds of thousands of innocent men women and children were temporarily imprisoned  by the British saved them from being enslaved for life by the communists.

We are losing this war:  Observe that honor killings go unpunished in Britain.  We are afraid, we are coerced.  I google the British news for honor killings.  The only ones being prosecuted are the kind that would be prosecuted in Saudi Arabia – those where a male Muslim was killed or non family killed the girl – which type of honor killing is rare and unusual compared to the normal case where extreme coercion by family to control the sexual activity of young girls gets out of hand.  So, we see prosecutions for the rare case (male killed), and no prosecutions for the common case (young girl killed by relatives)

You cannot coexist with a religion that simply is not willing to coexist except on the basis of supremacy. If you try to do so, you get what we have been getting.  Getting your cut throat for unkind reference to Islam slides by imperceptible degrees into full blown Sharia law, which gradual transformation we observe in process along the bloody borders of
Islam.

That is the way Islam conquers.   It not that we cannot afford a few casualties.  It is that we cannot afford the domination.

The counter insurgency planners have presented a clever plan on how they propose to counter Afghan insurgency by building an Afghan nation.

When first I saw slides from this presentation, I assumed them to be parody, but no, they are the real thing.  The people planning this war really are this stupid, crazy, and evil.

COIN experts demonstrating their amazing expertise

There are a great pile of slides, and they all look like the above. Hat tip The Austrian Economists.

I did a search for blog posts linking to this amazing pile of essence of evil madness, to find the New York Times treating it with the solemn respect that one would be ruler of all mankind should give another would be ruler of all mankind. Democracy’s Arsenal also displays the semblance of profound respect for this moronic madness, but from his image selection, his tongue is well and truly in his cheek.

The Taliban have a notorious tendency to mistake the customs of their tribe for the word of God, but at least they do not mistake themselves for God.