War Handwavium

Israel is channelling the Ents from Lord of the Rings: Don’t be hasty. The government is working on a bill that

is seen as a boost to those opposing Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights under a future peace deal with Syria.

The bill oppposes FUTURE peace with Syria. Wouldn’t want peace to accidentally break out, dontchaknow. If peace is going to happen, it must have at least a majority approval of Israel’s government.

Yeah, Israel. Go you.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009129132730663827.html

7 December1953, Iranians protested the overthrow of their democratically elected government by the US and British and the installation of a puppet government in the form of the dictator that was the Shah of Iran.

Three students were killed that day and 7 December became known as “Student Day” in Iran. After the Shah was finally overthrown in the Iraninan revolution of 1979, the country swung from a secular dictatorship under the Shah to a religious dictatorship under the Ayatollah. In the 90’s, “Student Day” became an occasion to protest for social and political freedoms.

And yesterday was Student Day in Iran and thousands of students have taken to the streets to protest Ahmadinejad’s election in June.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091277850229658.html

East Jeruselem by international law is Palestinian land that the Palestinians hope to make their capital when (if?) the two-state solution is put into effect.

But Israel’s occupying army has slowly torn down Palestinian homes and built up illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in an attempt to claim ownership of the whole of Jeruselem for Isreal, making a two-state solution nearly impossible.

If anyone’s been paying attention, Jeruselem is considered a holy city to three major religions (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim), but Israel has its sights set on claiming the entire city for itself.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091289319174457.html

For those failing to grasp the situation in Afghanistan, sometimes it helps to try to describe it as plainly as possible, and sometimes it helps to describe it metaphorically using something you’re already familiar with.

Plain explanation: The central government in Afghanistan is corrupt. The president stole the last election. His brother may be on CIA payroll while dealing drugs and guns. The central government provides no benefits for those in the tribal regions. And to get anything done in the bureacracy, one has to resort to bribes at every level. The local warlords see no benefit to supporting the central government, and many see it as nothing more than an American puppet, just like it was a Soviet puppet in the 80’s.

Metaphorical explanation: Seperatists and survivalists in America distrust the Federal Government. They view it as corrupt, they view it as wanting to take their power away, they view it as a threat. America now has a number of private militias who are heavily armed and don’t like the federal government.

Clear so far?

In Afghanistan, American forces have occasionally fired on and killed Afghan civilians. American Predator drones have attacked wedding parties, destroyed houses with children in them, and while the generals talk loudly about the al-queda leaders they’ve killed, they don’t talk so loud about the civilians they’ve killed to get to these leaders.

What’s the metaphorical equivalent for this?

I’m starting to think that maybe the best way to describe this is to equate it to the incident at Ruby Ridge in 1992.

The basic version of Ruby Ridge: The federal government charged Randy Weaver with a weapons violation (alleging he had sold an informant an illegal sawed-off shotgun). The courts sent Weaver a letter informing of his court date, but the letter had the wrong date on it, telling Weaver he was supposed to be in court in March, when the real date was February. When Weaver failed to show up in February, the courts issued a warrant for Weaver’s arrest. Weaver believed there was a conspiracy against him and refused to leave his cabin. Marshall’s tried to talk him out but he refused.

By August, Federal marshalls approached the property at night to install cameras to observe the cabin in preparation for a raid. Weaver’s dogs started barking. Kevin Harris (a friend of Weaver) and Weaver’s son, 14 year old Daniel, came out of the cabin with rifles. The marshall’s retreated for a while, but then set up defensive positions. The exact order isn’t clear, but by the time it was over, a dog, a marshall, and Daniel were all dead.

The next day, the Federal government sent in snipers and armored personel carriers, and the rules of engagement were given as shoot-on-sight any adult with a weapon. A federal sniper shot Randy Weaver in the back and then fired a second shot through a closed door, which ended up striking the wife, Vicki Weaver, in the head killing her, and hitting Randy Weaver in the chest. Vicki was holding a baby when she was shot dead.

Within a few days, the rules of engagement were changed and shoot-on-sight was revoked. Civilian negotiators eventually got the Weavers to surrender by August 30.

The Weaver family filed a wrongful death suit. To avoid trial and a possibly higher settlement, the federal government awarded Randy Weaver a $100,000 settlement and his three daughters $1 million each in August 1995. FBI director Louis Freeh disciplined a number of FBI employees and told a senate hearing “law enforcement overreacted at Ruby Ridge”.

So, now it’s been established that the central government is corrupt and goes around murdering people. At least according to the local tribes.

And what happens as a result?

19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh and a bunch of armed, right-wing extremists bomb the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 innocent people. The attack came on the second anniversary of the Waco Seige, but McVeigh also cited Ruby Ridge as a justification for his attack as well.

Now, expand this to a much larger scale, make the central government completely corrupt and ineffective, turn the local armed militias into warlords and their own private armies, and you have something on par with Afghanistan.

The United States is not going to stop right wing extremists in America by creating more Ruby Ridge type incidents or by creating more Waco type incidents.

And the US isn’t going to achieve any kind of real peace in Afghanistan by bombing wedding parties and killing bystanders.

To stamp out the McVeigh’s in America, the government must operate with the most extreme care to make sure they don’t create more innocent deaths and give some paranoid angry nutjob a warped justification to murder more people.

In Afghanistan, America must operate with extreme care to make sure that we don’t kill civilians and create recruiting posters for the Taliban and Al Queda. But more importantly, and more problematically, America must at some point realize that its very presence as a foreign occupying army is a recruiting poster.

So, Obama’s claimed plan for Afghanistan is to raise US troop levels to 100k or more for a couple years and in that time train several hundred thousand Afghans to be part of a centralized military/police force.

There’s only one problem with that. No wait, there are a LOT of problems with that. But the two biggies are this: First, Afghans don’t think of themselves as Afghans. They think of themselves as whatever tribe they belong to, and they view the central government as nothing more than a puppet imposed by a foreign invading army, which, well, it is. They view themselves as Pashtuns or Hazzaras, and they don’t give a damn about “Afghanistan”, because “Afghanistan” isn’t their country, it’s the label that we are trying to force on them.

The second problem with Obama’s plan is that everyone over there gets stoned on hash and opium on a daily basis. Drugs is a major source of income over there, and its a major passtime for a lot of people over there. It’s part of their culture. It’s also pretty much something to be expected in ANY location where people are living on a few dollars a month.

And we expect to train hundreds of thousands of these tribal people to care about a country that doesn’t exist to them and care about that country more than they care about their own tribe? We expect to create an army that serves the central (and very corrupt) government in Afghanistan out of separate tribal members whose daily pastime is to get high?

These guys may be smoking dope, but Obama is smoking crack if he seriously thinks this plan will work.

More likely what is going to happen is Obama will send the 30k troops, we will create an artificial “victory” condition, declare victory, and withdraw our troops.

The only part of the discussion of Afghan policy more awkwardly missing from the calculations that there is no Afghanistan, is that all the men there– yes, all of them– are stoned all day, every day on the strongest hash (much of it opiated) on God’s earth.

– from Down With Tyranny.

Something else to keep in mind about Afghanistan:

we call them Afghans, and they don’t even call themselves Afghans. They’re Tajiks or they’re Pashtuns, or they’re Hazzaras or someone else. The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.

–Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL)

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/10/alan-grayson-explains-best-policy-for.html

Via digby:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/everybody-must-get-stoned-by-digby.html

Matthew Hoh is the first known US official to resign over the strategy of the Afghanistan conflict.

here:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/200912212640413208.html

Year: troop levels in Afghanistan (year: troop levels in Vietnam)

2001: 1,300 (1959: 760)

2002: ? (1960: 900)

2003: 10,000 (1961: 3,025)

2004: 17,000 (1962: 11,300)

2005: 20,000 (1963: 16,300)

2007: 26,000 (1964: 23,300)

2008: 31,000 (1965: 184,300)

2009: 82,000 (1966: 385,300) (Obama sent 20,000 in the summer and approved 30,000 in December)

General McChrystal’s 2009 report estimates Afghanistan will need 500,000 troops over the next 5 years.

2010: ? (1967: 485,600)

2011: ? (1968: 536,100)

2012: ? (1969: 475,200)

2013: ? (1970: 334,600)

2014: ? (1971: 156,800)

McCrystal’s 2009 report estimates that troop withdrawal will occur around this time.

2015: ? (1972: 24,200)

2016: ? (1973: 50)

Anyone else see a pattern???

http://www.warhw.com/2009/08/10/us-troop-levels-in-afghanistan-by-year/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/U.S._Troop_levels_in_Vietnam_War

In January, Obama supported the release of photos showing Americans torturing prisoners. By May, Obama had reversed his position, signing into law a specific exemption preventing the photos from being made public. In November, a US court overturned a lower court’s decision to release the photos, saying the new law needed to be taken into account.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/principles-by-digby-what-is-lesson-here.html