Quagmire Watch

The Taliban are promising that they are going to ratchet up the violence, the bombings, suicide bombing and assassinations in response to the US surge. Do we believe them?

Out-powered in rural areas by military weaponry, fighters there will carry machine guns and attempt to sharpen the results of their ambushes, but they will rely more on land mines and improvised explosive devices, sources say.

Inside the city, insurgents plan to stage more frequent multi-bomber suicide attacks and targeted assassinations. Government officials and civilians who appear to be in favour of the current government regime will be hunted with new intensity.

“If a man or woman is working with the government, or they are supporters of the government or of the foreigners, we want to kill them,” said one Taliban organizer speaking through a Pashto translator. “We want to put the pressure on Kandahar city. And we want to dissolve the government.”

(...)

How locals respond to troops remains to be seen. In the city, confidence in both government and coalition forces has waned, and military officials acknowledge research confirms the forces' sunken popularity.

Their approval ratings have not been helped by a spike in large-scale violence over the course of the past month. Militants successfully carried out deadly bombings at the governor's mansion and the provincial council offices. Assassinations have become a daily occurrence, so much so that victims of the gruesome killings only make the news now if they are well-known figures.

(...)

Mullah Masood, Maywand's district leader, said allegiances to militants will not change until foreign stakeholders invest properly in Afghanistan.

“My suggestion is for the foreigner to find work for the common people, the people who are poor,” he said. “Find food for the children. Otherwise, this joining of the people with the Taliban will continue.”

This is definitely a 1969 moment. At the time the Vietnam War was looking unwinnable and the public had turned against it. The Johnson administration were crushed and unpopular. The newly elected Nixon could simply wash his hands of the war and withdraw, with popular support, and without the burden that it was his war. Instead Nixon waffled. He pursued the "peace with honor" policy, that they wouldn't just up and leave without concessions from the North Vietnamese. So the war that wasn't winnable dragged on, until 1975 and they had to leave in disgrace with the famous helicopter evacuation from the US Embassy.

Obama is in the same situation right now. It appears that he is choosing to drag it on. It becomes his war now. Not to be too cynical, but it's easy to see that this will not to turn around, and we'll have a nice clean victory. Does anybody really believe it will? It sickens me that we have to watch this unfold because failure can't be admitted. More money and lives will be destroyed over this point of honor.

On Obama Firing the GM CEO

Mickey Kaus makes a great point at his blog at Slate today:

Rick Wagoner = Ngo Dinh Diem? Discuss. After visibly defenstrating GM CEO RIck Wagoner, and moving to replace the board of directors, won't Obama now "own" the GM problem? If the company shuts down in the near future, costing tens of thousands of blue collar jobs, it will be under executives implicitly or explicitly chosen by Obama. It will be Obama's failure, not simply GM's failure, no?

This marks my first "Mickey Kaus" post. About five years ago, Kaus was probably the most cited blogger. I guess one post doesn't entitle me to call him "The Mickster" or simply "Mickey." Maybe in a few years I'll have the confidence to make the same post, but make it one line:

Wagoner = Diem? Mickey here. or

Obama firing GM CEO a good idea? Not according to the Mickster.

Solutions to the Women Shortage in China

The Economist reports that gangs are kidnapping Vietnamese women and smuggling them into China to be brides:

The kidnapping has been going on for some time, and locals talk of a number of cases so far this year. The abductions follow a pattern: a Hmong girl is wooed by an out-of-towner—whether from Vietnam or China is not clear—who speaks her language. She is lured to a rendezvous to be drugged and smuggled into China, probably near Lao Cai, about an hour’s drive from Sapa. Tall, pretty girls are said to be particular targets.

One 18-year-old recently managed to get back home to tell her tale after a four-day ordeal. Held captive in China, she escaped through a window and contacted the Chinese police, who returned her to Vietnam. Most do not escape. One of those kidnapped last month was a married woman with a son; friends fear her family may never see her again.

The most ambitious and possibly the most disastrous social engineering policy in the history of humanity was China's "One Child" policy. Because of the preference for male children there is now a shortage of women. There is a reason that nature divides us 50-50 between men and women. Tinkering with that balance is going to cause more and more problems.

Another Foreign Intervention Friday

Public opinion, and even the Obama administration itself are facing up to the fact that Afghanistan is an unwinnable situation. They are going to attempt a "surge" with more troops but admit that ultimately they want to train and hand it over to the Afghan army and get the hell out of there. The "surge" is to mow the lawn, and use the weed-whacker on those hard to get places. Make this effort one more time and get out while there is still order.

What about the people still serving over there? No doubt, people will lose their lives. Why? For a stalling tactic before inevitable withdrawal? Hardly a noble cause. Fred Kaplan in Slate Magazine gave his report on the situation.

Unlike those who got us into Vietnam, today's top officials—including President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates—at least see the specter. Both have emphasized that their goals in Afghanistan are limited; daydreams of turning the place into a democratic republic—"some central Asian Valhalla," as Gates snorted in recent hearings—are over. Gates further stated at those hearings, before the Senate armed services committee, that he would endorse his commanders' request for three additional brigades—but that he'd be "deeply skeptical" of subsequent requests for more. The fighting needs to be done mainly by Afghan troops, he said, adding that if the Afghan people begin to see it as an American war, "we will go the way of other imperial occupiers."

Isn't this immoral? If they know it's a lost cause they should begin immediate withdrawal.

Richard Nixon hummed and hawed on a lost cause in Vietnam when he took office in 1969. He could have ended it quickly rightly saying it was not a war he started and popular opinion favours pulling out. Instead, it took him five years and almost 25,000 US troop deaths and billions of dollars before leaving the war to the South Vietnamese in 1973. The country ended up being lost within a little more than a year, with the famous helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy, panic evacuation in 1975. (I honestly think I remember this footage when I was five years old, but maybe I've seen too many documentaries.)

I cringe to think Obama intends to send an additional 30,000 troops and ramping up the effort in a lost cause. As Yogi Berra would say: It's deja vu all over again.

No Clear Goals or Strategy in Afghanistan

Ralph Peters has an excellent op-ed in the New York Post today. I don't agree with everything he says but the bottom line is important. Vietnam-like the US seem to be fighting without a big picture strategy and are not setting goals.

Will Afghanistan be President Obama's Vietnam, with Pakistan as Cambodia on steroids?

I like that line: "Pakistan as Cambodia on steroids."

The bitter truth (as in Vietnam) is that we still haven't decided what we really want to achieve. We babble about nation-building where there's no nation to build, just a premedieval mosaic of tribes that hate each other. And the Taliban are homeboys.

We want Afghans to be like us. They never will be. (Good morning, Vietnam!)

If we want to alter the strategic environment amid a foreign population, we must be clear on three things: what we want to achieve, what the target population wants - and how much of what we want that population's willing to accept.

Washington is vague and naive on all three points.

Another 30,000 US troops? Fine. As long as they have clear, achievable missions. More nonmilitary aid? OK. Tell us specifically what it will accomplish. And mark the bills.

We can't bear any more of the Bush-Clinton-Bush approach of sending troops and mountains of aid in the nebulous hope that something good will happen.

Can anyone in the Obama administration articulate what we intend to achieve in Afghanistan? The Bush folks couldn't. I doubt this bunch can either.

I agree with most of what he says, but later he thinks we should fight tougher and meaner. This is true but then you run into the "we had to destroy her to save her" paradox.

I've been posting a lot on this issue recently because I feel the issue is being swept under the rug by the government. Recently, diplomat Richard Holbrooke was appointed by Secretary of State Clinton as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the press conference he was asked about the Pakistan issue, to paraphrase what he said: "That's a complicated issue that I can't get into." Oh.

The lessons of Vietnam are within recent memory, was nothing learned by them? The one lesson they did learn was to stifle the press. This is why this conflict has dragged on so long before people started noticing that it wasn't going well.

Book Review: Devil's Guard by George Robert Elford

Amazon.com

This book is popular amongst US troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Published in 1971, it’s supposedly a non-fictional account of an ex-Waffen SS officer who joined the French Foreign Legion and was sent to fight the Viet Minh guerrillas in the jungles of Indochina in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. It’s clear when reading it that it is not a true account, but fiction. I speculate that the book was written specifically for the US combat trooper, then still in Vietnam fighting the Vietcong guerrillas. The American author recognizes that what made it so difficult to fight that war for the GI was that you were hampered by rules of engagement: 1. Forbidden to engage civilians as they harbor or openly support the guerillas. 2. Forbidden to cross the border to enemy safe havens and supply depots in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Fictionally, to solve those problems, enter Hans Wagmeuller, an SS officer, fighting in the first Vietnam War, not bound by any rules of decency and commanding a specially formed German battalion (The Devil’s Guard) for the Légion étrangère. The French, desperate to fight for their colonies, turned a blind eye to the pasts of these former enemy soldiers and possible war criminals; set loose in the jungle and with experience fighting Russian “partisan” fighters, these men weren't going to flinch:

I was resolved to show the enemy that terror, brutality, and cold blooded murder were not their monopoly, a Communist privilege, and that at least my battalion was ready to pay them tit for tat. They understood no other language.

“The French are great fort builders,” the Germans laugh. Wagmeuller observes the result of French garrison mentality - supply convoys getting ambushed, outposts being overrun - and fashions his own unit to fight like guerillas. They move fast and quietly in the jungles and hills and unleash carnage and death on countless communist camps, fighters and hostile villages. If you are squeamish about such things, don’t read it because this is full-on ‘war porn’. (To use the term from “Jarhead” about troops watching combat movies to see the action, not for the anti-war moral message.)

The 900 man brigade view all civilians, even in French controlled areas, as potential enemies. Never get fooled by the peasants in the rice patties because they’re more than likely to report your position or even directly engage you when your guard is down.

It shows the futility of fighting these kinds of engagements. If you leave them alone, you could get killed - there were plenty of grenade lobbying grannys, mothers and children. But alternatively what are you going to do, kill off the whole population? The villagers themselves might not like the communists, but opposition is sure death. Ho Chi Minh and his communists seized power by force and aggressively indoctrinated the people.

Back then, the north was technically still controlled by the French and headquarters was in Hanoi, not Saigon. Newly victorious Mao Tse Tung in China was a vital ally for the Viet Minh. They provided border area safe havens, as well as money, arms and military advisors.

After a devastating hit to a French garrison, courtesy of a well known Chinese in command of a Viet Minh division, Wagmeuller decides he’s going to covertly cross the Chinese border to destroy two enemy bases. French high command are aware of it, but pretend not to be and certainly would never approve it (wink). The key is that not a single prisoner or body can be left behind as proof of the incursion, or it would cause an international incident. The Chinese and Viet Minh, comfortable in their sanctuary are caught off guard, and the Germans manage to inflict major casualties, and destroy bases, trucks and supplies, on their commando mission.

You can see why the book was as popular back then with US troops, as it is now. In 2009, it’s a different time and place (the Middle East) but they’re fighting against guerrillas with, as the saying went in Vietnam, “One hand tied behind their backs” - fighting an enemy that mixes in with civilian populations, and who are supplied from over borders that they themselves aren’t allowed to cross. It's hard to win a war that way and Wagmeuller himself admits in his day, in the long term, the situation was unwinnable.

The Viet Minh don’t destroy the Devil’s Guard but the liberal western press does. The communists were master media manipulators. Here’s an interesting observation by Wagmeuller (that is very relevant to today’s news):

When the Viet Minh was unable to claim any success by force of arms, the commissars always secured at least a political victory. Their formula was a simple one. Had their peasant -cum-guerrillas managed to rout a French garrison, the Communist victory was widely publicized. But when the Legion squashed them somewhere, the fallen terrorists were stripped of military equipment, their corpses were rearranged (often with arms and legs bound with ropes), then photographed and displayed to friend and foe alike as the” innocent victims of a French massacre.

The war ends for them before the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, and the absolute loss of Indochina for the French.

Overall the book is very interesting but the comic book fiction elements are irksome: They always have plenty of ammo, even on weeks long jungle marches, hence plenty of shooting and explosions for actions scenes; The plans, except for a few minor contingencies always work. (Which in combat is highly unlikely. As Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.”); The enemy always fall into traps and are generally stupid. It’s a more sophisticated version of Sgt. Rock.

It’s a cool idea. I think of the 60’s and 70’s motorcycle gang books, like “Chopper” that they produced in Britain. That too was under the guise of non-fiction but had the action/adventure and criminality/rebelliousness that readers were looking for. I think the writer "George Robert Elford" tapped into a great idea: The ultimate combat book, set in a theatre that the Americans were then fighting in, and dealing with real issues and tactics that were involved.