It’s not quite MASH but it’s blogging from the war zone. Thanks to Instapundit for this one.
Staff SargentSanchez appears to be almost as heavily armed as our own Perry de Havilland!
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Canada is treating its soldiers disgracefully. The fighting in Afghanistan is not a gentlemen’s game between sportsmen, it is a fight to the death with desperate terrorists. If some dead Al Qaeda/Taliban soldier was posed for a photograph with a cigarette and a placard around his neck saying ‘fuck terrorism’ then I say so what? It is okay to kill a man, to blow a hole in his body with a 50 cal slug, to shoot him dead, at the behest of your government… but not to disrespect the terrorist supporting son of a bitch’s corpse? Ludicrous. April 26th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 In today’s Times, war correspondent Anthony Loyd reports on the current counter-insurgency sweep through an ‘undisclosed’ valley in Afghanistan by British Royal Marines of the 45 Commando battlegroup, called Operation Ptarmigan. He also moans at some length that [emphasis added]:
So he thinks the US and British military are accountable to the press? Interesting concept. Now Tony Loyd is actually a reasonable reporter (he is certainly a million miles from the ludicrous Bob Fisk and his ilk), but such petulant foot stamping on his part is unbecoming. The newspapers have been roasting the US for allowing Al Qaeda and ex-Taliban forces to slip away, and for failing to achieve operational surprise during Operation Anaconda… and now they are going to roast the coalition military for taking operational security seriously? April 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Here is an interesting, much footnoted and rather less upbeat take on Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by Brendan O’Neill on Sp!ked, a site I find useful and maddening in equal measure. There is also an interesting article (also by O’Neill) about the domestic political mess that the hapless Karzai is presiding over called When nation-building destroys. However this last article rather misses a major point: firstly regardless of the occasional ill-advised propaganda blurb by the Americans, they are not there to ‘nation build’ other than en passant… they are there to kill the people responsible for September 11th. If Afghans insist on killing each other, that is primarily a problem for the Afghans. However it does highlight the madness of getting too deeply involved in Afghanistan’s domestic woes as both Dale Amon and I pointed out quite some time ago. April 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I’ve just been perusing the stats in a CNN poll of Americans taken recently and thought this line is worth sharing:
This is perhaps one of the few times in my life I’ve found myself in agreement with 9 out of 10 people, although I’d like to at least think I agree more strongly than most. April 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I sometimes find myself agreeing with Steven Den Beste’s articles but sorry Steven, this is one of the dumbest pieces you have written in a while. When he is right, he is sometimes very right and when he is wrong, he does tend to descend into crude history-by-Hollywood-stereotype. The picture he displays of two Royal Marines sparing with boxing gloves and an automatic weapon toting US soldier in the background is indeed symbolic… of the fact Steven does not know the slightest thing about modern British attitudes to war, British military culture or British military history.
People would think Britain had not won a war in the last 100 years if they got their history by reading what Steven writes, let alone in 1982. The Germans, Austrians, Argentines, Malays, Indonesians, Kenyans, Irish, Italians, French, Turks, Greeks, Japanese, Afghans etc. etc. etc. probably have a rather different take on British military culture. There is a reason Britain won in Malaya during The Emergency and the US lost in Vietnam under similar conditions. Marquis of Queensbury? Get real. Here is a picture I think rather better sums up Britain’s ‘Red and Green War Machine’  Update: April 4th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Academy of Drivelling Idiots is proud to announce its award for Best Writer in a Terrorist-Supporting Role. And the nominations are: Ted Rall for How We Lost Afghanistan “The principal goal of this adventure in imperialistic vengeance, it seems obvious, should be to install a friendly government in Kabul. But we’re winning neither hearts nor minds among either the commoners or the leadership of the current regime apparent” Robert Fisk for The Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People “And then how easy was our failure to recognize the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans or any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.” John Pilger for Inevitable Ring To the Unimaginable “Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims – principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth” Susan Sontag for The Disconnect “The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.” And the winner is…..(rustle, rustle, rustle)…..ROBERT FISK (Whoops, cheers, wild applause) FISK: Thank you. Thank you. I am not worthy of this award. I am not worthy of being so honoured. For I, too, am guilty. I, too, am an opressor (wipes way tear). Save your awards and your honours for all the hapless victims of global capitalism and American imperialism. They are the real heroes and I accept this award on their behalf. I thank you (More whoops, cheers, wild applause, standing ovation)  March 25th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In this report in the Times of India, US reduces reward on Bin Laden, we see the strangest manifestation of the backward bending demand curve I have ever seen!
Example 1: A high price designer ‘name label’ dress is offered at a reduced price… still out of reach of the ‘woman in the street’ buyer. Paradoxically the high end target market buy less of the dresses, presumably because the reduced price indicates it is probably ‘last years design’ (even if not true, the price is used as the primary source of information by the potential purchaser as to ‘what is hot’). Example 2: Soviet made wristwatches, made to uncharacteristically high quality and standards were marketed in Britain in the early 1970’s. They were every bit as good as other high quality wristwatches available at the time but were almost half the price. Even though Soviet products were a relative rarity in the UK, British buyers stayed away in droves, presumably taking the view that any watch that cheap had to be complete rubbish. The Soviets were baffled but on advice from a British consultant raised the price to just below the typical UK price and they stared to sell. Thus, the US is lowering the price on the head on Osama bin Laden in the hope the new level of reward is something rural Afghans can actually relate to in the real world. In each case the specifics are different but price is just a form of information and sometimes if the price of something is unexpectedly high or low, the effects is the opposite of what one might normally expect. That is what I mean by a ‘backward bending demand curve’! Also on reflection, I was thinking of this in terms of the US doing the ‘selling’ of an outsourced service here (terrorist removal)… but I suppose one could argue that this is a backward bending supply curve: the US is offering money in the hope some impoverished Afghan will ‘supply’ a dead or bound-hand-and-foot Osama bin Laden March 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
Yes, I know that the UK has been far and away the most ‘involved’ of the USA’s allies in the war against Al Qaeda, with almost the entire Special Air Service (SAS) being deployed in Afghanistan at one point. But the latest commitment of 1,700 Royal Marine Commandos to a offensively tasked Brigade forming in Afghanistan is a significant step that indicates a much more robust policy of aggressive engagement by Britain. Some libertarians will grimace that the state is sending men far away to march to the sound of an American drum, but I for one am delighted, for the enemy in question is the enemy of modern civilisation itself. I live in a major metropolitan area that would make a lovely target for a small nuclear weapon and thus am of the opinion that the only good Al Qaeda is a dead Al Qaeda and I do not much care where the men armed and equipped with my tax money have to go to find them. Godspeed Gentlemen. The Royal Marines, with their specialised arctic and mountain warfare training and equipment, years of extreme weather training in Norway, air mobility and formidable élan make a very high quality addition to the corkscrew and blowtorch warfare that is to come as the remaining cadres of Taliban/Al Qaeda are exterminated. March 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Over on the excellent blog Flit, Bruce has done a good ‘back of the envelop’ bombing survey that highlights some interesting facets of ‘smart’ bombing vs. ‘dumb’ bombing vs. ‘real indiscriminate’ bombing (i.e Al Qaeda). The article pointing to Bruce’s survey “U.S. Aerial bombing: a statistical summary” provides a simple interpretation of what the numbers mean. This sort of short but thoughtful factually based commentary really does the blogosphere credit and is an excellent example of high quality original content blogging. January 29th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There is a very interesting little article in the Moscow Times by Robert Ware contrasting US success in Afghanistan with Russian military failure in Chechnya.
Ware points out that the contrast is not just one of military success but also of the hugely different political approaches taken. He also correctly highlights the points of difference that make the analogies dangerous in some ways. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from the vastly different outcomes of these two struggles against extremist Islamic fundamentalism. Fascinating stuff. Lets hope that the importance of the political and social issues to the results so far in Afghanistan are not forgotten if the US decides to get involved in Somalia, as many pundits are predicting. In Somalia the clan based society is not alienated from its leaders and Al Qaeda, if they are even present, are not being supported by a central government (there is no real central government in Somalia) and thus picking a fight with the regional clans serves no purpose other than guaranteeing a fight likely to look more like Northern Ireland than Afghanistan. January 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
US Marines were handed an unexpected defeat yesterday and commentators are scrambling to find how this could have been allowed to happen. Reporters interviews dazed survivors at Bagram Airbase, near Kabul. Capt. Hank McHunter, from Dallas, Texas said
Sgt. Bud Burbacker from Oraldo, Florida added
A reporter for the Independent attempted to put this question to Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister in Kabul. He replied
However Deputy Defence Minister with the Interim government, General Abdul Rashid Dostam, promised he would make more information available to the selected members of the Western media later tonight
During a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld was evasive on the exact details but did indicate an enquiry was underway to find out how this could have transpired
SkyNew showed video of US Marines and British Royal Marines playing American football after a large Christmas lunch at Bagram Airbase. The Royal Marines narrowly won. [Editor’s note: This would have been posted yesterday but for the intervention of the hacker who disrupted blogger.com… may the fleas of a thousand camels infest his public regions too] December 27th, 2001 | Comments are closed
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Update: As a couple people have ask me to simply explain what a ‘backward bending demand curve’ is, it is a strange and counter intuitive phenomenon in which sometimes as a product gets cheaper, people buy less of it or if a product gets more expensive, they buy more of it. This does not seem to make sense but it does occasionally happen. 