Needlenose

I found this puff piece on ‘secret’ negotiations between the US and so-called ‘moderate’ members of the Taliban on HuffPo and I was quickly skimming through it when this bit caught my eye:

Also included in the negotiations is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious renegade Afghan warlord whose active insurgency continues to fight against U.S. and coalition forces.
Two former Pakistani intelligence officials say a deal was underway in which Hekmatyar would call for an end to his insurgency and be allowed to live above ground in Saudi Arabia with a budget of $85 million. At least one Afghan government official confirmed that a deal with Hekmatyar was being assembled.

Seriously?  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? If there is any credence whatsoever to the article, Obama will just be the next in line to be taken by this consummate “Khan” artist.

Several weeks ago I wrote a despairing post about the state of our war in Afghanistan, criticizing Obama for following Shrubya’s tired strategy of fighting a counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan while the enemy thrived, unmolested, across the border in Pakistan.

Since then, Pakistan really bumped up their game and has made major gains in fighting the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their sympathizers in the Swat Valley.

I should probably have posted something about that  earlier, but their past claims of ‘victories’ and gains were either gross hyperbole or outright lies.  However, I’m actually heartened by Osama Bin Laden’s latest missive blaming Obama for “ordering” President Zardari to attack the guerrillas.

Check out the speech – it strikes me as the typical ‘tough talk’ a leader has to give when his followers are backed into a corner – kinda like that some of the speeches given by the (now dead) head of the Tamil Tigers as his guerrillas were increasingly trapped by Sri Lankan forces.  The other comforting thought is that Obama could actually ‘order’ President Zardari to do anything!  Don’t you wish that were true?  I guess American Liberals aren’t the only people that believe Obama has magical powers!

It’s much too early to determine if this is a true sea change in the battle – who knows how many Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors donned burkhas and slipped out among the civilian refugees?  And don’t forget that Pakistan is only one of the countries bordering Afghanistan suitable for a base for the guerrillas, and that is a horribly corrupt country at that.

But it’s definitely cause for optimism – let’s hope this reduces some of the strain on President Karzai and the NATO forces in Afghanistan!

*Update 6/4/09* A friend of mine just got back from a couple of weeks in Karachi – he tells me things are really messy there right now – lots of internal divisions between groups such as the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns are boiling up to the surface resulting in pitched street fighting.

I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

If you thought that by electing Obama we’d get out of the Shrubyian quagmires any sooner, you’d be sadly mistaken.  It looks like Obama is following Shrubya’s brokeass ‘strategy,’ i.e. engagements without an exit strategy, no clear goals and a continuing drain of soldiers and cash.

In a move right out of the Shrubya playbook, Obama is replacing one general with another in Afghanistan, saying that it’s time for some ‘fresh thinking.’  Seriously, Mr. President, the only ‘fresh thinking’ we need is from you!!  It doesn’t matter whom you put in the hot seat, he/she will continue to muddle along until such time as it becomes clear what they need to achieve in order to get out of the quicksand.

And in the case of Afghanistan, as long as the Taliban live free and untouchable just across the border this war will drag on for as long as we wish to expend the lives.  Our ally Pakistan will neutralize the Taliban?  Don’t make me laugh, Mr. President, they are already busy getting their asses kicked by the Taliban’s tribal hosts.

And in case you’ve forgotten, Shrubya already tried launching a ‘death from above’ strategy in both quagmires and learned the hard way that for every ‘terrorist’ you kill, you create dozens of pissed-off new terrorists.

If you want to eliminate the Taliban threat to Karzai and ‘new’ Afghanistan, you need to take the war to them…on the ground…where they are.  If you can’t or won’t do that, then get us the hell out of there.  Fresh thinking, Mr. President, fresh thinking!

Last month I argued against Obama’s emerging broke-ass Afghanistan policy.  It looks like he is going forward with an escalation of 17,000 additional US soldiers.  This, is in the face of our increasingly strangled and expensive supply lines.

And as I argued before, if we are dead set on an Afghanistan escalation (that we will eventually lose), we need to first complete the exit from Iraq.  What could possibly go wrong?  How about the existing tensions between the Kurds and Arabs in Northern Iraq flaring up into a full-on war?  And it sure doesn’t help matters when our tactics involve the accidental, but continual slaughter of civilians from aerial bombardment - instead of winning hearts and minds, you need to pick them up from around the target.

Obama has been variously compared to JFK and Lincoln.  Could we in fact be looking at the Reincarnation of LBJ?

Sad, really.

True to his campaign promises, Obama is moving ahead with his broke-ass ‘surge’ in Afghanistan.  And Shrubya left-over Gates will continue lobbying militarily ineffective, civilian-killing missiles into Waziristan. 

I’ll give them credit in that they understand that the real ‘insurgency’ is in Waziristan, where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders are laughing at us, fueling the insurgency with drug and weapons smuggling while living large in their Wazi safe houses.  I’m sure they are also aware that the Pakistani government has zero military control over the region (having gotten their asses kicked by the Waziban several times over the last few years).   And finally it should be apparent to them that unless the Al-Waziban are defeated on the ground, the insurgency will continue.

So Obama is indicating that he is signing up for a long-term ‘containment’ quagmire, hoping that by keeping some critical mass of troops in the country and by blowing up the occasional Waziri household, he’ll be able to prop up the Karzai government at a low-enough cost that people will ignore the conflict.

Not much of a plan.  NATO troops will still die.  The conflict will gradually heat up.  The missiles will undermine both Obama’s new pro-Muslim ‘messaging’ as Al-Jezeera airs pics of dead kids, and the Pakistani central government (such as it is).  It will drain money out of the economic reconstruction.  And guess what?  We haven’t withdrawn from Iraq yet!  Who knows what might develop there that could slow down or halt our withdrawal?

Long-time Needlenose readers may remember that while I opposed the Iraqi debacle on both ethical and practical grounds, I largely opposed the A’stan invasion largely because it was a fucking stupid idea – there is no way we can prop up Karzai if we can’t stem the flow of Hashshashin and weapons from the hostile and anarchic Waziristan.

Obama would be better off biting the bullet now and starting the withdrawal when he has significant political capital, rather than at the end of his 2nd term, when his legacy will be tainted by the abject failure of his escalation policy.

Nope, no legacy peace treaty...just a stinking pile of crap!

A couple of days ago, I was joking about the Shrubya transition plan – wondering if he would leave a trashed WH and pop all the “Os” out of the computer keyboards.  But on seeing Condi’s failure to make even an iota of progress on a ‘legacy’ peace deal in the cis-Jordan, I further reflected on the transition from Clinton to Shrubya, then contrasted it with the current transition.  Clinton left Shrubya with:

* a balanced budget
* $2 billion budget surplus
* under $6 trillion national debt
* fewer Federal employees than his predecessor
* an economic boom
* high levels of unemployment
* the virtual elimination of Big Ag agricultural subsidies
* a 98% agreed-upon peace deal for the cis-Jordan involving S. Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the occupied territories and Jerusalem with Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinians
* an anti-nuke deal with Little Kim in N. Korea

What presents have King George the Witless left for Obama?

* $400+ billion dollar budget deficit (not counting the cost of the Iraq war)
* $12 trillion national debt (doubled in 8 years)
* a surge in the number of federal employees and paid political appointees
* the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression
* 6.5%+ unemployment highest level in 14 years (since his daddy, King George the Clueless)
* unprecedented levels of corporate welfare Big Ag and Big Oil tax breaks and subsidies
* complete breakdown of cis-Jordan peace talks and 2nd intifada, massive unrest and hardship in the occupied territories and regional ‘cold war’
* Nuclear-armed Little Kim
* election of hard-liners in Iran, virtual elimination of moderate faction
* And to top all that off – a failed costly war in Iraq and a failing war in Afghanistan

And to remember King George the Witless and TurdBlossom’s biggest complaint was a few computer keyboards missing “Ws.” I never thought I’d miss Clinton.

(Barack Obama and Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Sunday, via the Associated Press.)

Just felt I had to round out the trilogy — “real” posts will resume at some point…

The reactionary media is at it again – now they are criticizing Obama for not giving the GOP Slime Machine a chance to get a picture of him giving a speech with a couple of obvious muslims standing behind him that they can use in their news reports and viral emails spreading the lie that Obama is a Muslim.

But I can see the point of some of the veil-wearing folks excluded by the Obama team – how can it be ‘change’ when the candidate is doing the same careful stage operations as the wrong-wing guy?

Well in the grand guerrilla tradition, rather than just going down the traditional playbook, Team Obama should take a page from the greatest sales guy I ever worked with.

Back in the mists of time, the late 1980s, there was an expression in my industry that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying Blue (IBM).’ I worked for an upstart computer company at the time as a sales engineer, and it was my job, and the job of the sales guy I worked with, to ‘bust in’ to Big Blue territory, financial services companies in the Bay Area.

The sales guy in question was an ex-Blue man, a grizzled veteran who knew the Blue playbook from inside out. We had our first real prospect, a large insurer that was an all-Blue shop. A maverick IT guy was pushing our technology – the CIO spent his weekends and evenings out on the golf course with the IBM sales guy. Impossible situation, right?

Well the sales guy did some sales jiu-jitsu, turning our disadvantages to advantages. It so happened that the insurer’s disk drives were filling up. He coached our champion about what IBM would do – send an analyst out, who would putter around, create a report and recommend a lot of expensive new disk drives. But the Blue secret was that the way IBM setup databases at the time was to never ‘clean out’ deleted data or information, just deactivate it, gradually filling up storage. A simple utility could be written to clear out unused data, so no new disk was required. Our champion, filled with this secret knowledge, went behind the CIO’s back to the President and ‘predicted’ IBM’s and the CIO’s recommendation.

That was one of several examples that our sales guy and the champion used to ‘set up’ the CIO. And the result? The CIO was fired for recommending Blue!

In the case of Obama, he would do well to follow that plan. The GOP Slime Machine playbook is pretty predictable at this point. So going back to the picture of Obama with the Muslims – of course they are looking for that photo-op. So why not make it obvious?

He could start out his speech saying “If you will all notice there are two Muslim-Americans behind me. By tomorrow you’ll see this very scene, with everybody but me and these two Americans cropped out of the picture, running non-stop on Fox-News, complete with a running ticker-tape with words like “Al Qaeda, Muslim, Jihad and Islam” streaming underneath. Then, the following day, you’ll see their colleagues on other news channels like CNN & MSNBC start rehashing the same speaking points about how people all think I am Islamic. So the next two days, let’s all play a little game – every time you see this picture, or a Media Pundit say the words Obama and Muslim in the same sentence, send an email or call the station’s ombudsman and ask them why the are running this story? That’s the surest way we can stop this electioneering ‘business as usual.” Or something to that effect.

In this fashion Obama could set the agenda, rather than constantly reacting to the latest reactionary Media Echo Chamber attack.

On a related issue, Green Boy Sr. (dad) had a great suggestion about McCain’s constant whining about Obama not visiting Iraq. If Obama goes to Iraq he is just following the McCain agenda, and will get caught in bad photo ops (ill-fitting flack jacket, troops all around), and get the same orchestrated propaganda tour. However, if he blows off Iraq, and just goes straight to Afghanistan, he would have the opportunity (given the current crop of bad news as A’stan is starting to swirl faster down the drain) of seizing the initiative. “Senator McCain, where are you when Afghanistan is falling apart? Here is where you can find Al Qaeda; here is where you can find the Taliban. And here is where our troops need to be, supporting our ally, not in Iraq where we are unwanted.” Or something to that effect.

Since the run-up to the attack on Iraq in ’03, numerous liberal wags have been depicting Shrubya as a lil’ Napoleon. But if you think about it, Napoleon was actually pretty successful, for a time. And wasn’t he really smart? Focused on improving the lot of his countrymen whilst building up his empire?

An historic figure more analogous to President Arbusto is King Philip II of Spain – you know, the guy who launched the massive Armada (30,000 men on 130 warships) against England in a sort of quasi holy war – and got his ass kicked ( about 1/2 the ships destroyed and 2/3rds of the men killed).

In The Voyage of the Armada, David Howarth paints a pretty unflattering description of Shrubya’s soul-mate. King Philip was extremely slow to learn, either from his own experience, or from the much more brilliant men in court. The mixture of mediocrity and power made him immovably self-righteous and obstinate.” Sound familiar?

Philip “loved his children” and “at least one of his wives” but “outside of this little circle he was seldom moved to pity.” Shrubya seems equally devoted to both his spawn and Laura, but if you recall his time as Governor of Texas, he was a man that could execute felons (guilty or otherwise) with impunity.

Even their conception of the Almighty seems similar:

The God that Philip served was all-powerful, all-knowing and unforgiving. He could and did take part by miracles in men’s affairs…He demanded worship absolutely exactly in the forms the Catholic Church proclaimed and not in any other. He also demanded the most cruel and terrible punishments men could devise for anyone who deviated in the least degree.

Shrubya also seems to follow Philip’s economic policies:

Also (the Empire) was bankrupt…Philip had mortgaged all the empire’s revenues for years ahead, mainly to foreign bankers…Trite though it might seem, the designs of God cost an awful lot of money.

Howarth could easy be talking about Shrubya when he sums up Philip’s character:

Reading Philip’s letters in the twentieth century and judging him by twentieth century standards…one has to say he was bigoted, dogmatic, self-righteous, illogical, ruthless and hopelessly confused; but also, he was appallingly sincere.

The causus belli for the Armada invasion seems as confused as that for the invasion of Iraq. It morphed variously from restoring the Catholic faith to an England ruled by Protestant heretics to guaranteeing the rights of Catholics to practice their faith freely, to putting Philip or one of his kids on the English throne.

One eery parallel to the run-up to both wars is the use of both misLeaders on wacky spy masters who used disreputable and biased expatriate sources (English Catholics who were exiled or had to flee from England after being suspected of treason) to build his case for the war and for the reception the Spaniards would receive on the part of the grateful English:

Perhaps no monarch about to launch a war was ever so mistaken about his enemies. Philip was led to believe the Protestants of England were a small minority of oppressors; that the majority were Catholics who would gladly rise in revolt when they sighted his armada; and finally, the most tragic misapprehension of all, that England would welcome him as king or his daughter as queen.

Kinda reminds you of Swopa’s old favorite Iraqi subject, Chalabi, huh?

Another odd parallel is the use of deceitful, no-bid contracts. Some time after setting off, the leader of the Armada discovered that “their huge supplies of food were going rotten” and that the water barrels were “green and slimy and undrinkable” – most likely due to either shoddy workmanship or out-right swindling on the part of the suppliers. Worse, in the decisive sea battle off Calais, the English cannon turned the Spanish ships into swiss cheese, but the English ships emerged virtuously unscathed. No, it wasn’t a miracle – a modern study of the cannonballs used by the Spanish reveals substandard craftsmanship resulting in a “very brittle” shot that “broke into small bits either at the shock of firing or the shock of impact on an enemy hull.” I wonder who was the Halliburton of 1588?

Perhaps the most amazing similarity about Philip and Shrubya is their shared inability to admit to failure, and unwillingness to change policies in defiance of reality. In Philip’s case, you might think that the loss of half his fleet and the deaths of 20,000 men, especially in the face of not a loss of a single English vessel and minimal English casualties might convince him that sending an Armada against England was a really bad idea. But you’d be wrong:

…he dispatched three more (armadas) before he died in 1598. The first of them, for an invasion of Ireland, sailed at his insistence and against the advice of his admirals at the worst possible time of year, November 1596. It was wrecked by a storm before it left Spanish waters. The next, in 1597, was to land Spanish troops at Falmouth and occupy Cornwall. It came nearest of all to success, but was beaten back by a northerly gale a few miles short of its landing.

Afghanistan…Iraq…Iran? Two peas in a pod…