The Mound of Sound

I haven’t been closely following coverage of your provincial election but I’ve read enough to know you’ve got a Tory named Tory running to oust the ruling Libs. I also know that this guy Tory appears obsessed with pulling a seemingly endless array of electoral party favours out of his backside to win.

Now I know your guy McGuinty is no firebrand but the pandering “something for everyone” stuff we read coming out daily from Tory Tory smacks of desperation.

What gives?

Speaking of low blows, this is about Stephen Harper and his guru, Tom Flanagan.

Travers has an interesting piece in today’s Toronto Star about how Canada’s own far right-wing wants to undermine our democracy:

In a new book and seemingly everywhere else, Flanagan, Harper’s 2004 campaign chairman, lays bare cynicism that would make even Liberals blush. Distilled to its essence, the archconservative Calgary professor argues that rather than give Canadians the government they want, Conservatives must manipulate voters until they elect one they don’t.
Remarkable for its sophistication and expediency, Flanagan’s template gains credibility from two campaigns, one losing, one winning. But its immediacy is rooted in an October throne speech that may well end in the government engineering its own defeat as well as in a Tuesday report that the defence department crafted the speech Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai presented to Parliament a year ago.

Pushing the country into an election while blaming the opposition is a standard gambit that only needs to be seen for what it is to be fairly judged. But using non-partisan public institutions, particularly the military, for the political purpose of surreptitiously moulding national opinion is as slippery a slope as appointing a bureaucrat with Tory ties to lead the RCMP.

Both decisions would be worrying even if an inner circle Conservative wasn’t making it so clear how far the party will go to gain unfettered power and how anxious it is to fully apply its ideology. But Flanagan is and that adds caveats to even the Prime Minister’s most persuasive performances.

Harper in peak form remains the most palatable part of the Conservative cookie. But the dark half still leaves the same old bitter taste, one that would be unhealthy to acquire.

The object lesson seems to be, don’t go into the water Jimmy, those are sharks circling at your feet.

The LA Times photo above shows Phil Spector leaving the courtroom after a mistrial was called on his 5 1/2-month long murder trial.

For several days there have been signs the jury was firmly deadlocked. It even caused the judge to intervene in their deliberations by withdrawing an instruction he had given in his charge to the jurors.

The verdict – guilty, 10-2. Good but not good enough. The prosecution has announced it will refile the charges and start over.

“Money makes a difference. This comes down much more to money than fame,” Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson said.

Unfortunately, Levenson is absolutely right. As a former litigator I know that, in far too many cases, a litigant gets as much justice as he/she/it can afford. As a lawyer, the better you are, the more you charge. The more you charge, the more upscale becomes your clientelle. There are, of course, exceptions – just not nearly enough exceptions.

“The people of England have been led in [Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere and incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our …record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Does that ring any bells? It was written in August, 1920 by T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

This is reposted from 24 November last year.

This was originally posted October 5, 2006.

Encouraging news out of the New York Times that the U.S. Army and Marines have figured out that what they’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t work. It’s only taken what, five years, tens of thousands of civilian dead, a trillion dollars? They’ve blasted and bombed and rocketed and shelled and strafed with abandon. They’ve used technological wizardry the world has never before seen. It hasn’t worked, just as it didn’t work in Vietnam. It stopped working before the first tank rolled into Baghdad.

Looking for a new approach, at last, the U.S. military wisely went looking for old advice and they found it in the wisdom of Colonel T.E. Lawrence and other greats of guerrilla warfare. Based on those teachings the Army and Marines have prepared a new field manual based on the nine “representative paradoxes” of counterinsurgency warfare:

1. The more you protect your force, the less secure you are

If military forces stay locked up in compounds (garrisons), they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared and cede the initiative to insurgents.

2. The more force used, the less effective it is

Using substantial force increases the risk of collateral damage and mistakes, and increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda

3. The more successful counterinsurgency is, the less force that can be used and the more risk that must be accepted

As the level of insurgent violence drops, the military must be used less with stricter rules of engagement, and the police forces used more

4. Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction

Often an insurgent carries out a terrorist act or guerrilla raid with the primary purpose of causing a reaction that can then be exploited

5. The best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot

Often dollars and ballots have more impact than bombs and bullets

6. The host nation’s doing something tolerably is better than our doing it well

Long term success depends on viable indigenous leaders and institutions that can carry on wthout significant support

7. If a tactic works this week, it might not work next week; if it works in this province, it might not work in the next

Insurgents quickly adapt to successful counterinsurgency practices. The more effective the tactic, the sooner it becomes out of date

8. Tactical success guarantees nothing

Military actions of themselves cannot achieve success

9. Most of the important decisions are not made by generals

Successful counterinsurgency relies on the competence and judgment of soldiers at all levels.

Most of these pearls of wisdom can be found in my previous posts. That’s not because I’m super smart. It’s because they ought to be obvious. This isn’t some grand experiment but fundamentals that have been tried and tested in various hot spots in various centuries by various armies, again and again and again.

Counterinsurgency warfare is labour-intensive. To defeat a guerrilla challenge, really huge numbers of soldiers are needed. You also need a viable government that’s worth saving.

Contrast this with what we’re doing in Afghanistan. We’re using small numbers of soldiers that have to hunker down in garrisons. That throws Rule #1 right out the window. The garrison tactic has never worked. Not once, never and it’s not going to work now. Garrisons are okay only if you already control the land and simply need to patrol it. If you don’t control the land, you’re merely abandoning the people and yielding the critical initiative to the bad guys.

Rule #6 is another problem plaguing “the mission” in Afghanistan. The Karzai government is not a viable institution. It is little more than a “legislative power vacuum” propped up by armed foreigners. The government and its bureaucracy are corrupt as are its police forces and army. Ineffectual and corrupt. These are not viable institutions. They don’t serve the people and they alienate their people who are then lured toward the only other option, the Taliban.

Assuming the Americans have finally seen the light, it’s about time Ottawa did as well. Doing too little, poorly, is worse than doing nothing at all. The political dilemma, however, trumps the military problem. It is political suicide to take the steps necessary in Afghanistan without popular support at home and the Canadian people are already firmly against this effort.

Stephen Harper talks a good game, but it’s all talk.

Eating soup with a knife. That’s how the legendary Colonel T.E. Lawrence (yes, “of Arabia”) described the challenge facing conventional armies in fighting insurgents. Lawrence ought to have known. He led a highly successful Arab insurgency against the Turkish Ottomans who ruled the Middle East until the end of WWI.

Western nations have been struggling with insurgencies for the better part of two millenia. Roman emperor Hadrian crushed the ‘Caledonians’ of present day Scotland in a fixed battle perfectly suited to his Legions. When it was over, however, the survivors melted away into the hills and came back at the Romans with an insurgency. Eventually Hadrian threw in the towel and built a massive, stone wall from sea to sea that severed Scotland from Britain. You’ve heard of it, Hadrian’s Wall.

Not every battle nor every conquest of a people led to an insurgency. Sometimes there was some political accommodation that smoothed things out. Sometimes the victor just put the losers to the sword, using unrestrained brutality to crush out any idea of insurgency. The first is the diplomatic solution, the second is the military solution.

Today we haven’t got the stomach for putting entire peoples to the sword (we’re supposed to be ‘saving’ them after all) and, without that option, we’ve had a tough time defeating insurgencies with military force. There have been some successes, or at least one: Malaya.

Post-WWII Malaya was beset by a Maoist-insurgency which was eventually defeated by the British. They had a couple of advantages, however. The insurgents were ethnic Chinese, not Malays. They were identifiable and lacked the support of the Malay majority. That left the British with the task of relocating half a million ethnic Chinese to secure camps which enabled them to sever the guerrillas’ base of support. After that, British forces used their military superiority to drive the insurgents into the swamps where they pretty much ended their days. Game, set and match.

The Malayan counter-insurgency is an exception because rarely, if ever, are the same advantageous circumstances present. It’s not fair to say the Brits got lucky but they did make the utmost of every advantage that fell their way.

Which brings us to Afghanistan:

You’ve got a bunch of Christian white people in a Muslim, South Asian country. That means we’re the ones who stand out. We have an alien culture, an alien language, an alien religion, even alien weapons and equipment and we want to bring them a totally alien political concept, secular democracy.

We’re there to prop up a civilian government that never really took hold, on anything remotely approaching a national scale, and which has already succumbed to corruption and weakness. The government hasn’t delivered anything for its people and they are already turning their backs on it. Now they’re facing the other direction, directly toward the insurgency.

We’re up against an insurgency that is well-schooled in guerrilla warfare. Remember what they did to the Soviets or to the British a century before that? If you don’t, you can guess. Most NATO members don’t really have any experience in this stuff. We take our cues from the Americans and you might ask yourself when they last defeated an insurgency? Maybe it’s the blind leading the blind.

Even we don’t believe we’re there for the ten or twenty years it can take to exhaust an insurgency. The guerrillas will be there forever.

We’re trying to dominate a vast territory with piddling numbers of ‘boots on the ground.’ With all the disadvantages confronting us, we still want to do this on the cheap.

We’re even doing things to lose the “hearts and minds” of the local populations. We’re not providing them security which leaves them at the mercy of the Taliban. We can’t give them security because we don’t have nearly enough soldiers to realistically pacify (occupy) any significant amount of territory. Because we don’t control the countryside we can’t give the people essential services such as water and electricity. They are left to fend for themselves and they bloody well know it.

We go into their poppy fields and destroy their livelihood. Having taken the food out of their families’ mouths, we don’t give them some alternative means of survival, we just leave. That’s all right, the Taliban will give them a helping hand.

What I’ve described here is just a glimpse at this awful mess. Sorry people, we’re just not going to win this one. Support the troops, get’em home.

That’s the accusation leveled by Peter MacKay’s mouthpiece, Dan Dugan. The worst thing is, if Dugan’s right, the NDP didn’t take on a very daunting challenge.

Documents obtained by the NDP under the Freedom of Information Act suggest that the Canadian military pretty much told Karzai what to say when he addressed Canada’s parliament last September:

An internal military report, provided to the federal party under Access to Information, says members of the Canadian Forces strategic advisory team accompanied Mr. Karzai and his Afghan delegation to New York before his arrival in Ottawa last September for a historic address to a joint session of the House of Commons and the Senate.

It says that “at the request of president’s office” the Canadian military team “prepared initial draft of president’s address to Parliament Sept. 22.”

The note goes on to say that: “It was noted that key statistics, messages and themes, as well as overall structure, were adopted by the president in his remarks to joint session.”
NDP defence critic Dawn Black said the report is an example of how the Conservative government is trying to manipulate public opinion for the country’s military involvement in Afghanistan.

“President Karzai’s address to Parliament was an elaborately staged political stunt by this government to sell Canadians on the combat mission in Kandahar,” said Ms. Black, who called Mr. Karzai a “front man” for the Conservative government.

Karzai a stooge for Harper? Well, the way things are going for him at home in Kabul, maybe this will give him a new career opportunity.

Stats Can has issued a report pointing out the obvious: Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by more than 18% between 1990 and 2002 and the majority of that was related, not to consumption by Canadians, by in the production of exports.

I’d love to see the stats for the last five years because I expect it would be worse and that largely due to the expansion of the environmentally devastating Athabasca Tar Sands.

Our newly-green prime minister, Harpo himself, talks the talk about greenhouse gases and climate change but puts the lie to his claims by supporting the five-fold increase in tar sands production to produce petroleum for the American market.

According to NATO accounts, the Brits in Helmand and the Dutch in Uruzgan province – make that the Afghan National Army – killed 165 Taliban insurgents in fire fights yesterday.

In each case it appears that our side put the boots to the Taliban when the guerrillas chose to attack in relatively conventional combat. The Taliban were said to have used small arms, rocket propelled grenades and mortars. Our side, of course, has all that stuff along with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery, attack helicopters and jet strike fighters – so it’s a matter of when they stand up, we knock them down.

What’s not clear is just what the Taliban were up to. When the outcome of this sort of fighting is so predictable, why did they do it? The NATO reports claim in each firefight it was the Taliban insurgents who attacked. Unless they’re simply insane – and I doubt that – there must’ve been something they hoped to achieve that would warrant the mauling they would receive from NATO firepower superiority. Who knows?