The Mound of Sound

A common feature of failed counterinsurgency warfare is the eventual drift into “mission creep.”

Mission creep is the temptation when the original mission isn’t working to either expand the initial commitment or move on to an even bigger mission. It happens – all too often – and it almost always winds up the same way, in failure.

Vietnam is the classic example of mission creep. America originally sent in military advisors to work with the South Vietnamese forces. Then that progressed into combat formations with a massive supporting effort from the US Air Force and US Navy. Carrier battle groups lined up off the North Vietnamese coast. Bombers flying in from Thailand and Guam. Air war over North Vietnam. Carpet bombing in Laos. Invasion of Cambodia. Eventually just under 600,000 US soldiers in South Vietnam. And it all ended with helicopters flying off the rooftop of a hastily abandoned American embassy. What began with Eisenhower ended with Nixon/Ford, claiming the lives of 50,000 Americans on the battlefield and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, the countrysides still littered with mines and unexploded ordinance and the generational scourge of Agent Orange. All for a little country that, at the end of the day, really didn’t matter very much at all.

Now Stephane Dion has concluded that NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan are probably doomed to failure without taking the fight to the insurgent and terrorist strongholds inside Pakistan’s tribal lands. He’s probably right.

Unfortunately Mr. Dion has the same blinkered vision that Richard Nixon had when he authorized the secret invasion of Cambodia. Neither of them realized that they were addressing but one of several fatal flaws. Nixon thought he would destroy North Vietnam’s sanctuary infrastructure in Cambodia and eliminate the threat to the south coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. It didn’t work for Nixon and the same thinking won’t work for Dion and NATO either.

At best – at the very best – you can staunch the flow of the insurgency temporarily but only temporarily. Much as I hate this hackneyed phrase, “we have all the watches, but they have all the time.” Time is not on our side. It is on theirs. They’re the home team, not us. It’s Year Six of this fumbled effort and that means that Year One options are long foreclosed. If there was ever a time for a military operation to sweep the tribal lands it was at the outset before the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to get their infrastructure established there and cement their alliances with the locals. They haven’t survived this long by being fools. They have almost certainly prepared a long time ago for the possibility of the arrival of westerners in the tribal lands.

Speaking of the locals, the Pashtun and Baloch tribesmen of the border regions, what sort of reaction do we expect from them? Do we think they haven’t been watching where this war has gone these past six years? Do we think they’re going to be any more welcoming to us than they have been to the Pakstani army in recent years or to the British armies of the past? If an infidel force shows up, even with the support of the Pakistani army, what might that do to the simmering Baloch secessionist movement, how might that spread and, in turn, destabilize Islamabad?

Six years, six lost years and what have we learned? We ought to have learned that counterinsurgency warfare cannot be fought “on the cheap.” We ought to have learned that but we haven’t. We don’t even have but a fraction of the force needed to secure Kandahar province so we have to send our soldiers out on patrols, trolling for IEDs. NATO cannot maintain the existing force structure. If it could, it would be able to relieve us with another nation’s soldiers but it can’t and it won’t.

There’s no appetite among the NATO membership for the existing war so where are we going to conjure up support for a new and wider war, one that could have repercussions throughout the region that we can’t even begin to contemplate much less hope to control?

Yesterday US Defence Secretary Robert Gates stirred up a hornets’ nest by slagging NATO forces as not up to the job of counterinsurgency warfare. Guess what? He’s right. He’s right except that he’s disingenuous if he doesn’t include his own forces in that description. That’s why his own forces haven’t laid their hands on bin Laden in six years. That’s why the Taliban has come back, resurgent. That’s why al-Qaeda has morphed into a much harder target spread throughout the Islamic world, Europe and even North America. That’s why the bulk of his own army languishes, worn out, in Iraq.

Mister Dion may be right, the key to the future of Afghanistan may depend on what happens across the border in Pakistan but that is just one issue that will ultimately dictate what fate befalls Afghanistan, just one key.

The past six years have been perhaps the darkest in the history of American journalism. Time and again the networks and print jockeys have fallen on bended knee, opened wide and swallowed whatever incredulous bucket of swill was chucked their way. Some have been gullible, some stupid, some cowed into unquestioning servitude, some have just been well-rewarded collaborators.

There was reason to hope that, after the Iraq WMD scam, the American media would find their feet again and stand up. Forget it.

Historian and US national security policy analyst Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reveals how the media were all too willing dupes for a planted story about Iranian threats in the Persian Gulf:

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran’s military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself.

Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would “explode” in “a few seconds”. Although it was ostensibly a navy production, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three US warships occurred very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. No information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are “just not a major threat to the US Navy by any stretch of the imagination.”

By January 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. “No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats,” said Morrell.

The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Captain David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon’s story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, “I saw them float by. They didn’t look threatening to me.”

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Cosgriff, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on January 7. A week later, Commander Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away “before we got to the point where we needed to open fire”.

By any measure it’s not sage these days to take much of what comes out of the American media, or their like-minded allies here in Canada, at face value. They’ve simply allowed themselves – whether out of fear or gullibility, coercion or reward – to become full-fledged partners in a massive and powerful propaganda machine.

Stephane Dion says if Pakistan won’t clean the insurgents and terrorists out of its ungovernable tribal areas, NATO forces should go in and do it for them.

Say what?

This is what the National Spot claims Dion said: “We are going to have to discuss that very actively if they (the Pakistanis) are not able to deal with it on their own. We could consider that option with the NATO forces in order to help Pakistan help us pacify Afghanistan.”

At the same time Dion proposed NATO take on a mission in Pakistan far tougher than the one it’s currently bungling in Afghanistan, the Liberal leader reiterated that he wants Canadian troops out of their Kandahar combat mission very soon.

Is this guy serious? Just where does Dion think NATO is going to conjure up the masses of troops that would be needed to attempt to conquer and occupy Pakistan’s tribal lands? Dion seems to think the answer is easy.

“For the mission to succeed, NATO must apply the principle of rotation. When a country is in the most difficult combat mission during three years, there must be a time for rotation,” he said.

Memo to Stephane: 1. NATO doesn’t have any soldiers available to rotate in to relieve us in Kandahar. The “principle of rotation” is nothing more than fantasy. 2. If NATO can’t muster an effective troop level to secure Afghanistan, there’s not one chance in hell it would be able to amass a force several times that large to move on Pakistan’s tribal lands.

Sorry, Dion supporters but this performance was simply embarassing. If we’re going to get rid of Stephen Harper, we’re going to need a much better leader than this.

The George Bush White House hasn’t been known for saving US taxpayers’ money but that’s not always the case.

Take the tape backup system meant to preserve records, including White House e-mails, in case of a disaster. Well the White House spared the taxpayers a few thousand dollars by recycling those tapes right up until 2003. Now it was just coincidence, a pure fluke, that in reusing those tapes White House e-mails pertaining to the Valerie Plame scandal disappeared – gone forever. Oopsie! Won’t happen again. Promise.

From the Washington Post:

The back-ups are meant to preserve records in case of a disaster. They also serve a role in ensuring that federal record-keeping laws are met, according to administration officials and records management experts. Two separate statutes require the White House to preserve federal or presidential records.
The prospects for recovering data that has been overwritten is uncertain, especially if the tapes were re-recorded numerous times, according to technology experts.

In a court affidavit filed shortly before midnight Tuesday, the official in charge of overseeing White House computer systems said that recycling, or overwriting, the backup tapes was “consistent with industry best practices related to tape media management.”

But Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the Office of Administration, also said the White House stopped the practice in October 2003 and that back-ups made since then have been preserved.

Payton did not explain in her sworn statement why the White House stopped recycling its back-up tapes. She also said that White House officials have not determined whether e-mail also is missing from 2003 to 2005.

“At this stage, this office does not know if any emails were not properly preserved in the archiving process” during that time, Payton said. “We are continuing our efforts.”

Hey, c’mon, we’re talking about George Bush and Dick Cheney here – the most powerful man in America and his trained chimp. You don’t think they’d pull an underhanded stunt like erasing 18-minutes of White House tapes, do you? Oh, I forgot, that was the other crook.

US Weasel-in-Chief, George w. Bush, used his middle eastern tour to quietly sign an order exempting the US Navy from an environmental law that would have restricted it from using submarine sonars off the California coast.

From The Guardian:

The Navy training exercises, including the use of sonar, “are in the paramount interest of the United States” and its national security, Bush said in a memorandum.

“This exemption will enable the Navy to train effectively and to certify carrier and expeditionary strike groups for deployment in support of worldwide operational and combat activities, which are essential to national security,” the memo said.

The decision drew immediate criticism from environmentalists who had fought to stop the Navy’s sonar training.

“The president’s action is an attack on the rule of law,” said Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the president is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission and a ruling by the federal court.”

In the Antarctic Ocean yesterday two Sea Shepherd activists boarded a Japanese whaling ship. They were there to inform the Japanese their whaling was illegal and to demand the ships left the hunting grounds.

The Japanese crew responded by seizing the activists and locking them up. Sea Shepherd claims the pair were first lashed to the ship’s mast for two hours before being taken below.

Australia, which claims jurisdiction over these waters, has contacted Japan demanding that the activists be released and, as of yesterday, it seemed they would be returned to their own ship.

Now, it turns out, the Sea Shepherd crewmembers are being held hostage. Captain Paul Watson told Reuters that the Japanese have said they won’t release the activists until the get Watson’s undertaking not to use his ship against them (ramming) and to keep the Sea Shepherd vessel at least 10 nautical miles distant at all times.

Oh hell, kumbaya, here goes – feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. But what if you then go one step further and take away that man ‘s fish altogether?

In a number of ways, that’s happening right now in Africa. Along the west coast of Africa, European, Asian and other fishing fleets are emptying the seas. The Euros put the blame on corrupt African officials who oversell fishing quotas in their territorial waters – as though blame was going to relieve the people of this region of the abrupt end of their fish supply. This overfishing is now blamed for an exodus of migrants heading north from West Africa.

Another way we’re screwing these people up is garden-variety, climate change. They put out about as little greenhouse gas as any people on the planet but they get the most severe impacts. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, another centre of massive northern migration.

Global warming brings a brand new meaning to the old saw about how “it never rains but it pours.” It never rains – until it pours. Few know the meaning of this better than the people of Zimbabwe. Already bearing the scourge of a maniacal tryrant, Robert Mugabe, and his ZANU-PF brigands, these folks have also endured a 6-year drought that crippled their agriculture. That drought ended this year.

The deluge arrived in December, the wettest month Zimbabwe has experienced in 127-years. At the end of the month the government declared a state of disaster and, in Zimbabwe, conditions have to get borderline apocalyptic to warrant a disaster declaration. From the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office:

“Farmers in flood-affected districts, who had planted early, trying to take advantage of the predicted good rains, have seen their crops drowned, along with hopes of a marketable surplus.

“We prayed for the rains but the rains have now caused us pain and suffering,” said a despairing Esther Chiwodza, a communal farmer in the low-lying district of Chiredzi in Midlands Province.

She invested in seeds and fertiliser and planted early in October. “All the crops I spent my entire savings on have been washed away and there is no prospect of saving any crops, as the whole fields are waterlogged and the remaining crops will not survive the current rains.”

Neighbours lost livestock and homes collapsed. “After the rainy season is over everyone in my village will become a candidate for food aid, and if the donor agencies do not come we will starve to death,” said Chiwodza.”

Not all regions of Zimbabwe have been as hard hit. Some of the best farmland in northern areas has, so far, escaped flooding. And, while the deluge may wipe out crops in the rest, the excessive rains are expected to eventually restore the parched earth for grazing.

The world’s food supply is coming under unprecedented stresses and global warming is just one cause. Another is the diversion of grain stocks, particularly corn, from food into biofuel. According to the Financial Post, corn prices have shot up 44% over the past 15-months. That’s an enormous hit for poorer nations with populations dependent on corn for sustenance, countries as nearby as Mexico.

And then there are the new gorillas joining the rest bouncing around the room – China and India. FP quotes Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group as warning of a global food catastrophe that’s due to hit later this year:

“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.”

Mr. Coxe said the sharp rise in raw food prices in the past year will intensify in the next few years amid increased demand for meat and dairy products from the growing middle classes of countries such as China and India as well as heavy demand from the biofuels industry.

“The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it’s getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we’ve got to expand food output dramatically,” he said.

Let’s get this straight. The “greatest challenge” to the world is to do whatever it takes to ensure that the emerging Chinese and Indian middle class can eat the way our middle class does?

Mr. Coxe said crop yields around the world need to increase to something close to what is achieved in the state of Illinois, which produces over 200 corn bushes an acre compared with an average 30 bushes an acre in the rest of the world.
“That will be done with more fertilizer, with genetically modified seeds, and with advanced machinery and technology,” he said.

Sounds like a piece of cake. A few more bags of fertilizer, man-made seeds and some state of the art machinery and – bingo. Curious that Mr. Coxe hasn’t factored in the spreading drought and deluge pattern or the rapid exhaustion of groundwater reserves worldwide in his calculations of ramping up production of one of the most water-intensive crops of all.

If Stephane Dion thought he was able to have a private conversation with Afghan president Karzai in Kabul, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Canada set him straight on that.

According to the Toronto Star, Ambassador Omar Samad reports that Karzai told Dion that “calls by the federal Liberals for a new, non-combat role for Canadian troops in Afghanistan could undo the gains made so far and mean the sacrifices made by slain soldiers have been in vain.”

“This type of threat, in the form of terrorism and extremism, needs to be dealt with directly and head-on. That point had been made by the president.”

After his meeting on Saturday, Dion said Karzai would “welcome” whatever role Canada plays in rebuilding his troubled country even if it’s not a combat mission.

Samad didn’t indicate when Karzai intends to sling his drug baron brother’s ass in jail or, for that matter, any of the other drug lords Karzai is dependent upon, the very people whose opium industry funds the insurgency. Then there’s the corruption and compromise that undermines the Afgan government and leaves Karzai, in effect, the mayor of Kabul. If Samad and Karzai want to find something that “needs to be dealt with directly and head-on” they can begin by taking a real close look at themselves.