Moe Lane

So, last Friday 15 Taliban fighters managed to successfully [conduct] a raid where they traded 15 fighters for 2 dead US Marines, moderate to severe damage to the British-run Camp Bastion’s facilities… and 6 of our Harrier jump jets destroyed/2 damaged, which last is going to have severe consequences on our ability to conduct and support military operations in Afghanistan.  Despite the best efforts of Wired to suggest otherwise (H/T: AosHQ) this was NOT due to any stupid Youtube video.  I don’t care what the movies tell you, successful commando raids of this level  of sophistication and planning (the attackers wore American uniforms, had clear objectives, and met them) do not get thrown together and launched because a bunch of people without reliable electricity are upset about an online movie clip.  In short, last weekend we got an honest-to-God, no-fooling black eye that will eventually get more NATO troops dead.  Oh, and almost forgot!  Prince Harry is serving at Camp Bastion right now! So we almost had that to worry about. (more…)

Three lessons to take away from it.

1. The AK-47, while an excellent automatic rifle, is perhaps not best-suited for keeping up the high standards of marksmanship and fire discipline that used to be ubiquitous in countries like, say, Afghanistan.  In fact, there is much to be said about the venerable Lee-Enfield in that regard.
2. Do not fuck with the British Army, because they will drop a laser-guided Hellfire missile on you if you annoy them enough.
3. Do not fuck with the British Army, because they will drop a laser-guided Hellfire missile on you if you annoy them enough.

To paraphrase Kryten from Red Dwarf: Now I realize that, technically speaking, those last two were only one lesson; but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.

Via AoSHQ Headlines.

Moe Lane

PS: We will now pause to give everyone inclined to wage war over the statement “the AK-47 is an excellent automatic rifle” – pro and con – time to prepare.

Well, it’s official: there will be no withdrawal from Afghanistan prior to the 2012 Presidential election.  Not that there will be a withdrawal from Afghanistan after the 2012 election, either – and I invite anyone who wants to argue that point to first remember how the closing of Gitmo went, or more accurately, didn’t – but there are rules to this game, and the first is to pretend that you believe the press releases.  NATO did President Obama a favor on his domestic front by endorsing a 2014 plan; I have no idea what the President gave up in exchange, but with any luck it was something that he should have been offering them anyway.  That’s one of the few advantages to having an administration as weak as this one is on foreign relations; expectations are, as they say, lowered.

If one is wondering why Reuters was reporting that no decision had been reached on a 2014 timeline hours before the President himself confirmed that a 2014 timeline decision had been reached (and a week after  it was reported {via @DavePoff} that a 2014 timeline solution had been reached), that’s actually easy to explain.  Reuters must have talked to an administration official affiliated with the antiwar movement.  Those poor unfortunates are locked out of any meaningful policy oversight and generally given the mushroom treatment; it’s no surprise that they end up with a generally skewed vision of the universe. (more…)

It shows.  This one was probably my favorite:

This is what an eloquent first lady’s writing looks like: “Though some Afghan leaders have condemned the violence and defended the rights of women, others maintain a complicit silence in hopes of achieving peace. But peace attained by compromising the rights of half of the population will not last. Offenses against women erode security for all Afghans — men and women. And a culture that tolerates injustice against one group of its people ultimately fails to respect and value all its citizens.” Yeah, I miss her too.

Who doesn’t?  Well, the antiwar movement, of course.  Then again, they hated the liberation of Afghanistan, too – so we already were aware of their lack of judgment*.

Moe Lane (more…)

Weasel Zippers has the details – and, more importantly, the screen shots: essentially, what happened was that MoveOn.org did a little cleanup once General Petraeus stopped being a would-be whipping boy for Senator Obama and started being President Obama’s last, best hope for not mucking up the Afghanistan war.  This behavior would normally cause cranial explosions in anyone with the slightest appreciation of irony: fortunately for MoveOn, they are comprised pretty exclusively of hardcore antiwar activists, which means that they are as dead to irony as they are to the sufferings of non-European-Americans during Republican Presidential administrations.

On the bright side: since they’ve repudiated their own ad, they shouldn’t mind at all revisions to it.  My humble effort, after the fold. (more…)

If this checks out – big if; there’s no guarantee that the reality will live up to preliminary reports – then I agree with Hot Air Headlines: whoa.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

(more…)

Is what you are doing today going to be as cool as this?

Hey, don’t feel bad.  I don’t have anything as cool as this scheduled for today, either.

(Via AoSHQ Headlines)

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Walking through this one:

• Last week former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted strongly to the White House’s allegation that military commanders in Afghanistan were denied troop requests under the previous administration.  Actually, that’s too weak a statement: Rumsfeld denied that anything of the sort had happened under his watch.
• Which, in point of fact, it did not: the administration was referring to events in 2008 – under Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates (who is also the current SecDef, by the way) – and said events can be more accurately described as a ‘delay,’ not a ‘refusal.’  The requests were made by General David McKiernan.
• Yes, the David McKiernan that Gates fired.
• When pressed on this, current White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs must have felt backed into a corner.  After all, he was trying to justify the White House sneering at a policy implemented by a Secretary of Defense that the new administration had retained, and at the expense of a military general that the new administration had sacked.  Gibbs being Gibbs, he took the opportunity to try to change the subject by sniping at Rumsfeld some more.
• Because, of course, this administration is terrified of ever, ever admitting being wrong about anything.  Sort of like what the Left pretended that the previous administration was like, only for real.

All of this is context for the response from Rumsfeld’s office:

The administration now claims President Obama was actually referring to denials of troops by his own Secretary of Defense in 2008.  This is obviously not what the President meant.  If it is what the President meant, he owes an apology to General McKiernan for dismissing him, for it was General McKiernan who sought additional forces in 2008.

This looseness with the facts seems to be a pattern in the current administration’s efforts to blame their challenges on their predecessors.  Nearly one year into this administration, that approach is wearing thin.

My only quibble with that is the use of the phrase  ‘wearing thin.’  It wore bare months ago.

Full statement after the fold. (more…)

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

There is a school of thought that says, Do not delight in reminding your extremist ideological opponents that they are being betrayed by their own.  The underlying rationale is that doing so help make the people doing the betrayal appear to be ‘moderate,’ even when they’re really not.  Given that said extremist ideologues will also still vote for their betrayers in the future, the argument is that pragmatically there’s not enough of an upside to mocking them for it.  I respect the reasoning behind of this school of thought.

It’s just that sometimes I don’t give a tinker’s dam. Via AoSHQ, not a Photoshop or parody. This is real:

And the neocons laugh. Oh, how we laugh.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Speaking of watching, watch as the administration’s stance on Afghanistan continues to go [link fixed!], ever so slowly, off of the beam. The Telegraph reports that last week’s McChrystal / Obama meet was actually in reaction to the former’s comments on the situation in the Middle East, and that the administration is ‘furious’ about it.  For more wincing over the implications, see Michael Barone, The Corner, Hot Air, AoSHQ, & Jules Crittenden.

I really don’t want to have to write this, but I don’t think that I have a choice: start the clock.  And, a favor?  Remember this the next time you run through your “How should I vote?” decision tree.

Crossposted to RedState.

American Elephants hopes that the administration is delaying making a decision on Afghanistan until Tony Blair becomes the first President of the EU.  The idea being, it’d give the White House moral reinforcement:

Now we all know Tony Blair has his head on straight about both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and resolutely so. Is Obama then waiting for Blair’s leadership to give him the political cover to send more troops to Afghanistan?

Well… it’d be both a good idea and a personally satisfying scenario*, so I think that nobody should count on it happening. After the President’s unforced error yesterday in Copenhagen it’s no longer safe to assume that this administration’s strategic planning abilities are up to even minimum standards. It’s much more likely that the White House simply doesn’t know what to do next. Which does mean that they might seize upon enlisting Blair’s support – but if they do, it’ll probably be out of desperation. Which means that people still won’t be able to assume that any forethought went into the decision.

Just the way it goes.

Moe Lane

PS: “President” of the European Union for an unelected position may not be technically incorrect, but it’s a little eyebrow-raising.  Why didn’t they just call the position “Premier?”

(more…)

…(as can be found via here) is someone who has forgotten, or never knew, that the phrase “Not In Our Name” originated as a slogan against the liberation of Afghanistan.  in other words: I’ve known for half a decade that the antiwar movement lies when it suits them, so I was hardly surprised when the mask slipped on this one.

Contemptuous, but hardly surprised.

In other news, General McChrystal is possibly threatening to resign if the White House doesn’t start listening for his requests for more troops.  For the sake of pretty much… everybody… I hope to hell that’s a garbled report; mostly because I don’t think that the President has ever handled a situation like this before, and I have precisely zero respect for his ability to learn how to do things right on the first try.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.