Thanks Spencer

What’s the purpose of benchmarks? If they are not met, U.S. troops can’t leave until they are. If they are met, that’s evidence that U.S. troops are doing the right thing, and therefore that they should stay longer.

Oh, I inadvertantly answered my own Q: benchmarks are an excuse for U.S. troops to stay forever.

I have no fear, that when the neo-libs get started on propaganizing the Democoratic Party, they will commence their ‘argument’ with the notional that now that we’ve ‘pushed’ the Taliban and Al-Queda into one of the remaining ’stans, we will have to go after them when their over there. Therefore, from my contrarian viewpoint, this will not end in the lifetime of my grandkids, regardless of any presumptive metrics, to be defined in the near future.

Jaango

1) It’s a quagmire.

2) Colonialism builds resentment.

3) The military is always an expense. It’s only useful to kill people.

4) The only solution involves commerce & trade for profit, and this excludes the military (see 3).

5) No one in Washington believes (4).

The generals have green Obama by the short hairs.

And then there’s always the pipelanistan pipe dream.

from bernhard at MoA:

Douglas Macgregor is a now retired Colonel of the U.S. Army and one of its few strategic thinkers. (The currently faved COIN folks are mere tactical thinkers.)

Mcgregor just published a provocative piece in the Armed Force Journal arguing against the standard U.S. policy mindset of interventionist wars. Leaving out the ample historic references the gist is this (emph. added):

Despite the seriousness of the present economic crisis, the greatest danger to the future security of the U.S. is Washington’s inclination to impose political solutions with the use of American military power in many parts of the world where Washington’s solutions are unneeded and unsustainable.

and that’s just the beginning.

Seems reasonable to me.

I know just how Obama would reply: But I can do it better.

I like this part:

Treating conflict avoidance as a declared strategic goal should give pause to those in Washington who think counterinsurgency is something American military forces should seek to conduct. For outside powers intervening in other peoples’ countries as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called counterinsurgency has not been the success story presented to the American people. Making cash payments to buy cooperation from insurgent groups to conceal a failed policy of occupation is a temporary expedient to reduce U.S. casualties, not a permanent solution for stability.

When I read up on counterinsurgency in 04, I learned that it is rarely successful, and on those rare occassions it is because of suppression so extreme as to kill anything that moves. U.S. in Philippines is an example. But even then it’s not a sure winner, as I understand that the Soviets tried that in parts of Afghanistan and still didn’t win.

Occupation is the problem, not how well or poorly it’s done.

Spencer, you’re a pro-militarist -State -Department -brainwashed spider monkey.
If people would stop writing about these things in an understanding manner, especially this COIN stuff, we would be so much better off.
These COIN guys, in trying to suppress insurgencies by addressing the population’s needs, are merely putting a kind face on fighting.

When I was in school, I had a really great economics teacher, a guy named Lekachman, who would sometimes ask the class whether the problem was of supply or demand.
Sometimes we would want to hear what the problem was before answering.

The name sounds familiar. Where did you go to school?

CUNY

I thought he might have been NYU, where I did my graduate work. But since I live in NYC, I would have heard the name.

Robert Lekachman, prof em and great teacher

from george kenney writing recently about holbrooke:The Balkan Chameleon

Indeed, there’s nothing about Afghanistan that is of the slightest importance to U.S. national security except for the fact that Afghanistan borders Pakistan and that events in the former may well further destabilize the latter. Our only interest in the region is Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and, to a slightly lesser extent, India’s. We don’t want them to have a nuclear war and we don’t want them to proliferate.

An intelligent foreign policy approach to Afghanistan would recognize our priorities up front and work for de-nuclearization of the region — which would almost certainly require comprehensive and radical nuclear arms reductions by all the nuclear states, including Israel — and economic development in Pakistan, to start. Obscuring those priorities does nobody any good, with the possible exception of extreme self-promoters, like Richard Holbrooke, who care mainly or, when the chips are down, only about themselves.

selise, It makes a good deal of sense until you try to figure out how you de-nuclearize a region.
Not one country, but, at minimum, three.

True, Kitchener. Boer war.
Very successful counter insurgency.
Invented conentration (death) camps. (Maybe you though it was the Nazis, wrong)
70 Years later was remember bitterly by the Afrikaans (Boers).

What was it that the Boers were fighting for?