Archives! - Missing a forward slash in a setting path. Yes, it was that simple.

To Quag or Not to Quag, That Is the Question - Both MSNBC.com and The News (Pakistan), are reporting problems between the Northern Alliance (soon to change their name to The Northern Opponents) and British special forces. MSNBC.com says the Northern Alliance has demanded that the 120 commandos now in Afghanistan leave. (The same article also reports that the Northern Alliance says 15 of 60 can stay, so pick the story you like.) The News' summary simply reports the NA as saying that the Brits at Bagram airbase are in the country without "authorization." Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that the Brits plan to send 6,000 troops "to try to prevent a recurrence of the bloody internecine warfare that followed the fall of the city to the Northern Alliance in 1992."

Let's take it real slow here for a minute. You can't "prevent" - ahem; try to prevent - what someone doesn't want to do. Contrariwise, if you try to prevent someone from doing what they want to do, that makes the two sides opponents. And if what they want to do involves violence and your means of trying to prevent involves violence or the threat of same (like two brigades worth of your army), that's called war. Excuse me. That's called "peacekeeping." But what it is is war. Viz. Somalia 1992-1993.

Pundit and weblog luminary Andrew Sullivan left off quoting Orwell long enough to quote Churchill the other week: "Facts are better than dreams." The Northern Alliance surely agrees, which is why they occupied Kabul in advance of the "comprehensive political settlement" of everyone's dreams. Says one Far Side orca to the other, as they eye the trainer holding the mullet above them, "Forget the fish, I'm going for the whole schmear." The Northern Alliance decided to go for the whole schmear. That hardly means they're guaranteed to keep it. Kabul has changed hands in April 1978, December 1979, February 1989, April 1992, September 1996 and now November 2001. There's no reason to think the current conquest will be more permanent. But it does mean that whoever tries to dislodge them, including the US or Britain, becomes the enemy of the occupiers.

Was that part of the plan?

Any Man's Death Diminisheth Me...In the Abstract - Taliban spokesman Mullah Maulvi Najibullah says Mohamed Atef, al-Qaeda military chief, is dead. Atef is suspected of being the guiding hand behind not ony the September massacres, but also the 1998 embassy bombings and the 1993 Mogadishu shootdown. As Loki said on the death of Baldur, "With a dry eye will I weep for him" Assuming, that is, that the Taliban spokesman is telling the truth and not just providing cover for Atef to go underground.

All Means Short of War - The Daily Telegraph reports that five of those "British" muslims who went to Central Asia to fight, um, Britain, died in the fighting for Mazar e-Sharif:

Hassan Butt, a spokesman for the group who is based in Islamabad, said: "They all died as martyrs fighting the so-called coalition against terrorism. They went out there to fight for the Taliban and were prepared to give their lives.

Hassan, bubalah! Just change your last name and maybe you won't feel so angry all the time! Talk to Johnny Fuckerfaster about it. He'll tell you.

Even Sandworms Turn - Ken Layne is shocked, shocked by the following quote from the New York Times: "It seems the Americans only want to support Israel and attack the Muslims. And if this is a war between Christians and Muslims, we ought to fight." As Layne explains

That quote is from the owner of a rental car agency in ... Kuwait.

Fahad al-Munaif, 27, was 17 years old when his little oil emirate was invaded by Iraq. Oh, and his sister's baby is named "Osama," after the caveman himself.

It's bad enough when Islamic radicals (and the Western left) forget the very recent wars America fought specifically to protect Muslims from slaughter, but now the rich, pampered oil babies of Kuwait are whining? Kuwait?

Yes, Kuwait. This is why some of us become neo-isolationists, after all - the evanescence of the gratitude our "help" buys us. Right now Afghans are damned grateful and moderate Pakistanis are optimistic and Arabnews.com dutifully reports that America is not so bad after all and the Taliban are not so great after all and please please please don't shrug those shoulders and topple the House of Saud. All the blogs agree that "the best propaganda is victory."

This too shall pass, folks. It has passed before and it will pass again.

Where's Osama? - Almost anywhere, according to these Central Asian media reports compiled by The International News. Next thing you know, he and Mullah Omar will be turning up on top of the World Trade Center with a backp - oh, that won't work, will it? Guess the bastards should have thought of that beforehand.

The Meditations - The sister of Unqualified Offerings got laid off today, from the same company where Unqualified Offerings itself works. That has put it in a reflective mood; rather, a mood of frantic, baseless optimism, after the manner of the Tony Robbins CDs popular among the sales force that was also let go:

If someone hands you a lemon, make lemondate.

If someone hands you shit, make a shit souffle.

If someone hands you piss, make piss wine.

If someone hands you snot, make snot custard.

If someone hands you eye boogers, make eye booger crumb cake.

If someone hands you earwax, make earwax s'mores.

If someone hands you...

Bloomwatch Bonanza I - Justin Raimondo is making this feature too easy lately. After the heartwarming title of today's column, "LET'S DECLARE VICTORY – and get out!" things go quickly downhill.

So that's why we fought this war: so the Afghans could absorb the hip hop wisdom of Eminem, show off their naked chins, and bare their hairy legs. Oh, for joy!

Well, yeah.

Antiwar.com is sponsored by the Center for Libertarian Studies. Now apart from the merits of Eminem (considerable), and whether the locals were playing Western pop when they broke out the tunes (the papers don't say, and I suspect they were playing something much more like the intriguing Iranian instrumentals I heard last week), joy is precisely the libertarian word for freedom from a bondage so severe that the government decides how you'll groom yourself and what you'll wear! There is a case to be made against the United States making it its mission to deliver other countries from that level of (speaking of libertarian words) statism. But what lib worthy of the name can consider it a small matter whether the government shaves your face, or you do?

Osama bin Laden, A Parable - In the 70s for awhile, Steve Gerber wrote and Gene Colon drew a Howard the Duck newspaper strip. One particular strip stayed with me over the years and has been much in my mind since the massacres of September.

Howard and Bev have been captured by "Nihilists," dour, robed fellows pledged to bring oblivion wherever Being has been, and are aboard their flying Viking longship. When the Head Nihilist waxes poetic about the glories of nonbeing to Howard and Bev, Howard asks, "If you guys are so big on oblivion why don't you just off yourselves and leave the rest of us alone?"

The head nihilist draws himself upright, and responds, tenderly:

"Because we care."

Watch What We Say, Not What We Do - According to the International News (Pakistan), the Pakistani government "on Thursday continued to maintain it was not sending its armed forces to its western borders with Afghanistan to stop Taliban and al-Qaeda people from slipping into the country." Oh sure, the Pakistani government says, "increased vigilance would be done to ensure that those people involved with the Taliban and the al-Qaeda did not cross over," but they're not rushing troops around.

Questions that spring to mind are, So what form does non-troop-sending increased vigilance take? Do they ask refugees, "Did you pack your own bags?" Do they confiscate nail clippers? If someone tries to cross the border with a copy of Samuel R. Delaney's The Fall of the Towers, do they pull them out of line? Do refugees have to get to the border two hours early?

But forget what the Pakistani government is actually doing. What strikes me is that even in the face of massive Taliban reversals and concomitant US success, they're soft-pedaling the notion that they would take military measures to seal their borders against Taliban/al-Qaeda escapees. Taliban/al-Qaeda escapees would be armed and not necessarily peaceable. They'd likely want to use Pakistan as a base for attacks back across the border, as has been the recent history of exiled Afghan militants. That is, they're precisely the sorts of troublemakers most countries would want to keep the heck out. But the Pakistani government doesn't want to sound like it's trying very hard to do that. It seems pretty clear that the Musharraf regime is still worried.

Archive Blues - Can NOT make Blogger upload any archives. Get error 552. Anyone among our loyal reader who understands and can fix an error 552 problem, please e-mail to the address at left.

Stratfor Watch - Here's one that it would be nice if stratfor.com is right about:

But the situation is not nearly as dire as the public has been led to believe. Although many of the most optimistic pundits pegged a U.S. recovery to next year, close scrutiny of the numbers shows the so-called "recession" is over. The economy is already in the midst of a major recovery this quarter, with continued strong growth to occur in 2002.

U.S. gross domestic product contracted only 0.4 percent in the third quarter this year, far less than what many, including STRATFOR, were expecting. When the depth of the terrorist attacks and the relative strength of the GDP figure are compared, it becomes apparent that the United States was well into a robust recovery before the strikes.

I went to Stratfor.com looking for follow-up on their briefing quoted below, claiming that the Afghan's were strategically withdrawing rather than falling apart. They seem to have a follow-up, but you have to be a member to read it: "Omar: Desperate Bluff or Credible Threat?" is one, and "Ground War Strategies Part 4: What's Next for the Taliban?"

As an obvious opinion slut, Unqualified Offerings can't see why you'd try to make people pay for it.

Another Country Heard From - Actually, the same one we've been hearing about. MSNBC.com quotes exiled Afghan King Zahir Shah's radio address today:

The king called on “all warlords to heed international conventions concerning prisoners of war. People who surrender should be treated with respect.”

We are just not used to addressing, unironically, "warlords" in this country. I wonder if that's what their business cards say.

Sauce for the Gander - Brock Meeks on the laughably-named Patriot Act in MSNBC.com:

If you don’t think a surveillance society is a totalitarian one, try this little experiment: next time there’s a police action of any kind near you. Stop, whip out your video camera and stick in the face of a nearby cop. Try that in D.C. these days, especially if it’s a federal cop of any kind and you run the risk of arrest or at very least, being cuffed up beside the head.

Cops get real jittery, real quick, when you stick a camera in their face. That should tell you something right there about the “equality factor” of living in a surveillance society.

Bloomwatch - Justin Raimondo's Wednesday column goes severely astray in its central thesis, which is that "Islamofascism," aka "Fascism with an Islamic Face," is nothing but and nothing less than a new antisemitic (the other semites) canard. He begins witha hearteningly full-throated denunciation of Antisemitism Classic, the accusation that a country's Jews represent a cosmopolite fifth column loyal only to themselves:

This, of course, is an ignorant smear, one that, furthermore, has such an ugly history that it no longer seems necessary to refute it: the simple statement of it, in its self-evident absurdity, is enough to discredit anyone who makes such an argument.

He then continues:

It is passing strange, then, that another form of anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head in wartime, one which bears a remarkable similarity to the old version, except for one thing: it is directed against Arabs, who are also Semites – and it is being pushed, quite vigorously, by many of the very people who have, in the past, been victimized by anti-Semitic bullies.

Raimondo spends much of the rest of the article denouncing Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes for their claims about anti-American agitation and networking within the American muslim community, then bemoans the "anti-Saudi campaign being whipped up by this same crowd." What he never does do is get around to the factual questions. After all, the primary problem with the classic antisemitic canards - "Jews constitute a traitorous fifth column"; "Jews control the world's levers of power and use them to maximize their own wealth"; "Jews bake matzoh from the blood of Christian children" - is less that they are mean things to say than that they are demonstrably not true. So are the new Islamofascist "canards" factually true or not. In the latest Commentary, Pipes is careful to say that a very small number of American muslim residents are moved to violence against the country. If Raimondo wants to refute Islamofascism, he needs to go beyond insulting Pipes, Emerson, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan (all of whom come in for abuse):

1) Is it true or not that most American mosques are led by preachers who espouse militant Antiamericanism. (I mean, if it's true for the UCC...)
2) Did many of the hijackers have legal residency in the United States? Did the 1993 WTC bombers?
3) Fascism has been best described as "a Marxist heresy." The "heresy" takes the form of substituting some other collective struggle for the class struggle, typically race (Nazism) or national group (Italian fascism). Is it conceptually possible to substitute religion? Is militant Islam characterized by ressentiment and grandiose ambition? Do we have many, many statements from Taliban and al-Qaeda spokesmen valorizing death over life? Discuss.
4) Raimondo says, "In his increasingly dreary 'weblog,' Sullivan delights in quoting the most absurd snippets from Arab newspapers and then holding them up as somehow emblematic of Islam per se..." Let's give him the part about Sullivan's weblog becoming increasingly dreary. Are the "snippets" Sullivan and Instapundit quote, from major figures and institutions in government-controlled media, fringe statements rather than mainstream opinion? In what way?
5) Raimondo loves to play cui bono and so does Unqualified Offerings. How is Sullivan really sure bin Laden wants to overthrow the Saudi monarchy?
6) Raimondo writes: "We are constantly reminded that most of the hijackers were Saudis, but so what? In the 1970s, the Japanese Red Army, whose members were Japanese nationals, carried out a number of terrorist attacks worldwide. Did we blame Japan? Of course not." Question: Did Japan stonewall investigations into Red Army atrocities?

Raimondo is against what I am against: opportunistically widening the current al-Qaeda focused war. We'll need better arguments than he presents in his Wednesday column to do that.

Which Game Are We Playing? - As of yesterday, Stratfor.com was reporting the Taliban's retreat as being a strategic withdrawal, with a plan to regroup in their own ethnic strongholds. Meanwhile the Pentagon characterizes the retreat as a rout, and the Taliban/al Qaeda forces as essentially broken. It's not that Stratfor's claim is implausible on its face, nor does it make sense to believe everything the Pentagon tells one about the progress of the war. Stratfor says

In order to evaluate whether the Taliban withdrawal from northern Afghanistan was the routing of a defeated force or a strategic maneuver, we must first look at the evidence on the ground.

Perhaps the key feature of the withdrawal is that it has come almost without a fight. Neither the U.S. bombardment nor the Northern Alliance offensive adequately explains this. The Taliban have a hardened army with many veterans of the war against the Soviet Union. Taliban forces were renowned for their dogged combat, stunning the Northern Alliance in previous battles by advancing undeterred through minefields.

Before Sept. 11, the Taliban controlled some 95 percent of Afghanistan and appeared poised to mop up the remnants of the opposition. In the weeks before Mazar-e-Sharif fell, the Taliban soundly repelled a series of Northern Alliance attacks on the city, and even the Northern Alliance admitted they had not had time to prepare for a serious offensive.

Stratfor goes on to argue that the Taliban deployed screening forces and timed withdrawals (as from Kabul) to minimize casualties. What's more, Stratfor says that they largely sacrificed foreign troops to the delaying actions. And they offer some useful lessons from Afghan military history:

The speed of the Northern Alliance's advance was not surprising. Rapid advances are the norm in Afghanistan. The Taliban swept through the country as quickly when the group first emerged in 1994 and 1995. Russia's initial invasion of Afghanistan took only a few weeks.

Population density explains much of this phenomenon. Afghanistan has about 41 people per square kilometer -- less than a third the density of neighboring Pakistan -- and this does not take refugees into account. Rugged terrain means that much of Afghanistan is nearly uninhabited or is settled in small villages. It is easy to sweep through this territory; there is little to get in the way.

But there is a catch. Ethnic divisions, limited resources and logistical difficulties have constrained the size of the armies that fought over Afghanistan. At their peak, the Soviets had only about 90,000 troops in the country, and the Taliban and Northern Alliance armies were far smaller. Small armies and vast distances make frontal warfare difficult and dangerous. Armies cannot afford to spare the troops necessary to garrison the land they have overrun if they are to maintain a viable army at the front.

This leads to thin front lines, with troops concentrated at key nodes and with little reserve behind them. Once a front breaks or withdraws, an opposing force can make tremendous advances. Anyone who has played the board game "Risk" will recognize this.

I've quoted at length to be fair to their argument. But here's why they could easily be wrong. If it's fair to adduce Risk then it must be fair to adduce other games. Those of us who have played wargames are familiar with the class of games where you can only use your air power combat factors against troops that you have ground units in contact with. But often your ground units can be relatively puny; they nevertheless let you leverage your air power into terrific odds. Something like that may well have happened in Afghanistan. Northern Alliance forces that are not necessarily impressive in themselves can be, in combination with US aircraft, devastating. Andrew Sullivan is certainly wrong to assert that "air power alone" vanquished the Taliban (to the extent that they are vanquished). "Air power alone" didn't defeat Serbia in Kosovo either. In both cases, US airpower with local allied ground troops did win. Local ally ground attacks expose the locations of enemy forces, which US (and British) airstrikes devastate. The local forces are then in position to exploit breakthroughs.

Carp-Free Blog - Tonight, no worries about the long view. Genuine Moral Equivalence (TM) has the evening off. Tonight, Unqualified Offerings is content that the Taliban are in retreat, many of their foreign legionnaires are dead, and there are rumors that UBL himself may soon be run to earth (and soon thereafter, hopefully, planted in it). Unqualified Offerings would shave its beard in celebration if it had ever, in its entire life, been able to grow one. Mrs Offering already celebrated by traveling about the town unaccompanied and uncovered. What else could complete the picture? Ah yes. Music! UO now turns to the selection of tunes. Good night, world.

Battle of the Hawks - Not much to say on this newsy day. Nothing to say about the airline crash, a sad event that probably just...happened. Little to say on the apparent gains of the USAF-supported Northern Alliance against the Taliban, since its long-term meaning is unclear. Andrew Sullivan makes much of it, wants the Alliance to march into Kabul, and sees behind the administration's apparent caution, as so often these days, the fell hand of Colin Powell, who is rapidly becoming for Sullivan what Snowball was for the bad pigs. Actually, that's not fair - Sullivan isn't a bad pig himself, just too credulous of them (Wolfowitz, Perle et al):

I suspect too much State Department micro-management here and not enough go-for-it military strategy. I was, as usual, dismayed by Colin Powell on Meet The Press. Why is this man declaring that we'd never contemplate using nukes against bin Laden? Why limit ourselves in any way?

L'Audace, Andrew! Toujours L'Audace! But Sullivan's fellow hawk, young Patrick Ruffini, has a different view.

The trap we're falling into is that we're starting to think of Afghanistan as a state and of the Taliban as its sovereign rulers. We think we can capture key cities, and eventually the capital (Kabul), and cause the Taliban to collapse. All Hitler had to do to terminate the French nation-state as it had existed was march into Paris. It won't be that simple in Afghanistan. Afghanistan represents Hobbes's anarchy more than anything else. It is ruled by tribal warlords of which the Taliban aren't even a majority (they extend their reach over the majority of the country through alliances with local tribes). Any square inch the Taliban controls is a potential base for terror, even if they don't control the "Afghanistan", even if they don't have Kabul. It won't be enough to set up a new government but leave the Taliban in control of the areas that really matter. Osama bin Laden is just as dangerous with 10% of Afghanistan to run around in as he is with 80%. And as this still-relevant Arab News piece points out, Bin Laden's hiding options are already strictly limited because the Taliban actually exercises total control over only a small part of Afghanistan. Even if the Taliban are routed from 90% of Afghanistan (surely one of the Pentagon's better-case scenarios), they will still control these areas. Mazar-i-Sharif is a sideshow because it doesn't provide us with direct access to the areas we need direct access to.

Taking over Mazar-i Sharif was easy. It's in Uzbekistan's back yard, and by all accounts, the Northern Alliance is more popular there anyway. What won't be easy is getting at the south, especially if we rely on the Northern Alliance, who I take it couldn't care less about ruling there.

If we are going to do this right, we must go to the source. We must go to Kandahar. And we must do it ourselves.

I haven't had much use for Ruffini since he urged the government to lie to us about what it did and didn't know about anthrax attacks. I only half accept his conclusion. (If we're to usefully find bin Laden in Kandahar we're going to need local clients there too.) I might ask what going to Kandahar has to do with bombing power plants. But his argument that the Northern Alliance can take the US so far toward its statedwar aims and no further seems sound.

The Myth of Afghan Invincibility? - From Unqualified Offerings' (blissfully unaware) friends, The News of Pakistan, a skeptical reassessment of Afghan military history by A H Amin. (No, I have no idea who A H Amin is.) An excerpt:

Now we come to the romantic tales of Afghan invincibility in the British period. The British are in the habit of dramatising the odds they faced and giving it a poetic touch. Thus the First Afghan War became a subject of many myths and fantasies which to date many of our worthy writers have failed to comprehend in their true perspective.

Lots of analysis and interpretation in the full article, which is worth a read.

Bin Laden Interviewer Interviewer Interviewed - CNN.com has an article about their attempts to authenticate bin Laden's interview by a correspondent for Pakistan's Dawn. As part of it, CNN interviews correspondent Nic Roberston, who interviewed Dawn reporter Hamid Mir about his trip to bin Laden. (Note: By presenting CNN's interview with its interviewer of the interviewer of Osama bin Laden, Unqualified Offerings feels that it must now be acknowledged as the worldwide leader in fifth-hand journalism.)CNN.com quotes Robertson quoting Mir as describing bin Laden's location as a command post where, "about four times an hour, bin Laden was contacted, being given updated military reports on the progress of the war, particularly as it progressed around the key northern city in Afghanistan of Mazar-e Sharif." That's a lot of access for an "honored guest" of the Taliban government, quarter-hourly updates on infantry action, if what Mir tells Robertson tells CNN.com tells us is true.

Reasons to be Cheerful - The biggest worry about the possible fall of the House of Saud is what would happen to the price and supply of oil. An article on US-Saudi relations in an Australian paper, The Advertiser, includes the following:

An analysis by Professor George Perry, a senior economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, argued that if Muslim extremists managed to win control of Middle Eastern oil supplies, the price would shoot up from the current $US20 ($30.8) to $US161 a barrel.

Since most Brookings economists wouldn't understand markets if you broke the concept down to Teletubby level and let them watch the video on Dipsy's tummy screen, we can all feel secure in believing that things can't get anywhere near that bad.

Annoying unrelated fact: The Advertiser story tends to confirm Prince Abdullah's claim that President Bush apologized to him for anti-Saud stories and essays in the US media. Note to Abdullah: Unqualified Offerings is not sorry.

The Link to End All Links - Ginger Stampley commends the following Daily Telegraph story to everyone's attention. Here's just one key bin Laden quote from the video the Telegraph obtained:

He says: "The towers were supposed to be filled with supporters of the economical powers of the United States who are abusing the world. Those who talk about civilians should change their stand and reconsider their position. We are treating them like they treated us."

As has been said, "Well, there you have it." Obviously, the video could have been faked by US/British intelligence for propaganda purposes. But yesterday's items on this site, including the links Michael Croft provided, establish a context in which I feel justified in regarding the new video as authentic until proven otherwise. Besides, in the best early speculation on the motives and strategy of bin Laden, the antiwar paleocon Gary North argued that a recruiting video was precisely bin Laden's goal in launching the massacres. Now we have a recruiting video.

Mind you, even North didn't get everything right: "My prediction: there will be no air strikes," he wrote.