By Hanlon, on March 31st, 2009 at 07:06 PM
 At the risk of sounding like a namby-pamby, this really does seem like a case of catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Haji Gran, a 70-year-old poppy and wheat farmer, wants a pump for his well.
U.S. Marine Sgt. Joshua Randall has an answer: “If (you) start telling us where the Taliban is and where they’re placing bombs on the road, I can start asking for water pumps,” he tells Gran and his family through an interpreter.
Gran, wearing a white turban and shalwa kameez, the local dress of loose pants and shirt, says he will be glad to provide information about the Taliban. “The bombs are not good for us either,” he says.
Ain’t that something? Work with the people and they’ll talk. No need for waterboarding.
See that’s the thing. Terrorism is a response to the perceived “evil” of the “enemy”. The way to combat terrorism (that is, prevent it from spreading) is to prove to the people that the United States is a friend. That way when the militants talk of the Great Satan, the people will go “are you kidding, they bought me some farm equipment! They’re good people!” When you capture and beat them and then hold them for years without hope of release, that tape with Bin Laden talking of America’s evils starts to sound pretty convincing.
By Hanlon, on March 28th, 2009 at 03:14 PM
 I don’t know, maybe it’s the grumpy anti-everything liberal in me, but I’m always really surprised when a Bush appointee praises an action taken by Obama. Especially when it’s one that caught as much flak as Hamid Karzai, who was positively glowing when talking about Obama’s plan for Afghanistan. Not just him, either.
“He has our full support,” Karzai told a news conference. “This was better than what we expected.”
…
“I welcome President Obama’s call to the Congress to pass the bill for $1.5 billion aid to Pakistan every year,” [Pakistani President] Zardari said.
“The U.S. presidency now approaches and presents a positive change. It is an endorsement of our call for economical, social uplifts” to help fight extremism.
This is, at least symbolically, huge. To have the leaders of two of the three most tumultuous nations in the area (particularly the ones where Al Qaeda terrorists arguably still have a hell of a stronghold) siding with Obama’s plan represents a massive vote of not just confidence, but unity. That’s what’s needed to just get the whole thing off the ground, a united effort between the nations.
So yeah. Let’s see Hannity and pals explain why Obama’s wrong now.
By Hanlon, on March 19th, 2009 at 06:02 PM
 Sometimes the story isn’t so much what is said as who is the one saying it. No one reading this would be much surprised if ol’ Hanlon said there are innocent people being held at Guantanamo Bay, but when it’s a former Bush official, now things are getting interesting. However, we’re getting a weird wrinkle here.
“There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.
“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”
Did that scare you? It scared me. For two reasons. One, the fact is we don’t even know how many at Guantanamo are innocent, because they haven’t been charged. That’s the whole reason you’re supposed to charge people with something and then give them the right to challenge it: we can sift through the roster and separate the innocent people from the guilty. Two… really?? Just because you live in Afghanistan, we can pick you up at random because you “must” know something? That’s straight-up terrifying, and I doubt telling the Afghan people that the United States military is presuming everyone is buddy-buddy with at least a couple terrorists is helping our efforts to change the dynamic over there.
What we’re seeing is rationalization. It’s the ultimate explanation for why even innocent people can’t be let go. Oh sure, we say, they may not have done anything but if they didn’t know at least a little bit they wouldn’t have been there! Now, normally, a “person of interest” who holds useful information is used as a contact. What we’ve got here is the equivalent of if your friend murders someone and goes on the lam you get thrown in jail until your friend is caught because you “must” know something.
By Hanlon, on February 28th, 2009 at 11:46 PM
 Mark this one on your calendars, Hanlon is going after the media for overblowing the bad situation in one of our foreign engagements.
Everyone knows I’m a believer in “report the truth even if it’s unpleasant” and other such mantras, and I certainly don’t want to act like I’m downplaying the loss of life of our soldiers, especially when it’s in the one half of the war I support. But come on now. First, the headline and sub-heading are “U.S. deaths spike in Afghanistan Casualties increase threefold for 2009″, but here’s the actual stat:
Twenty-nine U.S. troops died in Afghanistan the first two months of 2009 — compared with eight Americans in the first two months of 2008.
This is kinda like saying if I have five bucks in my bank account and I find a $5 bill in an old jacket I’ve doubled my money overnight. When a number goes from eight to 29, you can say “about twenty more casualties in the first two months”, or you can say “casualties more than triple”. Both are loaded one way or the other, each paired with an intention.
Now, it doesn’t help the AP that it takes them five paragraphs before they mention that the troop increase is probably why it happened, and that’s just to be expected. You dump an extra 10,000 troops or so in a country and even if things keep in proportion you’re looking at a rather sizeable increase. Consider that the extra numbers are likely paired with an extra aggressive course of action and naturally some more deaths will occur on all sides.
So, yeah, some more troops died, but ease up.
By Hanlon, on January 23rd, 2009 at 11:31 AM
This is one of those times I have to remind myself that all the world’s ills aren’t going to be solved overnight by the arrival of President Obama. A pair of rockets wriggled their way into Pakistan today, hitting a house and killing a few people. Unsurprisingly, “officials” are claiming the deaths were militants.
Now, tell me I’m not alone here:
There have been more than 20 such attacks carried out from drones on targets in north-western Pakistan in recent months, sparking protests from Pakistan’s government against US policy in the region.
The United States seems to have this attitude of “deal with it” when it comes to what we’re doing in other countries. If China was helping fight off terrorists in Canada and a score of their rockets came flying across the border to hit houses in Minnesota and New York, what do you think the reaction would be? Would it be this mild little “hey, respect our sovereignty” kind of reponse? Or would there be hell to pay for killing our citizens in our borders?
American exceptionalism was borne of our leaders using our strength only for good. When the United States reserved its power for when the world needed us and sought to prove we had the moral high ground in all matters, the world came to see us as the city on the hill. Obama’s got an uphill battle to get that back.
By Hanlon, on September 9th, 2008 at 01:10 PM
 Here’s a fun one. Obama released a statement this afternoon criticizing President Bush for not doing enough in Afghanistan. Full text from the AP.
RIVERSIDE, Ohio (AP) — Barack Obama says President Bush’s announcement that he’ll send more forces into Afghanistan is too slow and insufficient.
The president said Tuesday that he’ll add a Marine battalion in November, followed by an Army combat brigade. Obama responded that “his plan comes up short.”
Obama said, “It is not enough troops, and not enough resources, with not enough urgency.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said Bush doesn’t understand that Afghanistan and Pakistan are the central front in the war on terror, not Iraq.
Now let me start off by saying that I agree 100% with Obama here. Despite McCain’s claim that we could just “muddle” our way through Afghanistan and others saying it was easy pie so why worry, Afghanistan is both not won, and far and away the more important war in the fight against terrorism. So I agree that a single battalion and one Army brigade is like throwing a few Dixie cups of water on a fire.
But let’s think this over. The Republicans are campaigning on “change” and the Democrats are criticizing Bush for not being tough enough in a war. What the hell?
By Hanlon, on August 29th, 2008 at 10:47 AM
Well, color me surprised. The United States launched its own investigation into a military operation getting negative press and, amazingly, found out that it was really not as bad as everyone was saying!
A U.S. military review of an airstrike last week in western Afghanistan maintains that only five civilians were killed, Pentagon officials said yesterday, a finding that starkly contradicts reports by the United Nations and Afghan officials that the civilian death toll from the bombing was at least 90.
The completed review corroborates an initial assessment by the military of the operation Friday by U.S. and Afghan forces in a village in Herat province. The review determined that 25 militants, including a Taliban commander, and five civilians had been killed, the officials said.
“We did not kill up to 90 civilians as has been alleged,” one U.S. military official said. The review “comports with our operational understanding” of the events, said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Why does it seem like every single time the United States disagrees with the findings of either an international body or the country we’re in, the US’s findings are way more positive? Has there been a single instance where the US tallied more civilian casualties of a US-led strike? Electrical grids, body counts, costs and length of engagement, it’s always more favorable when the Bush-led investigations happen.
Ministry of Truth indeed.
By Hanlon, on August 26th, 2008 at 08:41 PM
It’s the heaviest civilian casualty operation since 2001 over there, but hey, at least there was a pretty decent children-to-badguys rate.
The United Nations the team visited the scene and interviewed survivors and local officials and elders, getting a name, age and gender of each person reported killed. The team reported that 15 people had been injured in the air strikes, which occurred in the middle of the night.
The numbers closely match those given by a government commission sent from Kabul to investigate the bombing, which put the total dead at up to 95.
Mohammad Iqbal Safi, the head of the parliamentary defense committee and a member of the government commission, said the 60 children were between three months old and 16 years old, all killed as they slept. “It was a heart breaking scene,” he said.
There’s a kind of totaler krieg attitude emerging lately that the best way to fix everything going wrong is to bomb the hell out of everyone, or that this is what we should have done in the first place. While that kind of strategy might have worked then, having a terrifying number of civilian casualties while attempting to root out “terrorists” just does not work.
Here’s why. When you fight a proper war, the “enemy” is the government of the country the fight’s in. Bomb a load of civilians and the government sees you have no hesitation to go all out, and rather than let their own be slaughtered will go for a hasty surrender. In this case, the extremists stand to lose nothing when civilians are killed, and likely will use that as proof that America is evil and strengthen their resolve (imagine that, we’re emboldening them). Plus it undermines the “we aren’t waging war on the people, just the terrorists” idea.
These two wars really should be studied by every single administration from here on out as a manual entitled “How Not to Fight Terrorism”.
By Hanlon, on July 25th, 2008 at 06:13 PM
 Easily amongst the more infuriating problems with the “media bias” toward Obama is the fact that we are once again seeing the wrong debate getting framed. We’ve seen it before, but nothing really exemplifies it better than this really, really shitty interview Katie Couric had with Obama.
You can read it for yourself, the point is that she asked him some variant of “but wasn’t it a mistake to oppose the surge?” or “wasn’t it good that the surge happened?”
This has become the latest talking point: Obama opposed the surge and he was wrong because the surge led to success. McCain’s been using it as a talking point a lot lately, here in PA there are ads focused almost entirely on that point that get run all the time. Any time McCain gets on the stump to contrast his own policies with Obama’s, the surge invariably comes up.
The problem is that the people spouting this one forget that Obama’s actual Iraq policy was “don’t go into Iraq, it’ll just screw up Afghanistan.” That part’s pretty hard to deny. Had we kept our troops in Afghanistan, not blown off the bin Laden hunt, we’d be enjoying a damn safe America and probably a way better economy.
And the right knows it. They know that they can’t argue that launching the war has left us with one hell of a military headache and precious few resources to clean it up. So they frame the debate to ignore all of that, instead acting as though it hadn’t happened, we all came in circa 2006 and that’s when all discussion on the issue started.
Oh, and on the topic, I found this quote by McCain’s on what the Surge really did rather adorable:
“Obama will tell you we can’t win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backwards. It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan,” McCain continued to the crowds’ applause. “I know how to win wars. And if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory. I know how to do that.”
Oh I see. When we started the war in Afghanistan, we had no idea what we were doing. But rather than altering strategies, we had to use Iraq like a little testing ground for what would eventually get rolled out over there. PERFECTLY logical. Heck, if we had stayed in Iraq, we might never have figured out that adding troops would help!
By Hanlon, on July 22nd, 2008 at 09:21 PM
 The New York Times ran a piece today about how the desire to avoid civilian casualties causes limits on what can or cannot be done in terms of striking on the enemies in Afghanistan. I’m surprised this is a news story really, but what I want to point out is the following statement:
“We miss the opportunity, but the beauty of what we do is we will get them eventually,” said Lt. Gen. Gary L. North, commander of American and allied air forces in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. “We will continue to track them. Eventually, we will get to the point where we can achieve — within the constraints of which we operate, which by the way the enemy does not operate under — and we will get them.”
Okay, you got that? I’m tired of this attitude that says that the war is somehow “lopsided” because we aren’t as callous and cruel as our enemies apparently are, and that’s why we need to have this “make ‘em into a parking lot and torture the survivors until they squeal” mentality. After all, they’re savage people, we should treat them as savages!
Well there you go, folks. The commander of US and allied air forces over a huge chunk of the planet is damn PROUD of the fact that we will succeed despite taking the high road. Let’s hope that attitude spreads.
|
|
|
