Afghanistan
mikethemadbiologist | May 8, 2011Well, actually it is being asked, just not by our political betters. From The Army Times:
Another soldier, Spc. William Baxter, a parachute rigger with the 101st Sustainment Brigade, was more succinct with his thoughts.
"OK, he's dead, can we go home?" he asked.
His thoughts were echoed by Spc. Wesley Gibbs, from Division Signal Co. H&H Battalion.
"I'm happy," Gibbs said. "Maybe this process will go a little bit faster now, and we can all go home to our families."
Declare victory and bring them home. Now.
mikethemadbiologist | May 2, 2011Last night and this morning in the U.S., people no doubt are wrapping their heads around the announcement that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces yesterday. The question now becomes--will that change anything?
If we still are occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, if U.S. lives and treasure are still being squandered there, what did this accomplish?
Now do we bring our fellow citizens home, or does the war against Oceania Eastasia continue?
Will we still look upon torture as a good thing?
My entire adult life, with the possible exception of the Clinton era (then, no ground troops…
lborkowski | December 28, 2010Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site.
By Liz Borkowski, originally posted 11/6/09
Earlier today, the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing on the use of burn pits for trash at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan - a practice that may be exposing thousands of soldiers and civilians to carcinogens, respiratory irritants, and neurotoxins. A particularly large burn pit at the Balad Air Base in Iraq has been getting a lot of attention, but the use of burn pits seems to be widespread at these military bases.
As DPC Chair Senator Byron…
mikethemadbiologist | December 15, 2010No doubt they hate us for our freedoms (or something), but if I were an Afghan, this might just push me over the edge:
Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.
...according to the leaked cable, that money was flowing to drug dealers and pimps. Pimps of children, to be more precise. (The exact type of drug was never specified.)
Since this is Afghanistan, you probably already knew this wasn't a kegger. Instead, this DynCorp soiree was a bacha bazi ("boy-play") party, much like the ones uncovered earlier this year by…
mikethemadbiologist | October 10, 2010More fun in our military libertarian paradise (italics mine):
Afghan private security forces with ties to the Taliban, criminal networks and Iranian intelligence have been hired to guard American military bases in Afghanistan, exposing United States soldiers to surprise attack and confounding the fight against insurgents, according to a Senate investigation.
The Pentagon's oversight of the Afghan guards is virtually nonexistent, allowing local security deals among American military commanders, Western contracting companies and Afghan warlords who are closely connected to the violent…
mikethemadbiologist | July 26, 2010The NY Times has an article about the recent revelation of a six-year archive of classified military documents (released by WikiLeaks). In it, we find this lil' tidbit:
There are fleeting -- even taunting -- reminders of how the war began in the occasional references to the elusive Osama bin Laden.
This isn't mission creep, this is mission rocket-blast-to-the-moon. If, when the Afghan occupation started, we had announced that we were going to stay for nearly a decade (and with no withdrawal in sight) in order to bring light unto the heathenengage in nation building, no one would have…
gregladen | June 22, 2010According to reports.
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Check it out.
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2010Related to this morning's post about the find of $1 trillion dollars worth of minerals in Afghanistan, even if we were to capture (if the verb fits....) ten percent of the total worth of those resources, it still wouldn't come close to the break-even point for the occupation of Afghanistan (which is somewhere between $200-$300 billion). If this will be the justification for staying even more Friedman units in Afghanistan, we're so stupid we can't even figure out how to make money off the deal.
(This venal argument ignores the "what do you say to the last man to die for a mistake" principle…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2010Or something. Look at what we found in Afghanistan:
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…
gregladen | December 2, 2009As a strategy, Obama's plan for Afghanistan is an order of magnitude better then what we were doing before, and an order of magnitude worse than walking away from the region. Or at least, that is my opinion at the moment. Here's some interesting discussion on it:
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ddobbs | July 4, 2009Spencer Ackerman explores and explains the importance of eating the local food when fighting an insurgency:
One of the things that struck me when I embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is how little local food I ate. When I met some friends for drinks in April 2007 after coming a month in Baghdad and Mosul, one of the first questions I got was about local Iraqi delicacies. Man, I said, I ate king crab legs with a plastic fork on a huge base around the Baghdad airport, courtesy of KBR. Or rather I tried, since you can%u2019t eat king crab legs with a plastic fork.When I went…
awild | February 17, 2009
The Taliban Beetle, a specimen at the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland.
Meet the Taliban Beetle.
I took this picture in 2004 while visiting the collections at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland. For reasons I was unable to discern, a coleopterist working in the collection in the late 1990's had intended to name this new Afghani ground beetle after the country's ruling party at the time. Whether he came to regret this decision in the post 9/11 world, I do not know.
No formal description of the Taliban beetle was ever printed. So despite the official looking…
ddobbs | February 25, 2008
Yesterday's NY Times Magazine carried one of the best stories I've seen yet on our military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq -- "Battle Company is Out There," a riveting and deeply informative piece by Elizabeth Rubin about the difficulties (to put it lightly) faced by a company of soldiers trying to win the war on terror (and keep mind and body together) in the remote highlands of Afghanistan. Simply stunning reporting -- relevant, compassionate, and frightfully immediate. This is reporting and writing on the level of Michael Herr's Dispatches. (And I do not say this just because I sometimes…
tqa | October 9, 2007
A little after 7 am on 27 November, 2004, Lt. Colonel Michael McMahon and Chief Warrant Officer Travis Grogan boarded a small twin-engine airplane in Bagram, Afghanistan. The plane, which also had a cargo of 400 pounds of mortar illumination rounds, was operated by Presidential Airways, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blackwater USA. Grogan was an experienced pilot assigned to the 3rd Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment (the 3/4 Cav). McMahon was the 3/4ths commanding officer. At around 7:30, the plane stopped on the taxiway and a third passenger, 21-year old Specialist Harley Miller…