Afghanistan

Apparently there is a new bit of drivel being propagated via email:

BREAKING NEWS: Pentagon Burns Soldiers Bibles - Military Chaplains Attacked

The Pentagon under the Obama Administration has just acknowledged seizing and burning the privately owned Bibles of American soldiers serving in Afghanistan. The Bibles had been printed in the local Pashto and Dari languages, and sent by private donors to American Christian soldiers and chaplains, for distribution to American troops on overseas military bases during optionally-attended Christian worship services. Had the Bibles not been seized and destroyed, they could have legally been given as gifts during off-duty time to Afghani citizens who welcome our troops in their homes, as an expression of American gratitude for Afghani hospitality, promoting the democratic ideals of freedom of religion and freedom of the press.

Got an email from a friend this morning. It was short, almost despairing:

I agree with David Brooks. He makes sense. Is this some alternate reality I've fallen into and can't get up?

My friend was talking about this column from Brooks last week:

Cheney Lost to Bush

President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history.

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money a link to this post:

WHAT IF BUSH HAD NUKED TORA BORA?

I have believed from the start that Bush should have nuked Tora Bora in 2001. The GWOT would have ended right then and there. It would have sent the right message: Don't Tread On Me!

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Nuking Tora Bora with a few small tactical nukes would have killed the entire al Qaeda leadership and warned everyone - terrorists and the nations which aid or harbor them - that they shouldn't fuck with us. Had Dubya done this the Bush Doctrine ("you're either with us or against us") would've has some teeth - and some positive effect. Now it's too late; what we could've done then in righteous reprisal can not be done now. Not until we are attacked here in the USA again.

Poor lad sounds almost sad that there haven't been any recent attacks which killed thousands of Americans...

Anyway, thought-experiment time: what do you think would have happened had we followed this course of action?

By UTI's own brilliant DarkSyde:

An Open Letter to the Media

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But this diary isn't about Tim Russert, it's not about you; it's about some other people who you occasionally cover and for whom you may now feel an unwanted and yet inseparabale kinship. It's probably too early to say this, and yes, I apologize if anyone feels this is crass or inapproriate, but I'm going to say it anyway: The same intractable pain that has reached out cruelly and gripped you with despair is felt by every mother and father, brother and sister, and friend and spouse of every single soldier killed in Iraq. Those men and women died doing a job that paid peanuts, most of them at a young age. Despite whatever loyalty they may feel to their comrades in arms, odds are good that quite a few of them would have rather been somewhere else right up until the moment their bodies were ravaged by fire and red-hot lead. The gut punch, horrific beyond comprehension, is their departed died for a mistake or a campaign of intentional deception, take your pick.

I was on my way to be the forward guard for our camping trip when I heard a piece on NPR that made my blood boil. It was about how the military was treating soldiers who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems. The official line is that they want to help and treat every soldier with problems. The reality on the ground doesn’t come close to that line.

According to the piece PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) manifests itself in many ways. It can include depression, drug and alcohol abuse, family problems, spousal abuse and problems with authority. One interviewee was the Sergeant Major of the Army who stated that above all the Army was concerned with “good order and discipline” which is pretty standard. He also stated that they would do what they could for the soldier but that “good order and discipline” was the most important thing.

The trouble with this is that in these cases good order and discipline is in direct conflict with the soldier’s and Marine’s state of mental health. So if those soldiers and Marines cross the line they’re disciplined in the standard way. That means, in many cases, that they’re kicked out of the service. Being kicked out of the service means that they’re then cut off from the health care that they need and deserve.

I understand the military’s dilemma. I DO understand the need to maintain good order and discipline and to maintain unit cohesion. However, when a member of the military has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder those members need and deserve care. Kicking them out seems to me to be the most irresponsible thing that the military can do.

Kevin Tillman is Pat Tillman's brother. Kevin and Pat joined the Army as brothers in 2002, and ended up serving together in Afghanistan and Iraq. On April 22, 2004, Pat Tillman, the former NFL football player and atheist, was killed while serving in Iraq.

Kevin, who was discharged from the Army in 2005, has written an incredibly powerful and moving article in anticipation of his brother's birthday coming up on November 6th.

I strongly encourage you all to read the whole thing.

[Kevin Tillman] It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Over the years I've heard this many times in many different forms referring to those who sign up for military service, "Those people signed a contract. They knew what they were getting into and they should follow orders no matter what."

I've always hated it when people said that. It presumes something important...it presumes that they will, as members of our armed forces, be used responsibly. I've never seen a response to it better than this. LINK

"Pentagon's Top Operations Officer, Now Retired Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold:

"After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq-an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable…I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough,” he writes in Time.

In Afghanistan, The Taliban is targetting schools. Post-Taliban Afghanistan's public schools instruct girls as well as boys, and teach subjects other than Qur'an verse recitation. Needless to say, this irks Jihadists, who would much rather see the male populace ignorant of everything but Islamist propaganda and the female populace barefoot and pregnant (of course the official excuse is the standard "they're foreigners!" soundbite). So far school shootings, school burnings, and threats of attacks have shut down at least 165 schools in the country.

The police and the troops on the ground do next to nothing. The first link describes an attack on a school that "is 15 minutes drive from an American base, now being taken over by the British, and just 500m from an Afghan police post. Police did not turn up for half an hour after the shooting. The Americans failed to turn up at all." Needless to say, this problem is largely attributable to the fact that most American and British troops are occupied elsewhere, thanks to two leaders. But evidently, in this case there were US troops nearby an Afghan police within a spit's distance; was the lag due to wanton incompetence, due to American and British troops' not giving a damn about Afghan civilians, or due to some other cause?

Incidentally, this destruction of schools is a fairly typical and expected move by radical terrorists. The greatest enemy of the radical terrorist is never the other side, and always the moderate. Moderates have an annoying tendency to achieve the parts of a radical program that are practical, useful, sensible, and acceptable to the masses, which causes the radicals to run out of steam. The second worst enemy of the radical is still not the other side, but the expert, who might make things work better without the radical's ideology. The Mufti of Jerusalem's first priority was to attack Arab moderates, so that anti-Semitism would remain the only option open to Palestinians; the Russian Revolution's first targets were anarchist coops that may not have been moderate but certainly ran the risk of getting things done without Lenin at the helm; the Khmer Rouge made sure to kill off about anyone who could read.