Bookworm on Dec 11 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military, Political correctness
Tweet The rule of war used to be that you hated your enemy. That made it easy to fight your enemy. Then, starting with the first Gulf War, the new rule was that you felt sorry for your enemy. By the Iraq War, the rule had become, you’ve got to like and respect your enemy. [...]
Bookworm on Sep 17 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet In war, it’s entirely possible to have battle causalities increase despite the fact that you’re winning. This is because, as with the Surge in Iraq, you are aggressively engaging the enemy. Yes, you are defeating the enemy, decimating his numbers, and driving him back, but the very fact of engagement is necessarily going to [...]
Bookworm on Aug 23 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet In the last two weeks, Afghan forces under American mentorship have killed ten NATO troops. Now, you and I might think this is because we are at war with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and these enemy forces have had their agents infiltrate the ostensibly American-friendly Afghan forces. In other words, our [...]
Bookworm on May 14 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama
Tweet Somewhere between yesterday and today, my brain went AWOL. I had a wonderful idea for a short and sweet post yesterday but never got the chance to write it down. Today, I have the chance, but absolutely no ideas, neither short and sweet ideas, nor long and boring ones. I’ve been reading the news, [...]
Bookworm on Feb 25 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan
Tweet Stick with this one. You’ll like it — I promise:
Bookworm on Feb 06 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet BUDS trainees during Hell Week Special troops are, by definition, small in number. If everyone could do what they do, they would be special. They are made up of men with unusual mental and physical strength. Again, by definition this is a subset of all men. (No disrespect meant to the majority of men [...]
Bookworm on Jan 18 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet My post caption is not a joke: According to USA Today, the newest NATO tactic in Afghanistan is, in essence, to pretend there is no enemy: Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that [...]
Bookworm on Jan 11 2012 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Iraq, World War II
Tweet A friend sent me a link to an editorial bemoaning the fact that, by abruptly pulling out from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, the Obama administration is ensuring that we’re leaving a job undone — something that invariably means one has to do it again. If history is going to keep repeating itself, why can’t [...]
Bookworm on Dec 19 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan
Tweet Sadie played connect the dots for me: Dots begin here . . . . After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to [...]
Bookworm on Jun 27 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama
Tweet I like Pete Wehner’s writing a lot. I don’t always agree with him, but I often do, and I always enjoy the way in which he develops his ideas. This column, about the post-Vietnamesque horrors that Obama is cheerily planning for Afghanistan (although I’d say the Taliban will be even more savage than the [...]
Bookworm on Jun 24 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama
Tweet When I read about Obama’s drawing down troops so that he’d send tens of thousands home right before the election, I said that I didn’t think this would make the troops vote for him. Barry Rubin kindly pointed out that the calculation wasn’t to get troop votes, but to get votes from his antiwar [...]
Bookworm on Jun 23 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Military
Tweet Peter Wehner writes about Obama’s decision to draw down troops in Afghanistan, something that (just coincidentally, of course) will take place right before Obama’s reelection bid. Wehner is appalled, and he explains that this gross political calculation isn’t the way it needs to be: I have the advantage of having served a president during [...]
Bookworm on Mar 31 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Jihad, Libya
Tweet Does the administration’s decision to arm the Libyan rebels remind you of anything? It does me. It reminds me of the Reagan administration’s decision to arm the rebels in Afghanistan. Back then, the rebels were not our enemy, and they were fighting a sworn enemy against whom we’d been engaged in myriad proxy wars [...]
Bookworm on Mar 29 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Media matters, Military
Tweet Years ago, in another life, I dated a man who had worked for Rolling Stone and personally knew Jann Wenner. (My ex-boyfriend claimed that a well-known Rolling Stone photographer was the one who introduced him to and got him hooked on cocaine. I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not, [...]
Danny Lemieux on Feb 10 2011 | Filed under: Afghanistan
Tweet Will Democrats once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Here’s a very encouraging report about the latest NATO (mostly American forces) offensive in Helmand province, one of the last redoubts of the Taliban. I don’t know how much play this will get in the Mass Media, as they generally don’t like to [...]
Bookworm on Oct 01 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama
Tweet Peter Wehner describes the conduct, but I think, when you behave as Obama as, the word “contemptible” can apply, with equal aptness, to the man himself (emphasis mine): I have praised President Obama in the past for his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. New facts have come to light since then. And, [...]
Bookworm on Jul 06 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Military
Tweet Phibian, who is one one of my oldest blog friends, explains at Big Peace how the President’s entirely artificial time line for withdrawing from Afghanistan not only emboldens the Taliban (and makes a negotiated peace impossible), but also destroys all good efforts at future planning in that theater. If you like Phibian’s writing (and [...]
Bookworm on Jul 01 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet My (conservative) book club read Victor Davis Hanson’s A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. One of the points Hanson makes in the book is that Pericles embarked upon a new type of warfare: Periclean strategy . . . defined the new war as battle not between [...]
Bookworm on Jun 23 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Military
Tweet I feel I should say something, so I will. Being me, of course, what I say will be discursive. Re McChrystal: An excellent general who didn’t hit it off with Obama from the git-go (blame lies, I believe, with Obama), and who failed utterly in the diplomatic discretion category — something that’s true whether [...]
Bookworm on May 31 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet [I'll keep this at the top through Memorial Day. Scroll down for lots of new posts.] Several years ago, as part of a 9/11 commemoration, I wrote the following words as part of a post I did about Lt. Brian Ahearn, one of the New York fire fighters who perished on that day: My [...]
Bookworm on May 31 2010 | Filed under: 9/11, Afghanistan, Leftist morality, Military
Tweet As I’ve mentioned just a few times, I just read, and was very moved by, Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10. A liberal I know flipped through the book’s first few pages and had a very different reaction. The following passages bugged [...]
Bookworm on Feb 28 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet I meant to post this yesterday, but time got away from me: many, many, many congratulations to the Marines and their Afghan allies for the Marjah victory. I never doubted that they would win, but I certainly understood that each Marine and Afghan soldier faced the risk that he would make the ultimate sacrifice [...]
Bookworm on Feb 15 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Military
Tweet A friend sent me this powerful (non-exclusive) image from Michael Yon: Yon describes it as follows: A crew from the United States Air Force spent Saturday night and Sunday morning airlifting different groups of wounded soldiers from Kandahar to Camp Bastion to Bagram, back to Kandahar, then back to Bagram, and back to Kandahar. [...]
Bookworm on Jan 29 2010 | Filed under: Afghanistan, GBLT
Tweet I don’t have a comment here. I just think this story is interesting: An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns — though they seem to be in complete denial about it. [snip] In [...]
Bookworm on Dec 02 2009 | Filed under: Afghanistan, Anti-war, Barack Obama
Tweet Despite giving the generals almost 75% fewer troops than the 80,000 they really wanted (and even significantly less than the 40,000 they sort of wanted), and despite telling the Taliban and Al Qaeda exactly when the field is theirs, and despite dwelling morbidly on death in front of the men and women at West [...]
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