October 4th 2008
Pesky Furriners
G
ood old Yankee know-how has been on display in Waziristan lately, as drone-fired missiles are slamming into rat-filled hovels. The latest report claims 20 “militants” - al-Qaeda and taliban terrorists - were killed.
A fine thing indeed, but what’s with this paragraph?
One attack in Mohammadkhel village about 28 miles west of Miran Shah, the region’s main town, killed about 19 people, most of them alleged militants but also including about a half-dozen foreigners, the officials said, citing agents in the field.
You mean the foreigners weren’t also terrorists? Were they perhaps European tourists on an eco-tour? Hollywood stars and Parisian fashion models on a round-the-world Smug Quest?
More likely they were jihadis from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Euro-Muslims on the only real kind of tour that reaches those parts, jihad madrassa tours. A half-dozen foreigners? A half dozen more dead terrorists, most likely.
Since this is evidence of stepped-up efforts to win the war in Afghanistan by taking out the terrorist dregs that dragged that sorry butts back to the mountains after we took out most of their compadres in Iraq, one would think that Barack “The Kabul Kid” Obama will be singing the praises of the attack. Bets anyone? Anyone think he’ll actually praise a successful military action?
Posted in Al Qaeda, Jihad, Obama, Pakistan, Taliban, War on Terror | 3 Comments » | 
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Comments
October 4th, 2008 at 6:53 am
I’d like to sound a cautionary urgent note.Occasionally in these attacks we make mistakes in targeting. Sometimes the mistake is serious and innocent villagers get killed. Sometimes less serious and their livestock get killed.There’s not much you can do to alleviate the problem when people get killed.In Iraq, sometimes our troops made rigorous and constant efforts to provide compensation for the effects of our attacks on the terrorists or, in local resistances, the insurgents. As Petraeus molded the entire fighting force into his Surge strategy, ALL such mistakes resulted in effective compensation.This was a significant part of the soldiers being embedded community enforcers/policemen along with the local Iraqis they were training, and it was all extraordinarily effective.It got to the point where the Iraqi people would dig up the IEDs from the roads and paths, sort them for us into piles, and we’d drive up, examine the piles, pay them, blow up the IEDs, leave. In Afghanistan we’re doing none of that and the people are NOT (yet) with us. I am sure that will change under Petraeus. Anything we can do to help urge our leadership to adopt similar strategies will help!The Afghanis are dirt poor. Villager deaths are tough enough. But when we blow up 28 cattle belonging to a poor village, arrive, look around, wave and leave, it has a very bad effect. The loss to the villagers (or compound dwellers) is absolutely devastating economically. Those opium warlords aligned with the Taliban step in and just plain trump us.Petraeus will get this changed, but the completely dysfunctional NATO structure is going to make all of this extraordinarily difficult.Michael Yon is an independent American photojournalist that gained complete credibility with American, British, Australian, Canadian fighting forces in Iraq. He’s in Afghanistan now. Go to his website and read up on things if you want details. His conclusion is that we currently are losing in Afghanistan because of misguided leadership at the top, despite heroic efforts by the troops themselves.Scroll down to his ‘Death In the Corn’ reports, parts 1 2 3 if you want one helluva good story and synopsis about conditions on the ground for our troops. Also there’s a great story about the secret mission to move a HUGE electricitiy generator and its infrastructure through Taliban controlled territory to an isolated dam, to begin providing electricity to a region that had been promised the electricity long ago. Great stuff.
October 4th, 2008 at 10:26 am
I read a piece by Michael Yon that dealt at length with the frustrations of British troops who were unable to fairly compensate a farmer for trees the Brits removed in order to have better defenses for their position. They wanted to pay more but couldn’t - and the result was that the farmer became a sniper who harassed them endlessly.
The difference with Waziristan is that we have no troops on the ground. The good of that is there’s less chance of direct repercussions on our troops if civilians or valuable assets are destroyed. The downside is that we are wholly dependent on other peoples’ intelligence for targeting. Also, it will be more difficult to assess the truth of claims regarding loss due to mis-targeting.
But I agree with you wholeheartedly. I have said from the outset of these wars that the PR war is as important as the military war, and until Petraeus, we were losing that war too.
October 4th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Greetings:Then, again, there’s the old saw about not killing a sniper who never hits anything, in case his replacement can.