RC/CA

“With eyes that seem older than her years, this Afghan girl lives near Tora Bora, once home to Osama bin Laden. High in the mountains, the Pashtun tribal region offers many trails that lead to Pakistan. The Pashtun have never recognized the formal border cut through their territory, the ‘Durand line’ drawn by the British diplomat Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in 1893 to separate British India from Afghanistan, and later used as the basis for the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Reblogged from the vast difference.

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@ 6:18 pm

Why not fix Mexico, which has much more strategic importance to the United States? The idea of sending 60K military personnel into Mexico and spending 10s or 100s of billions of dollars to overcome Mexico's political corruption, suppress the drug smuggling, create security institutions, and redeem its school system would seem insane to most. And yet, when the same solution set is outlined for Afghanistan, everyone thinks it's the obvious answer. Our national security interests are distorted - we need to treat Afghanistan as if it were any one of the many other small nations with which the US government does business and develop astrategy that invests the lowest possible costs. As for Nagl's idea of a global COIN campaign, we do not need that and we cannot afford that.

I post a lot of links I mean to be thought-provoking, and not necessarily representative of my opinions (which tend to be rather fluid). This time, however, I’ll follow Bacevich out of the shadows and finally declare that I think COIN sucks.

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Jun 24th, 2009 @ 7:17 pm

“Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”

Mohandas Ghandi

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@ 7:16 pm

On the other hand, their efforts present the same quandaries as all aid. Showering cash on Iraqis encourages malaise. And having this shadow reconstruction agency, working parallel to (and barely uncoordinated with) the government in Baghdad, pisses off the Iraqi government something fierce. Nouri al-Maliki received a briefing on the ePRTs' work and quite understandably huffed about being undermined by the very US government was trying to prop him up. If money is to shower down on Fallujah, let it be from a single spout.

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@ 7:16 pm

We were invited by the United States Agency for International Development to witness the dedication of Afghanistan’s first national park: The Band-e-Amir National Park, a series of six crystal-blue lakes surrounded by heart-stopping cliffs and natural dams that capture the imagination.

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@ 6:05 am

Fixed!

After a tussle with my registrar, I got my domain name back. If your RSS reader hasn’t heard from me in a while, you may want to get caught up on http://rootcausecorrectiveaction.com.

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Jun 23rd, 2009 @ 8:08 pm

The more convinced you are when you come that this place is the pinnacle of your dreams, a modern-day Camelot, the place where golden boys and girls come to push themselves from success to success, the more you’re going to be knocked for a loop by its myriad of imperfections. Some of these are the result of the fact that our hype about uniformly high midshipman quality is only hype; some are the result of our current policies; some are the result of the fact that NOTHING ON EARTH is as perfect as an idealistic 18-year-old can imagine it to be.

Prof. Fleming writes a pretty effective teardown of the Annapolis mystique. As an alum, I had a hard time staying dispassionate while reading—my pride was alternately stung and swelled.

The big thing that Fleming is missing is perspective. Two decades of observing midshipmen must provide tremendous insight into the leadership of midshipmen. His experience with Naval Officers and the demands placed upon them, however, is quite limited. I’d argue that the disillusionment and frustration that I felt coming down from the Plebe Summer high was exactly the training I needed to prepare me for the fleet. I had been broken and, afterwards, made stronger at the broken places (to paraphrase Hemingway), in more ways than just the physical. USNA taught me to cope with imperfections of character and to temper my idealism with pragmatism, skills which are absolutely necessary to the Naval Officer. I think Prof. Fleming paints an excellent picture of one side of the coin.

I think my alma mater has made more news lately than since all that rape stuff. The outspoken Prof. Fleming expands on the topic of diversity (at seemingly great personal peril). A mid is in the brig for being a drug mule on summer cruise. This after some newly-minted butter bars shot some protected waterfowl. Despite these scandals, applications are up 40%. Some want to shut down the service academies, and others think they’re valuable institutions (after consideration, I’ve decided I’m in the latter camp). And finally, not even the august walls of USNA are impenetrable to loony chain-emails.

[via Jeff]

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@ 7:29 pm

U.S. troops and Afghan police officers inspect the site where a suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of international troops, killing two civilians, near the city of Ghazni, in central Afghanistan, Tuesday, June 23, 3009. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Naikzad)

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@ 7:05 pm

It was up to Harrison, a 27-year-old company commander who oversees U.S. military operations in a sprawling, isolated and violent swath of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, to figure out how to take advantage of the opening the Taliban had given him. The question consumed and frustrated the Virginia native for most of June. It also laid bare the challenges facing the Obama administration and U.S. commanders as they try to reverse the course of a war that has grown increasingly dire in the past year.

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@ 6:37 pm

If you think about it, the greatest leaders who you have ever worked for most likely cared deeply about you and your success. It worked! You were probably never more motivated and dedicated in your entire career. If you have felt dedicated and motivated, you can most likely pass on the same feelings to your peers and the people who report to you.

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Jun 21st, 2009 @ 6:37 pm

monologamist:

The U.S. military is posting updates about the war in Afghanistan on Twitter and Facebook. Just today I found out that the war in Afghanistan is no longer in a relationship.

Reblogged from MONOLOGAMIST.

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