0230 GMT March 14, 2006

0230 GMT August 31, 2007

The Benchmarks The non-partisan General Accounting Office reports that only 3 of 18 Iraq benchmarks have been met whereas the administration is about to say that 8 have been met.
Our reaction to the whole benchmark thing is two-fold.
First, if the benchmarks had been forced on the administration, despite our opposition to the war, we'd have been right there saying the benchmarks were plain dumb and of no meaning except to crazed management-by-PowerPoint types.
Second, however, the benchmarks were not forced on the administration. It came up with them on its own, and told us the measure of the surge's success would be the benchmarks.
So even though it was clear the benchmarks would not be met to any significant degree, we are obliged to hold the administration to these exceedingly stupid and unrealistic benchmarks.
The starting problem was not the benchmarks, but the post-facto justifications given for the surge. First the administration decided it was going to surge in order to save its face, and then it started coming up with rationalizations to hoodwink the people.
The surge was mounted to give Iraqis more time to reconcile, to clear their government of sectarianism, and to permit security forces to standup.
But the Iraqi people do not want to reconcile. The government is NOT sectarian: it is a majority-of-the people government and 60% of Iraqis happen to be Shia. It expresses the majority wishes of the Iraqi people. And as for permitting more time for the security forces to stand up, even we, who have become enormously skeptical of the US training effort were horrified to learn that Iraqi units able to operate on their own dropped from 10 to six. That's six percent of the maneuver battalions after 4 years of US effort, in a country where to begin with darn near every able-bodied male has some military experience.
The administration never seems to wonder why it lacks credibility. The readiness issue may explain why. The administration said simply that a slight drop in units able to operate on their own had taken place, without giving numbers. But dropping from a pathetic 10 to a disastrous 6 is not slight: it's an almost half drop.
Once the administration said XYZ was the objective even though the objective bore no relation to reality, naturally an benchmarks build to measure the surge's effectiveness of the surge are going to come up short.
Enough said.
The Iraq Army 2012 We were in a pensive mood after reading D.J. Elliot's projected Iraq Army orbat for 2012 in http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/08/projected_isf_five_y.php
First, Mr. Elliot says that the Iraq Army's main role is to defense against external aggression, and the main threats are Syria and Iran. We assume that since the US is building the Iraq Army, these are the roles/threats the US would like the Iraqi Army to have.
In which case, the US is again hallucinating with regard to Iraq.
Iran is not a threat to Shia Iraq. The problem is going to be how to stop the Shias from working together to overthrow the Sunni hegemony in the Middle East. On Syria, we will reserve judgment because the situation is very complex.
Mr. Elliot, who has done a brilliant job, freely acknowledges his orbat could well be off the mark. That is true of all long-range planning so we cannot hold that against him. Nonetheless, he foresees an army of 20 divisions plus several reserve divisions, say around 25 divisions.
Well, if that comes to pass, Iraq will again have the largest standing army in the Middle East. Neither Israel, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Jordan, nor Syria, nor Lebanon, nor Egypt, nor Oman, nor the Gulf states, are going to be overwhelmed with joy at the prospect. Such an army will present a huge potential threat to everyone in the Mideast except for Iran. We realize that this army will not have the striking power of Saddam's army, not by a long shot. But that could happen by 2017 provided Iraq's oil exports expand to 4-6 million barrels/day in time.
Right now Iraq is in a mess and the idea it can threaten anyone is laughable. But it is likely once the US withdraws the resultant civil war will sort out Iraq and it will stabilize. Then oil output could increase.
Keep in mind that the Iraqis are proud heirs to a civilization at least as old as Iran. They are very nationalistic. If/when they overcome the current hurdles, they will assert themselves and we are not sure to what extent, if any, the US will be able to control them.
A Note On The Taliban A reader asked for more information on the Taliban. A very short summary follows.
After the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, Pakistan decided it needed to confederate with Afghanistan to protect against a rapidly modernizing and increasingly assertive India. Given Pakistan has six times Afghanistan's population and at that time likely 20x or more its GNP, naturally the confederation would be on Pakistan's terms.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan had fallen prey to the warlords and by the early 1990s the country was in complete chaos. This provided Pakistan with the opportunity to organize a fundamentalist militia, the Taliban, and to take over Afghanistan.
While the militia was heavily reliant on Afghanis, it shared an ethnicity with Pakistani Pushtoons. More to the point, the Pakistan Army sent 10,000 troops to fight with the Taliban, aside from providing leadership and logistics at all levels as required. It was these Pakistani troops that ensured the defeat of one warlord after another, till by 1996 the Taliban controlled all but small enclaves in the north.
Success gained, the Taliban - as was to be expected - slowly began asserting themselves and Pakistan slowly began losing control. Bin Laden's arrival provided the Taliban with the funding it needed to function increasingly independent of Pakistan.
By the fall of 2001, this process of throwing off the Pakistani yoke was far from complete. By the end of 2001, the Taliban - and Pakistan - had been completely ejected from Afghanistan.
Undeterred, Pakistan began forming a Taliban II, even as it pretended to be on the US side in the war against the Taliban. In 2005 the new Taliban began making its debut against Afghan and western forces, and its influence has grown to the point it may have effective control over 60% of Afghanistan. This is a difficult figure to pin down, because effective control means different things to different people.
Where is the new Taliban going? Difficult to say at this stage. All we can say right now is this time around the Taliban is trying to build grass roots support along with its standard intimidation of the people. It is not short of money thanks to heroin and opium. It is still completely dependent on Pakistan for sanctuary, though it is increasingly establishing a permanent presence in rural areas. It will remain dependent on Pakistan for its weapons pipeline into the country and drugs pipeline out of the country. We'll have to see where all this goes.
Completely by the way: we're told Iran has been fighting a major war against Afghan/Pakistan drug lords/traders who push large quantities of drugs into East Iran. Many of these people are tied up in various ways with separatists and anti-Teheran movements inside Iran. We have also been told that Iran is losing this war and has suffered somewhere upwards of 1500 security forces killed in the last couple of years combating the drug trade.
Anyhows, the above is a terribly simplistic picture of the Taliban, but we hope it provides enough background as to why Pakistan will not act against the Taliban no matter what the US says or does.

0230 GMT August 30, 2007

Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US: Can The Situation Be Saved?

Despite every engagement with the Taliban ending in NATO's favor, the US/NATO are losing Afghanistan to the Taliban. The country is almost entirely rural, and right now the only no-go region for the Taliban is the north. The south has been their natural stronghold, they now control the rural east and are steadily expanding in the west. This is the reality, and do not be misled by the Afghan Government/US/NATO control of the big towns.
In all this hoohaa about the battles won - and the west has fought and won many this year, all credit to its soldiers - what is being missed is the battles not fought. There are no battles in the great majority of Taliban controlled/dominated rural areas because the west has no resources available.
Meanwhile, the Taliban is short neither of money nor of manpower.
The staggering expansion of opium production to double what it was in 2005, to about 8500 tons. The area under poppy has increased to 1930 square kilometers.
In the days the editor followed the South Asian narcotics trade, he used a rule of thumb: 10 kilos of opium give one kilo of heroin, and a price differential of 10x between the producer in South Asia and street price in the west.
If we assume half that amount of opium will be turned into heroin, with the rest stored/consumed as opium, using a street price of $150,000/kilo, we are looking at Now, a lot of that opium is used in the region so that not all is turned into heroin. But say half is. You are looking at 400 tons of heroin and $6-billion revenue at the producer end. Let's assume 10% of that goes to the Taliban, and you have a war kitty of $500-million a year.
Now look at manpower. Pakistan has a population of 170-million; about a quarter is of military age. Assume 1% if available as a recruiting pool, we are looking at 400,000 men. The pool increases by ~12,000/year on account of Pakistan's population explosion. So in theory the Taliban could lose that many men each year killed/disabled without suffering a reduction in strength.
In the face of this expansion of Taliban influence thanks to its Pakistan sanctuaries, NATO's response has been to speak brave words and whine about the lack of military resources. The US's response has been as impractical as any response in Iraq, and it's major component is to pressure Pakistan to take care of the problem on the eastern side of border.
What Washington may not fully understand is that Pakistan cannot be pushed any further. It has done as much as it was willing to do for America. Now it has reached the stage that neither money, nor threats, nor cross-border attacks will make it budge further. In fact, cross-border attacks will destroy the position of the very few pro-America parts of the Pakistan political/military entity.
Pakistan cannot, and will not, accept a pro-west, anti-Pakistan Afghanistan. It created the Taliban to bring Afghanistan within its sphere of influence; those imperatives are stronger today than at any time in the past. It cannot back down, and it cannot fight its own people just to satisfy America.
America has influence only with a handful of Pakistani leaders who are considered by the country to be traitors. When push comes to shove, does America really believe they will continue to do America's bidding while the people howl for their blood?
The Pakistanis are experts at saying to troublesome, powerful overlords like the Americans the things Americans want to hear, and making a few gestures, and for the rest going their own way. This has been ever the case since 1950. We are, in fact, amazed that the US has been able to squeeze out of Pakistan even the little Pakistan has done. Pakistan will hand over Al Qaeda, but touch the Taliban, and you are asking for trouble.
In a colonial situation, none of this matters as long as the elite, the army, the security forces are prepared to work for the overlord. But here is the problem: from the start of 9/11 none of these actors has wanted to work with America. They did so because President Musharraf convinced them that a raging, angry America would attack Pakistan if the country did not cooperate.
But now two things have happened. The Pakistanis see America bogged down in Iraq, a helpless giant. And Pakistanis have actually reached the point they value their pride, their national identity, the sense of who they are and what they want, much more than pleasing America. Not only do they fear America less and less, like the dog who has been repeatedly beaten by its master, they are increasingly ready to attack the master, and if the master does not relent and beats the dog to death, at least the dog dies with its dignity intact.
The Pakistan Army, which is the only actor that really counts right now, will not wage war on its people on the frontier. Any leader, be he President Musharraf or a future Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz-i-Sharif who orders the Pakistan Army to clear out the frontier will be told very politely and firmly: "No". If the leader persists, s/he will be deposed. That is all there is to it, and nothing America can do will change this.
The sole solution is to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan At this stage, things have deteriorated to the point we are unable to say how many troops are needed. We used to think three brigades, but that was before we realized the extent of the deterioration. It is not impossible that nine brigades are now needed and even then years of long, hard fighting lie ahead.
Even if the US was to immediately start drawing down in Afghanistan, we now doubt it has the resources to turn Afghanistan around.
In both Iraq and in Afghanistan the US is seeing the results of its fanatical adherence to the completely wrong doctrine of small ground forces backed by airpower. The US should have seen this as early as 2004 and acted aggressively to expand its ground forces. It did not, because it would then have to justify to its people what it was doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US chose the politically cheap option in fighting these two wars and the chickens have returned to roost. Hardly cheap financially, though as the cost of the two wars climbs above $200-billion a year - which does not include stuff like pay and allowances, these are in the regular budget.
Almost every decision the US has made in the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan has turned out to be bad.
The only question now is: what is to be done? We wish we knew.

0230 GMT August 29, 2007

Karbala Fighting As part of the security measures for the Shia religious festival held there no one was to bring weapons from the outside. Karbala and Najaf are controlled by the Shia old Guard, so its militia would of course be carrying their weapons.
Along comes Al-Sadr's lot, who control Shia areas of Baghdad - and who have been extending their control of the south. They of course refuse to hand over their weapons.
So 50 killed and 250 wounded later, the Iraqi government gets as many pilgrims as possible out of Karbala, end of the festival. Iraqi government grandly announces it now controls Karbala. Pardon us while we snigger. Iraqi government forces are only slightly less sectarian than the police. What we of course do not know since we don't visit Iraq is what faction the reinforcing troops come from.
The Sadr City and Najaf Shia factions have been slugging it out for more than two years as far as we know. This uproar made the news because of the pilgrimage, otherwise most incidents are never reported in the western media. So beware of any analysis you might read that says stuff like "this was the most serious outbreak etc etc" because it was not the most serious outbreak. It's just one more incident in a continuing war.
Back In Fallujah presumed AQI suicide bomber kills a pro-American leader and his two sons. Put together the attack last week near Baqubah in which the local pro-American leader and some members of his family were killed with this and other reports, AQI's strategy of countering the Sunnis working with the US is clear.
We thought AQI would backpedal on spreading its totalitarian brand of Islam and make up with the Sunnis as a way of getting them back into the anti-American coalition. We were quite wrong on this. AQI has decided to go straight head-to-head by killing the leaders of the Sunni tribes that turned against AQI.
Pakistan Government Buckles Again We get a lot of information on Pakistan from old and new South Asia intel sources that we either cannot use publicly because that's the requirement for people to talk to us, or that we won't use publicly because we suspect the sources is pushing an agenda of its own. We don't want to be like Seymour Hersh and other American journalists who are clueless about the basic situation and so are easy marks for US intel people planting stories.
So it helps us when Bill Roggio comes up with a Pakistan article because we can quote him.
So we knew the Pakistan Army's grand offensive launched after the Red Mosque siege was a total bust. We've been hinting as much, rather loudly, without providing details. Essentially what's been happening is the Pakistan security forces march around and shoot up a few tribals, and the tribals keep ambushing the Pakistan Army and paramilitary, and kidnapping them as well. The death toll is in favor of the militants, though not a whole lot of fighting is taking place. Basically the Pakistan Army is putting on a show for Uncle Sam, on orders of the President/Army Chief General Musharraf.
Uncle Sam, of course, knows its all a show but can't say so because then the media and Congress etc will jump all over the US administration for coddling a sham ally etc etc. So on the one hand you have the highest echelons of the government praising Pakistan for its offensive, and you have everyone else on the ground venting their anger and frustration very loudly.
Please note on this one topic of Pakistan and the US we never make sarcastic comments because we know the administration is stuck between the proverbial rock/hard place. It really is doing its best, and it isn't the administration's fault that there are zero good options. Unlike Iraq, the US also cannot just cut its losses and quit for reasons we'll discuss if anyone is interested.
Back to Mr. Roggio. Read http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/08/pakistan_the_mohmand.php and you will learn that the Pakistan government has - once again - made a fake peace deal with another bunch of tribal militants. Mr. Roggio has said for months the North West Frontier Province has been increasingly slipping out of government control with "Talibistan" expanding - this is confirmed by our own sources, partisan though they may be.
The "peace" deal in Waziristan was a simple cop-out for the Pakistan security forces, which allowed them to return with "honor" to the status quo ante after they failed to destroy the militants/Taliban/AQ in that area. After the Red Mosque siege, Pakistan government was again told by US government: "Clean up the NWFP yourself, or we're coming in without your agreement/cooperation. We are not going to lose Afghanistan because you can't deal with the bad guys". So Pakistan announced the peace deal was finished, and it launched its mock offensive, and the first result is - as Mr. Roggio succinctly and laconically states - another peace deal.
Incidentally, we should make clear that in this particular story Mr. Roggio is ahead of Orbat.com. We actually don't follow the NWFP and Pakistan's internal affairs closely at all. This is one area your editor handles himself, and he is much more interested in the minutiae of the Pakistan orbat. This political game playing is of no interest to him.
So is Pakistan taking America for a ride on the new offensive? Yes. Should we be surprised? Anyone who has any knowledge of Pakistan-US relations from 1950 on should not be surprised. So the Americans know Pakistan is playing them for fools? They do, as they have always done for the last six decades. So why do the Americans let the Pakistanis play them for fools?
Well, this is a bit complicated, particularly for the pre-2001 period. But basically, American policy towards Pakistan has always been of the "realism" school. The Americans say: "Look, we know we aren't going to get 100% of what the Pakistanis promise. But we can live with the 50% we do get."
What's happening in late summer of 2007 is that the realism school, which has had a long run since the fall of 2001, is colliding with reality and the Americans are not getting 50%. Instead they are getting a steadily worsening situation in Afghanistan which is almost entirely because of the Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan.
What can America do about this? One word: nothing. America has to grin and bear it. Americans refuse to believe their phenomenal power can have serious limits. Well, on the North West Frontier of Pakistan, America has run into a long, high, and very deep rock wall of limits.
If anyone is interested, we'd be happy to talk about this, but as far as your editor is concerned, he's focusing on trying to get his sources to disgorge the numbers of Pakistan's two nuclear missile divisions (actually brigades, but that's another long story of no interest to normal, sane people).

0230 GMT August 25, 2007

The US And Cambodia After pondering the matter, we decided to through caution to the winds and jump into this new old controversy with all four feet.
Among the consequences of the US withdrawal from Indochina is supposed to be the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. The implication is had the US stayed in Vietnam, the genocide would not have happened and the cost to South Vietnam of falling to communism would not have happened.
Your editor supported the Vietnam War to the end and has wasted many a productive hour going the "If onlys" of the war. He was, and remains, a staunch anti-communist. Nonetheless, he asks people who support the US Departed/ Cambodia Died thesis to hold on for just a minute.
First, it wasn't the US departure of ground forces that caused the defeat of South Vietnam. In 1972, almost all major US formations had withdrawn but the RVN/US completely destroyed the PAVN offensive. RVN provided ground troops, US the airpower. What caused the defeat was the refusal of the US to send back the airpower that had been withdrawn, and the refusal of Congress to sanction $800-million in military air for RVN. Of course, more would have been needed later, but that was a substantial chunk of change in those days, perhaps $4-billion in today's money.
If all it takes to win in Iraq is a few thousand special forces, a few hundred tactical aircraft, and a few billion dollars, we at least would not be calling for withdrawal from Iraq.
Second, in Vietnam the US took one side in a civil war and then fought like the blazes for seven years against the other side in the civil war. Iraq under no circumstances bears anything like a comparable resemblance to Vietnam.
Third, if we are to speak of the lives lost because of the communists, perhaps we should speak of the lives lost because of the US intervention in the Indochina civil wars. Had the US not intervened, it is likely Vietnam would have been rapidly unified and the vast majority of Indochina deaths would not have taken place.
We know that 60,000 Americans died/remain MIA, but that is a minor detail compared to the losses suffered by the Indochinese. Perhaps about 250,000 ARVN were killed/MIA. North Vietnam, by its own admission, lost 1.1-million soldiers KIA. Civilian losses in the divided Vietnams are a matter of significant controversy. The government of unified Vietnam says 2-million each died in the North and the South. There are good reasons to believe these figures are exaggerations, so we arbitrarily halve them. That would make 3.3-million dead.
That figure excludes the dead in Laos and Cambodia, so for round figures, lets make it 3.5-million.
A generally accepted figure for the Cambodian genocide is 1.5-million - the communists did keep detailed records.
Now comes the big question that arises if we blame the US withdrawal from Indochina for the Cambodian genocide.
First, was the US fighting in Indochina to prevent a Cambodia-genocide situation from arising? No, it was fighting for its own interests and the internal affairs of Cambodia were of no interest to the US except as they pertained to the use of the country as an NVA sanctuary.
Second, what was the responsibility of the US for the rise of the Khmer Rouge? We know this sounds like a weird question, but the KR was a minority player in Cambodia before the US began attacking that country. Some historians say there was a cause and effect, that the indiscriminate US bombing drove Cambodians into the arms of the KR. We are not in a position to say anything definitive one way or the other, but the question does need to be debated more comprehensively. In any case, the US seemed to have no problem treating with the KR because the latter was anti-Vietnamese.
Third, had the US miraculously known that a Cambodian genocide would result, would the US have decided to stay in Indochina and continue the war? We think not because once the KR came to power, the only way the US could have done anything was to occupy Cambodia. We don't think this was domestic-politics feasible.
There were ways to stop the rise of the KR. One was to help Sihanouk with arms, money, trainers, and airpower. Or if you say Sihanouk had to go because he wouldn't do anything about the North Vietnamese using his country - as if he could do anything - then the US could have supporter Lon Nol.
The US could have done that even after leaving Vietnam. It chose not to, just as it chose not to recommit its airpower to defeat the 1975 invasion, but that is another matter.
Another way the US could have stopped the Cambodian genocide - and we know people are going to hate it when we say this - is to urge the Vietnamese to intervene. You're going to say "an already weird editor is getting even more weird, if that's possible", but let us explain.
We need to ask: had the US not been in Indochina in the first place, would there have been a Cambodian genocide? The probable answer is no because the Vietnamese would never have allowed the KR to rise in the first place.
Through most of the history of the Cambodian communist party, the party was really a Hanoi front. The KR were not just independent of Hanoi, they opposed what they saw as Vietnamese imperialism. After unifying Vietnam, possibly before 1960 but for US aid to Saigon, Hanoi would have turned to sorting out its position in Cambodia and Laos. Undoubtedly in time a nationalist communist movement would have arisen in Cambodia in response to Vietnamese imperialism, but then Vietnam would have been fighting its own counterinsurgency in Cambodia and the way events unfolded after 1975 would have been quite different.
As it is, it was the Vietnamese who invaded and overthrew the KR. We know you're going to say "that was because the Cambodian government attacked Vietnam." But, the KR overthrown, Vietnam withdrew after its invasion and allowed Cambodia to go its own way as an independent country.
Yet another way of looking at this is: assume the US had never been involved in Indochina and the KR began killing its people. Would the US have intervened? We can unequivocally say "no".
The world at that time was a very different place. National sovereignty was paramount and intervention to prevent a government from killing its people was unthinkable. For example, the US did absolutely zero to stop the East Bengal 1971 killings. Even in the 1990s the US did zero to stop the Rwanda killings: on a per capita compared to time this genocide is without equal in modern times. It did nothing to stop the Congo wars, and as for Dafur, the record is there for everyone.
Jump Forward To Iraq 2007 In Cambodia, the government decided to kill off a substantial fraction of the population by execution and starvation. If the US leaves Iraq today, will there be anything comparable?
Doubtful, because the Shias simply don't want to live with the Sunnis. That doesn't mean they want to kill every Sunni they see. We are willing to bet that if tomorrow the US declared a Sunni nation within Iraq and moved all Sunnis there, and took steps to see the Sunnis did not attack the Shia state, the Shias would happily go back to slaughtering each other until one or another side won.
If you are saying the US has to stay back in Iraq to stop the Shias from killing each other, then we suggest Americans get ready to intervene in the 30, 40, 50 other civil wars or near civil wars that are raging, principally in Africa.
Letter to President Bush Sir: today I received my first paycheck as a certified math teacher with an advanced degree. Previously, as a provisionally certified teacher, I received 22 paychecks a year of US$2050 each, of which $1495 was left after taxes and mandatory deductions. Now my salary is $2700/paycheck, and my tax and mandatory deductions are $825, leaving me with a paycheck of $1875.
In other words, from the extra $700/paycheck I earn, I lose $350, a marginal tax/deduction rate of 50%.
I wonder if I can ask you a big favor. A 50% tax/deduction rate on my marginal income on jumping from $2000/paycheck to $2700/paycheck seems a bit harsh. I believe you favor tax cuts for the wealthier of us on the theory that the rich will invest more of their wealth and generate jobs. I'll be polite and leave the economics of this alone - after all, I am asking a favor.
Sir, can you cut my taxes too? I promise I will save the extra $1-$200/paycheck I will get and thus help generate more jobs, just like the rich.
Letter To The President Of India Excellency, I have been reading about the 6-year jail sentence imposed in movie star Sanjay Dutt for unauthorized possession of an automatic weapon.
First, may I congratulate the Indian legal system for acquitting Mr. Dutt of conspiracy in the terrible Bombay bombings, India's biggest single domestic terror incident. Given Mr. Dutt was friendly with some of the accused, and added to the acquisition of the weapon, had he been under trial in the US, we can only guess at what his fate might have been, but it would not have been pretty. The Indian court was able to separate the issues of terrorism with Mr. Dutt's acquisition of a prohibited weapon.
That said, as a citizen of India, may I request you to show mercy and commute Mr. Dutt's sentence.
I must make clear I have never met him, and know him only as a crude, boorish person who is used to throwing his weight around, a son that the great, refined, and illustrious star couple of Sunil Dutt and Nargis surely did not deserve.
At the same time, Mr. Dutt said he had acquired the weapon only for protection during a period of Hindu-Muslim disharmony and rioting, and no one seems to have doubted his self-given motive.
When I lived in India, I had very few friends I recognized as being Muslim. That was because I was brought up overseas, and the nuances of Indian names were a mystery to me. So I am sure I had many Muslim friends, but of these, only two were known to me as belonging to that faith.
One kept 3 licensed weapons at home. His father was freedom fighter and patriot, a stalwart of the Congress party and advisor to prime ministers and so on, chancellor of a university plus achievements so many he could not remember them all. The father lived in Jamia Millia, a mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood of Delhi.
I asked the son, my friend, why he not just kept 3 weapons but practiced regularly with them and made sure his wife was equally handy with the guns.
He told me that that was the advice of the neighborhood police chief. The chief had told his father, "With the greatest of respect, Sir, you understand if there is trouble we will not be able to come to your help. Not only will we have to protect our own families, it will be unfair to ask my men to risk their lives for your protection."
Your Excellency, perhaps I am wrong in extrapolating this one case to generalize about Mr. Dutt, who I am told despite his name is a Muslim, but I also honestly believe his motive was simply self-protection.
He broke the law, and was justly convicted. He has already served 16 months in jail during trial. I feel commutation of the sentence is morally justifiable.
Note To American Readers In India gun permits, for long or short guns, are very tough to come by. Semi-automatic weapons are even more difficult to obtain legally; if we recall right, the Indian actor in question had illegally acquired an automatic rifle.
When your editor lived in India, a neighbor was an Army officer whose father had been the equivalent of a county chief of police. The father had been very active in the war against Sikh terrorists in the 1980s, and was on the terrorist death list. At that time, the insurgency was reducing, but still very much alive.
On retirement, his father's service .45 revolver was taken away, and he was given a license for a .32 revolver he could buy on the market for himself. In India, anything bigger than a .32 is considered a weapon reserved only to the military and police services.
To those of our readers who know their guns, .32 6-shot revolver is not exactly a weapon to give confidence to a man on a terrorist death list, particularly when the terrorists were armed with AK-47s and other assorted hardware.
The son went from official to official, begging his father be allowed a bigger caliber, to no avail. The son told me: "I have brought my father to live with me for his protection. As an army officer I am permitted a prohibited caliber weapon purchased with my own money, and I have bought a .45. But any time now I will get posted to a forward area and I will have to leave my family behind. If I leave my .45 with him, and there is a problem, my father and I will be in very serious trouble with the authorities. If I don't leave him a proper weapon, he will be defenseless."
We tell this story to explain to Americans what the fuss concerning the actor is all about. If in India they are so strict they would not allow a retired terrorist fighter to have a decent legal gun, you can understand why they sent a mere film star, albeit a famous one, to jail for an unauthorized weapon.

0230 GMT August 24, 2007

Baqubah: Cruelty, Heroism, And Just Desserts Somewhere between "several dozen" and 200 Al Qaeda attacked two villages near Baqubah in Diyala province. They executed a local sheikh who was also the local mosque's imam and who had rallied the Sunni locals against AQ. They also kidnapped 15-25 children and women before they were driven off.
There seems to be just no end to AQ's cruelty Men will do anything to get their wives and children back safely. In this case, going by AQ's well-known propensities, it's likely the captives will be tortured and some, if not all, killed to teach the locals a lesson for daring to defy AQ and for working with the Americans. If that doesn't happen, big sums of money will have to be paid by the locals, together with verifiable promises they will abandon the American alliance.
With this new tactic, AQ continues displaying its reputation for innovation. Before the kidnapping, the innovation was using fuel tankers to blow apart entire city streets and villages. We are no ordnance experts, but from photographs we have seen of the results of such explosions, it's basically akin to dropping ten or more 2000-lb bombs along a city street: every building fronting the street gets destroyed.
The heroism is on the part of the locals. There are very few cases where Iraqi locals have managed to stand up to an AQ attack, and by accounts, this was a big one. We may guess the help the locals have been getting from the US was a factor in their determination/ability to fight off AQ.
Just Desserts is what the American division commander for the region deserved and has got. He began the operation with a lot of inappropriate boasting about what was going to happen to AQ, as if the commanders before him were pathetic failures and he was heaven's answer to the problem.
His boasting was particularly jarring because US commanders have tended toward caution and modesty in their statements to the press. It was inappropriate because even as the operation began sources said that AQ, which had taken over Baqubah after the Americans left to focus in the first Baghdad surge, had had warning and up to two-thirds has escaped before the Americans cordoned off the area.
AQ did not succeed in overrunning the two villages. Had it done so, there would have been mass executions. But that AQ was able to launch such an attack at a time the Americans are all over the place in force is some about which readers can drawn their own conclusions.
Some weeks ago, An American 3-Humvee patrol near Ramadi stumbled on 70 AQ preparing to attack the home of the sheikh who has led the local Sunni offensive against AQ. They fought a great battle, with the help of a platoon or so worth of reinforcements, and killed perhaps half the insurgents for the loss of two of their own.
The Americans did not boast about their victory. Instead they were alarmed that AQ, which has supposedly been driven out of Ramadi, was able to mass that many men for an attack on the sheikhs house - the insurgents had outfitted two semis with false bottoms, so they would have driven right up to the house. They were frankly admiring of the insurgents' fighting skills and their determination. If 30+ of the insurgents were killed, about nearly all the remaining may be assumed to have been wounded. That's 80% casualties, and a lot of armies just give up before their units get to that point.
The American troops had to execute AQ wounded after one wounded insurgent they tried to help blew himself up, fortunately without loss to the Americans. And despite these losses, some or all of the AQ remained behind, ambushing the Americans from a distance of 20 meters the next day when the latter came to check on the battlefield. That is when the two Americans died.
Senator John Warner Now Opposes The War: We Are Not Impressed The media is making much of GOP Senator John Warner's apparent defection to the "Leave Iraq" camp. But we are not impressed.
First, if readers have noticed, at no time have we relied on quoting the opposition of other people to the war as a justification for our position. We don't need any "expert" or other agreeing with us. So Senator Warner's joining the "Withdraw" camp means nothing to us.
Second, he wants a b-eeeeeeee-g withdrawal: All of 5000 troops by December. The boldness of Senator Warner takes our breath away.
Sarcasm aside, he is trying to do exactly what most Democratic senators who oppose the war are doing: trying to have it both ways, and he deserves our contempt just as much as the contempt we have expressed for the Democrats. He wants to look good with his anti-war constituents, and he wants to keep party discipline and look good with his pro-war constituents.
The issue here is Congress is looking not to America's interest, it is looking to its own. So you have any number of GOP senators who have the gravest doubts about Iraq, but they will not break party lines and give the Democrats a victory. Then you have the Democrats, who go yak-yak at 600 miles an hour in opposing and abusing President Bush, who we feel is 100% wrong but at least has the courage of his convictions, but who wont vote to cut off the money because they want the President and the GOP to swing in the wind.
Incidentally, Senator Warner is an intelligent and honorable man. But he is first and foremost a politician, which means you have to shut down your intelligence and discard your honor.
Opposing Al-Malaki: Oh The Irony Of It All Now lets hear Congress thunder about how Prime Minister Al-Malaki of Iraq must be replaced because he is ineffective. Yo, dudes and dudettes! Heard of a thing called democracy? The man is a disaster. But he was democratically elected. Can we request Congress not to male a laughing stock of America in front of the world? And since the President has invoked Vietnam, anyone in Congress what happened each time the US decided X or Y or Z had to go? We were fighting for democracy then too.
Meanwhile, the President thunders that no Congressperson will decide when Al-Malaki goes. The people of Iraq will decide when he goes.
Sounds good. Can the President now see that what he's saying about the people of Iraq deciding also applies equally to the people of Palestine deciding who leads them?
Our Estimate Of What It Takes To Finish The Job of reshaping the world that America first embarked on in 1940: a friend asks, are we serious about 20% of GNP and 15-million people under arms or are we covering up our wimping out on Iraq by talking so right wing as to make the President look like a limp liberal?
First, those figures were just off the top of our heads. We have not done any real analysis because why waste our time. Just like Americans want the best schools, the best infrastructure, the best health care and so on but they don't want to pay for it, Americans want their country to be supreme in the world but they don't want to pay for it. They don't mind much if volunteers are getting killed and maimed in America's wars, but heaven forfend that a draft and higher taxes be instituted.
Second, yes, we are serious. We are getting fed up of the way America is skimping on defense everywhere while threats keep growing. It isn't just GWOT, you've also got Russia and China, and the later very plainly intends to be Number One by 2050.
Third, sure you can compromise on those figures. We were loosely assuming 1-million troops in Iraq, 1-million in Iran, 1-million in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and 1-million for the rest of the world including Afghanistan, North Korea, and Africa. That means 12 million ground troops on the 1 forward-2 back principle. Then we assumed stuff like 200 B-2s, 2000+ F-22/F-35s, 18 carrier battle groups and so on for the conventional stuff needed to show Russia and China they can dream on. That brought us to 15-million. You could demobilize most of those ground troops in 20-30 years after the US straightened out the above places.
Of course you can work with less. That is just going to draw out things much longer and cost much more in the end.
So, for example, you don't need 18 carrier battle groups today. But you certainly cannot intimidate China 2015 with 10. If you went to 18 right away and were prepared to go to 24 or 30 as needed, the Chinese would get the point that its no point even trying. Similarly the air component. It sounds extreme. But its better to demonstrate overwhelming capability now.
US is spending about 4% of GNP on defense now without about 2-million troops (all round figures); so we multiplied by 5 for 15-million troops. A draft will drastically reduce pay costs, but there is a lot of heavy duty investment required in new equipment, particularly ABM defense/civil defense, and operations on the scale we envisage will be expensive.
Okay, so if the American people decide this is crazy - and we can assume with 100% certainty they will, we're fine with that. You don't want to rule the world, carry on with whatever it is you are doing, but then don't get surprised when things don't work out as has happened in Iraq. Going cheap now on anything means pay later, or live with failure.
From Walter E. Wallis We need to close the State Department, contract with Halliburton to handle any residual functions after you eliminate writing checks, and inform all Islamic countries that reciprocity is the first point of diplomacy. Then slam the door.