This is nothing new if you've been reading me for the past, oh, eight years, but since often the messenger matters more than the message, here you go, from a retired Army Lt. General.
November 9, 2014 | NPR
URL: http://n.pr/1yYEegl
Showing posts with label counter-insurgency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label counter-insurgency. Show all posts
Monday, November 10, 2014
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Wolfowitz still defends Iraq invasion, 10 years on
Wolfowitz's lame apologetica doesn't even merit a response. Just let it be entered into the record, 10 years later.
Do take note that Wolfowitz, the "brains" behind Dubya's foreign wars, is now a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. John "Yosemite Sam" Bolton, Fred Kagan and Richard "Black" Perle are taking cover there, too. I guess AEI is where discredited neocons go to die.
By Paul Wolfowitz
March 19, 2013 | FOX News
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
DOS 'whistleblower': Nation-building FAIL
More than a few State Dept. officers disagree with Van Buren, and personally distrust his motivations (write a provocative book at/near retirement and get rich and famous) instead of blowing the whistle internally and trying to change the system from within.
Myself, I have a problem with his "greedy contractors"/"corrupt bureaucrats" line. First, contractors don't write the contracts, the government does. They just bid on the work and then implement it. Secondly, Van Buren presents no evidence of U.S. government corruption.
If Van Buren meant corruption within the Iraqi and Afghan governments, then, well, duh. We never should have expected to funnel $ billions through these nascent institutions and trust all the money to be well-spent or even accounted for. But in fact, trying to spend a lot of money fast -- and this was a hell of a lot to spend on development, more than any nation had ever tried to spend before in such a short time -- no matter who was managing it, was bound to lead to waste, poor accounting, missed and moving targets, sloppy work, etc.
Those disagreements aside, Van Buren's central points are true and bear repeating: 1) using development aid as a counter-insurgency tactic almost never works; and 2) in our arrogance and cultural blindness we have failed to understand that they don't want to be like us, they don't even want most of our stuff. This is especially true in Afghanistan.
Why has the US spent so much money and time "so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad"?
By Peter Van Buren
August 28, 2012 | Al Jazeera
Friday, June 22, 2012
Absurd, terrifying history of counter-insurgencies
This is a fascinating brief history (complete with embedded film clips) of the absurd and terrifying results of Western "counter-insurgency" warfare, from Algiers to Vietnam to Iraq.
Personally I was shocked to learn that Gen. David "Surge" Petraeus found his inspiration in 2006 in none other than French military expert David Galula who advised the RAND Corp. and the U.S. military how to fight the Viet Cong. Said Galula:
"Revolutionary warfare requires a revolutionary approach on both sides in the struggle. Whereas in ordinary war the objective is to destroy the enemy and occupy his territory, the guerrilla's aim is to control the population.
"This, therefore, must be the aim of the counter-guerrilla as well."HOWEVER,"One basic difference between insurgency and counterinsurgency is that the insurgent starts out with nothing but a cause and grows to strength, while counterinsurgent often starts with everything but a cause and gradually declines in strength to the point of weakness."
And we all know how well Vietnam went for the U.S.
The point is that counter-insurgency, without any real cultural understanding of the native people, in the end always resorts to indiscriminate torture and killing. First we westerners train our local "allies" in new, aggressive guerrilla-like tactics; then our "allies" lead us, their "masters," by the nose to wreak havoc on their personal enemies and/or rival sects and tribes, until the violence becomes criminal, absurd, and seemingly indiscriminate. We kid ourselves into thinking we can sort the good guys from the bad.
By Adam Curtis
June 16, 2012 | BBC
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)