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Major Guy Parmeter: "Seen any foreign fighters?"
Iraqi farmer: "Yes, you."
Any different in Afghanistan?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ10Ak05.html
Iraqi farmer: "Yes, you."
Any different in Afghanistan?
Robert Gates, the secretary of defense "has repeatedly declared his concern that more troops would make Americans look increasingly like occupiers".
After almost eight years of war, only now does the danger that we might "look increasingly like occupiers" rise to the surface.
After almost eight years of war, only now does the danger that we might "look increasingly like occupiers" rise to the surface.
The first Martian invasion of this planet - they landed near the town of Woking in England and, before they were done, laid waste to London - took place in 1898, thanks to the Tasmanians, and if you don't think that's worth considering more than a century later, think again. In fact, General McChrystal, President Barack Obama, Proconsul Holbrooke, as you're doing your reassessments of the Afghan War, do I have a book for you.
I was perhaps12 years old when I first read it - under the covers by flashlight long after I was supposed to be asleep - and it scared the hell out of me. Even now, when alien invasion plots are a dime a dozen, I have a hunch that it could do the same for you. I'm talking, of course, about H G Wells' The War of the Worlds.
I was perhaps12 years old when I first read it - under the covers by flashlight long after I was supposed to be asleep - and it scared the hell out of me. Even now, when alien invasion plots are a dime a dozen, I have a hunch that it could do the same for you. I'm talking, of course, about H G Wells' The War of the Worlds.
nothing in the book - not the weaponry, not even the destruction - is more terrifying than the attitude of the Martians ("intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic"), for this is one of the great role-reversal novels of all time. They are implacable exactly because they see the English as we would see rabbits, or as English colonists in Australia did indeed see the Tasmanians, a people they all but exterminated with hardly a twinge of regret.
In fact, that's where The War of the Worlds evidently began. It seems that Wells' brother Frank brought up the Aborigine inhabitants of Tasmania, south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island into a prison colony day, launching the idea for a book still in print 111 years later. Evidently, the question that came to Wells's mind was this: what if someone arrived in England with the same view of the superior English that the English had had of the Tasmanians, and the sort of advanced weaponry and technology capable of turning that attitude into a grim reality?
As his unnamed central character comments in the first pages of the novel: "The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"
The Martians (actually transmogrified Englishmen) advance through the English countryside and into London, frying everything in sight in a version of what, in the next century, would come to be known as total war - that is, war visited not just on the warriors, but on the civilian population. At the same time, they harvest humans and feed off their blood. In the coming century, there would indeed be Martians aplenty on this planet, more than ready to feed off the blood of its inhabitants.
In fact, that's where The War of the Worlds evidently began. It seems that Wells' brother Frank brought up the Aborigine inhabitants of Tasmania, south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island into a prison colony day, launching the idea for a book still in print 111 years later. Evidently, the question that came to Wells's mind was this: what if someone arrived in England with the same view of the superior English that the English had had of the Tasmanians, and the sort of advanced weaponry and technology capable of turning that attitude into a grim reality?
As his unnamed central character comments in the first pages of the novel: "The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"
The Martians (actually transmogrified Englishmen) advance through the English countryside and into London, frying everything in sight in a version of what, in the next century, would come to be known as total war - that is, war visited not just on the warriors, but on the civilian population. At the same time, they harvest humans and feed off their blood. In the coming century, there would indeed be Martians aplenty on this planet, more than ready to feed off the blood of its inhabitants.
What if, from an Afghan point of view, we really are Wells' Martians? Then, it's not a matter of counter-insurgency versus counter-terror, or more American troops versus more American-trained Afghan ones, or even nation-building versus stabilization. What if - and this is an un-American thought - there is no American solution to Afghanistan?
An unremarkable paragraph in a piece in my hometown paper recently caught my eye. It was headlined "White House Believes Karzai Will Be Re-elected," but in mid-report Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times turned to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's "redeployment option".
Here's the humdrum paragraph in question: "The redeployment option calls for moving troops from sparsely populated and lawless areas of the countryside to urban areas, including Kandahar and Kabul. Many rural areas 'would be better left to Predators,' said an administration official, referring to drone aircraft."
In other words, the United States may now be represented in the Afghan countryside, as it already is in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the border, mainly by Predators and their even more powerful cousins, Reapers, unmanned aerial vehicles with names straight out of a sci-fi film about implacable aliens.
Here's the humdrum paragraph in question: "The redeployment option calls for moving troops from sparsely populated and lawless areas of the countryside to urban areas, including Kandahar and Kabul. Many rural areas 'would be better left to Predators,' said an administration official, referring to drone aircraft."
In other words, the United States may now be represented in the Afghan countryside, as it already is in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the border, mainly by Predators and their even more powerful cousins, Reapers, unmanned aerial vehicles with names straight out of a sci-fi film about implacable aliens.
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