Forty one years ago, the 1st Battalion 8th Marines were attacked by the first modern suicide bomber at the Beirut International Airport. A dump truck packed with 12,000 pounds of explosives crashed through a flimsy gate and into a building being used as barracks for the Marines, killing 241 Marines and sailors. At the time, I was a Navy corpsman assigned to the Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. I was also the leading petty officer of the Surgical Support Team, and we were rapidly mobilized, vaccinated, and sent overseas to join the unit, replacing the devastated Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut. In the ensuing months, I witnessed, mostly from our ship but sometimes on the shore, an American military disaster.
Doc Lynch on the ground in Beirut. standing in front of what was left of the Barracks
Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut.
In November 1983, the various warring factions were stupid enough to attack the Marine positions, which allowed for some mission clarity. One thing Marines understand is killing people, so when attacked, they responded by killing everybody shooting at them. That caused the various warring factions to stop shooting any weapons anywhere near Marine positions. With no enemies attacking them, the Marines returned to displaying the flag as our political masters dictated. The Marines also found creative ways to trick Lebanese militia into firing their weapons near them so they could kill more of them. That’s what bored Marines do in undefined combat adjacent spaces.
The anniversary of that pointless disaster is the perfect day for the FJB administration to announce another pointless deployment of American combat troops into the Middle East, where they will do… What? Question number one is, who’s deploying them? It can’t be Joe Biden because he turned over his first cabinet meeting in over a year to Jill Biden. Is this Dr. Jill’s idea? Or is Cackling Kamala doing the saber-rattling? These are questions the regime media will never ask because the answers will reflect poorly on their democratic sponsors.
What the hell is this? Why are we forced to act like this is normal or acceptable?
Could you imagine the media frenzy if Melania Trump chaired a cabinet meeting? What if Melania took over a cabinet meeting, and the next day, the military made the following announcement:
“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,”
We know precisely what would happen: the end of the world, with media hysteria cranked up beyond the endurance of mere mortals.
What will a “small number of military personnel” do in the Middle East? What capabilities do they bring to the fight? If the Pentagon wants to exercise “an abundance of caution,” how about you leave those troops in the United States? They cannot influence a damn thing happening on the ground in Lebanon. We tried that in 1983, thinking the mere presence of a Marine Corps expeditionary unit would stop the internecine fighting in Beirut. We stopped nothing. Instead, we presented an attractive target for Iranian-financed proxies to destroy in the biggest nonnuclear detonation in history.
We just completed a 20-year, multi-billion dollar effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and have learned nothing. The same “smartest kids in the room” who gave us the Kabul fiasco are driving this ridiculously under-resourced response to a war that is none of our business. It has been all war all the time in Lebanon for the past 40 years, and we’ve done nothing about it. Why start now by once again exposing our military to grave danger while failing to give them a mission, a desired end state, or adequate resources?
Maybe “Doctor” Jill thinks getting American troops killed overseas is a brilliant election-year strategy. It would certainly generate some “rally around our troops” support, forcing attention away from Kamala and FJB. That may be smart politics if you’re a raging sociopath. Melania Trump, who is fluent in five languages with a measured IQ an entire standard deviation higher than “Doctor” Jill, would never risk the lives of American troops for political gain.
In 1983, if the military said it was building a pier, it would have built one that could handle the moderate seas of the Mediterranean.
The truth lands with a thud and requires no further explanation. The truth is, we have no idea what we are doing in the Middle East. We didn’t have a clue in 1983, and we don’t have one today. Nor do we have a capable military, adequate naval shipping, or capable Marine Corps battalions. We can’t even build a temporary pier, something the Roman army was quite proficient at building 2500 years ago. Those capabilities have been sacrificed on the altar of equity and inclusion by men who placed access to power and post-retirement riches over the stewardship of their respective service branches. Other people’s children will be paying the price for that folly in the future. And it will be a painful lesson for all involved, just like Beirut in 1983.
The Reynosa tiger has, unfortunately, been captured on our side of the Rio Grande. I thought that it had most likely been stolen by one of the cartels but I was wrong. Although it entered the river opposite the Junk Yard Bar in Granjeno it was driven west by the border walls (not hard to predict) and probably exited the border wall belt at the Bensten State Park. The cat then worked the scrub lands making a beeline for Star County where there are plenty of cattle and scores of wild Ocelots. It was trapped outside the hamlet of Los Longoria most likely by Texas Game Wardens. It will probably be returned to the Quinta La Fauna Zoo which, given Mexico’s international ranking of #3 for animal abuse is a crime against nature, but property rights, not animal rights, animates our legal system so I suspect there is little choice in the matter.
If the tiger had made it across expressway 83 he would have been home free in Star County
I have been asked by several of my former Marine Corps associates how I could support President Trump after his competency, executive skills, and temperament were called into question by the four-star Marine Corps and Army Generals who worked for him. The answer is as simple as it is infuriating, they dumped on Trump only because it was well inside the Overton Window of our failed intelligentsia and its rent-seeking nomenklatura. Those four-star conformists would have never, in a million years, done the same to Obama, Clinton, or Biden because that would jeopardize their access to the riches showered upon the upper echelons of our ruling class. It doesn’t matter that Obama’s surge with its announced end date was exactly the kind of White House incompetence that they railed against as junior field grade officers. It doesn’t matter that they despised Willy BJ when he was in the White House for his gross sexual assault on an unpaid intern. If you asked about the disparity in power between a sitting president and an unpaid intern, which is the modern definition of rape, their answer would be it’s time to move on.
The last time I saw two of those generals (Allen and Mattis) in person was in the CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, where I had been summoned to explain how The Pentagon’s Private Spy Ring worked. I worked for General Allen when he was a major and knew him well, I met General Mattis only once when on active duty and did not know him at all. The Pentagon had cut ties with us after the second New York Times front-page fake news article about the ring. So our founder, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge, started a password-protected website, put our intelligence there, and gave the password to selected journalists and members of the House. They saw, in real-time the cost of ignoring our intel when suicide bombers hit ISAF exactly where and when we said they would. They saw how quickly we found the kidnappers responsible for grabbing two sailors who had mistakenly driven into Wardak province and then witnessed the consequences of ignoring our offer to mediate when the surviving sailor was killed. His kidnappers panicked when ISAF flooded the province with soldiers. exactly what we predicted would happen.
In August of 2008, my cell (the Willi cell) sent this to Dewey Clarridge and told him Osama bin Ladin was living there. That’s how good we were at the intel game, making us an existential threat to the regime intelligence apparatus, who drove a stake into us via their useful idiots in the media.*
I thought that Generals Allan and Mattis would be thrilled at having an effective human intelligence operation up and running inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, but I thought wrong. Winning was not on their agenda, pleasing Obama was their priority, so the last thing they wanted was an effective HUMINT network gumming up the works as they focused on a hasty retreat mandated by a nitwit of a president. Criticism of Obama was outside the Overton Window of the movers and shakers in Washington, DC. The yellow generals would claim they were respecting the office, not the man, but that changed instantly when the Bad Orange Man was in office. Trump represented the same threat to the political class that our Eclipse Group presented to the CIA so the rules about deportment around a sitting president suddenly changed allowing the yellow generals to use their prestige to kneecap him.
Yet it turned out Donald J Trump had good instincts when exercising the office of the presidency. He called out our NATO allies for underfunding their defense while expecting us to fight for them. He made this country an energy exporter driving costs down with cheap oil and natural gas. He closed the border and instituted a stay-in-place policy that made a dent in the sexual exploration of children being trafficked across our southern border. And he salvaged the Supreme Court by installing a couple of almost conservative justices. The “chaotic, unfocused, undisciplined” Trump White House was a godsend compared to the disaster we have been living through ever since FJB waddled his corrupt ass into the Oval Office – and not a word from the four-star high-functioning conformists who were more than happy to trash Trump.
Biden and Harris intentionally abdicated their responsibility to secure our borders which is one of the basic functions of government. Now we have armed gangs from Tren de Aragua taking over buildings in Aurora and Chicago. Towns like Springfield Ohio are being colonized by thousands of feral Haitians who lack the ability or intentions of assimilation while establishing their enclaves from which they can raid the public parks for ducks and swans to eat. The incompetent city leaders of those unfortunate locals mimic their federal overlords by lying about these situations until too many social media posts pile up to ignore. The Regime media, as usual, labeled these reports as unverified rumors until evidence of their veracity became undeniable.
Fact check – there is no credible evidence (according to the legacy media) that your lying eyes are telling you the truth – Haitians eating local park waterfowl have been “debunked” despite police audio proving it’s true. There is a video of police arresting Haitian woman for eating her neighbors cat but that too is a figment of your imagination according to our gas lighting media.
The invasion of millions of illegals comes with a worsening competency crisis in every nook and cranny of the federal government. We watch in stunned silence as our tax monies are wasted, we can’t staff our military, we can’t recover stranded astronauts without the help of private contractors, we can no longer even build a temporary pier, and we are incapable of holding transparent, fair elections. The basic roles of government are being ignored leading to a deep and pervasive legitimacy crisis for the Regime. Challenging the consensus on which the Regime based it’s post World War II identity is a new line of attack on their legitimacy which explains why the Regime and their adjuncts on social media freaked out over the Tucker Carlson interview of Darryl Cooper.
The Shibboleths of the progressive left, feminism, egalitarianism, DEI, tabula rasa, and anti-white racism do not square with how things work in the world. Darryl Cooper and those who understand how reality operates are now free to fire broadsides into fake progressive media narratives without repercussions. Instead of being destroyed by the ensuing hysteria from the White House, Regime media, (and the Powerline blog), he is now the number one downloaded podcaster in every category on every podcast hosting site in the world. That would not have been the case five short years ago indicating a major shift to the right of the Overton Window.
Everyone wants to believe they would be this guy if they came of age in 1930’s Germany. Based on his work I think Daryl Cooper is the only person I know who could claim this title. The rest of us … not so much.
Alternative media podcasters should be able to argue that a morbidly obese alcoholic who worked from his bed all morning may not have been that great a man without automatically being labeled an anti-semite or holocaust denier. But being labeled by the left no longer matters. The regime media can engage in the fact-free sliming of opponents as right-wing extremists all they want but when every person not down with their agenda is labeled a “right-wing extremist,” the words have lost their meaning. This explains why the American media is no longer trusted or believed by any adult proficient at exercising their own reasoned choices.
* The full story of the Eclipse Group will be found in the new book Free Ranging Afghanistan scheduled for publication in the summer of 2025.
Yesterday an adult tiger escaped from the Quinta La Fauna zoo, which is outside of Reynosa and on the banks of the Rio Grande River. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OCED) ranks Mexico number three in the world for animal abuse so the poor cat may be in no condition to swim the Rio Grande River. If he does he would be heading for the quant hamlet of Ganjero home of the Junk Yard Bar.
The Junk Yard Bar could be in for an interesting weekend
Of course the tiger would have to navigate a series of border wall fences that would drive him a little west towards the Bentsen Rio Grande State Park. The Bentsen park is about to fill up with bird watchers for the bi-annual hawk migration but not to worry, the park is full of armed border patrol agents and Texas State Troopers who spend their days rounding up illegal human migrants but I’m not sure what they would do about a tiger. Shooting the poor beast would not go down well with the public on this side of the river and I don’t think local animal control officers have the ability to tranquilize an adult tiger. Time will tell if the majestic beast had the energy to cross the Rio Grande but the safe bet is he has drowned or was stolen by the cartels.
This is a stock photo from India where they would know exactly what to do with a cat this size
The picture above is from a British newspaper article about how climate change is going to wipe out the Bengal tigers but that dog doesn’t hunt anymore as a more and more of us figure out the climate change hysteria is total bullshit. How many predictions by the “experts” are going to fail to materialize before everyone figures it out?
Migrating hawks have fields full of eco crucifixes to navigate but nobody seems to care about dead raptors unless they are covered in oil
In my last post I pointed out that this years hurricane season would be “nishta” (Pashto for nothing) for the exact reason our climate “experts” predicted it would be severe. Note how there have been no more hurricanes since my bold prediction but I have to tell you – when you point out how dead ass wrong the experts are people just get pissed off. Nobody wants to hear that everything they hear on the TV is nonsense, I guess it stirs up too much cognitive dissonance but I got bad news there too. When the famous 1959 paper on cognitive dissonance by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith was subjected to a Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means (GRIM test) they found the numbers to be bogus. You cannot have a mean of 3.08 from 20 test subjects filling in 0- 10 scales, it’s impossible yet typical of papers that use small data sets to detect big changes. GRIM tests, and the recently developed Stat Check are the reason why NOAA will not release the raw data they use to generate climate hysteria. All the right people are getting rich off the climate scam so who needs the truth cluttering up peoples thinking?
Daryl Cooper is the king of long form history podcasts
But I tire of the climate change hoax and want to move on to a guy who has the eye of the tiger and is currently under siege by the conservative media for expressing wrong think and that would be Daryl Cooper. Daryl is the king of long form history podcasts and was on Tucker Carlson last week talking about all sorts of things to include Winston Churchill and World War II. As a general rule I find morbidly obese middle age men who drink booze all day every day, lounge around in their pajamas most of the day, become enraged when disturbed while playing with toy soldiers, and have a propensity for designing and wearing silly military uniforms to be less than trustworthy. But I always gave Winston Churchill a pass on that because everybody else did, he’s a hero to many despite being weird as shit. Daryl isn’t giving Winston a pass and articulated several reason why and that has enraged my fellow conservatives causing me to start feuding with the Powerline bloggers and that is not a good place to be.
Powerline is written by razor sharp lawyers who I normally venerate except for 2016 when they developed a slight case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but they recovered and there was no harm done. And it’s not just them, Victor Davis Hansen weighed in without listening to the podcast as have several “media professionals” like Dominic Green at the Washington Examiner. According to Dominic
“Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II”.
That bit of hatchet work is the exact opposite of what Daryl Cooper said which was:
“…well you know it’s funny actually because when I first started it I didn’t really know what went into making a podcast like that…so I started working on it after I’d read maybe like 6 books because the series only goes up to 1948. When I started to approach the end of that episode this is months and months and months later by now I’ve read 20 books or 30 books about that pre 1948 era. I started going over what I created for that first episode, and it was so embarrassingly terrible …. I got to the point I counted them all up one time … but I read over 80 whole books parts of another 100 at least and about 12-13 hundred academic papers and journals. I read everything I could find”.
This is why I insist the media is the enemy of the people. They are lazy, partisan, and for some reason they have declared jihad on Tucker Carlson. Which has forced me to jihad with the Powerline writers who haven’t been as glaringly incompetent as ole Dominic but they obviously have not done any research into Daryl Cooper which should embarrass them.
I think questioning to role and motivations of Winston Churchill is an interesting topic given his alcoholism, obesity and weird habits. But if you want to get an idea why Daryl Cooper has his sights on Churchill listen to his podcast #19 The Anti Humans about the treatment of the Romanians by Stalin after World War II. I dare you to try and listen to the whole thing because it is as dark and nasty and upsetting as anything I’ve ever heard in my life. And no, I did not, and could not, listen to the whole thing because it was that upsetting. Churchill gave us Uncle Joe Stalin as an equal partner and that murderous son of a bitch is exceeded Hitler (but not Mao) in his willingness to butcher millions in order to stay in power. Maybe Winston should be held to account for that, maybe not, but it is for historians like Cooper to ferret out using the kind of drive that saw him read hundreds of books just to make a decent podcast. Plus he has the balls to question conventional wisdom and that is a rare find in these days of conformity and COVID masks.
Watching the politico- media complex attempts at gaslighting their consumers about Kamala is no longer amusing. She appears, according to polling, to be gaining traction with American voters. Polling on a presidential election requires a significant degree of trust in pollsters to be taken seriously, but we know better than to trust the media which is unquestionably the enemy of the people. I’m sticking with my earlier prediction that Trump will win in a fraud proof landslide.
The delusional belief in Kamal competency should haven been crushed by her selection of Tampon Tim as her vice president. His despicable use of stolen valor to promote his political career is nauseating, and in direct contrast to Senator J.D. Vance who has more in common with the average voter in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley than any politician on the national stage in my lifetime. That’s why the Trump Train rolls through the former democratic stronghold of McAllen every Saturday growing is size every week as the election nears. The other advantage of living in an area with virtually no racial diversity is local governance. If Venezuelan gangs were taking over apartment building and terrorizing residents we would be told by career politicians that the gangs were a figment of our imagination. Unlike Colorado our political class is forced to deal with reality, otherwise their tenures will be short, bitter and probably end in getting shot in the face.
On a slightly related not the politico- media complex is also taking a beating on the climate change front from yet another underperforming hurricane season. NOAA predicted above normal 2024 hurricane season for the exact reason there will be (yet again) lower than average hurricane activity.
To date we have had 5 named storms, 3 hurricanes, and 0 major hurricanes and we are half way through peak hurricane season (August and September)
The reason NOAA and other climate change “experts” say the hurricanes will be more frequent and severe, is warm ocean water temperatures. Warm ocean temperatures decrease the temperature difference between the poles and equator and thus decreasing the ability of storms to move energy north to south. The climate “experts”cannot admit this least they lose their lucrative government or academic sinecures. Telling the truth about the climate means they can no longer shake down big business and might be held accountable for the migrant bird killing solar arrays or whale killing (according the green peace) wind farms.
PresidentTrump visiting a Virginia Vietnamese restaurant without kicking everyone out and replacing them with paid actors like Titmouse Tim and Kamala have done at every business they visit.
Any doubt that the whales are being decimated by wind farms can be assuaged by goggle who will feed you article after article from media “experts” explaining that the whales are dying for “complex reasons” that they are certain have nothing to do with the incessant undersea noise turbines generate. The media is truly the enemy of the people (and the whales) but this summer they’ll be losing millions because they can’t demand premium dollars for commercials without the massive “manmade climate change” hurricanes to cover with 24/7 “breaking news” hype.
1979 was the first year satellite microwave data for global temperatures were available. Those temperature readings still have to be massaged to get them anywhere close to the climate modeling from our so called experts.
Broaden the time line and you can see the current climate change scam in its full glory. As hard as the left tries it cannot (yet) go back and re-write history.
I recently read The Unprotected Class: How Anti White Racism is Tearing America Apart and found it compelling but not reflective of my experience. In 1958 I was born into an America that overwhelmingly white, but I was raised on military bases which were totally integrated and never realized the country was so white (not that I thought about that as a child). I now live in the Rio Grande Valley which is overwhelmingly Hispanic and if I have lived here 100 years ago at my age I would have survived four separate attempts ( the runaway scrape, the Cortinas War, the Salineño War, and the San Diego plan of 1915) to ethnically cleanse South Texas of all white people. Relationships between the White and Hispanic populations were strained in the RGV which happens when one population tries to ethnically cleanse the other.
Today Whites comprise less than 10% in the Rio Grande Valley of the population the rest is Hispanic (who were white people when I was a child but now aren’t for reasons). Yet the Rio Grande Valley feels like the America of my youth, church attendance is high, religious holidays a big deal, racial strife and animosity virtually unknown. There is exactly one Harris/Tampon Tim yard sign in McAllen (thousands of Trump yard signs dot the region) and the small minority of Harris/Tampon Tim voters are easily recognizable in public by their COVID masks.
This was the first and only Black Lives Matter protest in McAllen, Texas. The protesters were a handful of young, unattractive white girls and as soon as they started “protesting” a local man jumped out of his truck, got his chain saw going and commenced to threaten the protestors with nasty comments about the blacks and how little he cared for skinny unattractive white girls. Most of his ranting was in Spanish except he translated the N-word into English which of course resulted in his arrest.
I’m compelled to point out (again) that the 20 million or so illegal migrants who have flooded into the country present no problems here, in fact federal dollars continue to pour into the valley to fight the onslaught. But we don’t have any problems with illegals because the people who control the border (Mexican drug cartels) don’t want them here. The Cartels invest here, send their children to school here, and routinely vacation here. They are not hard to spot -just look for any high end, late model truck or car with Tamaulipas or Nuevo León license plates and you’ve found one. If 20 illegals tried to take over a school bus full of kids, like they did yesterday in Jamul, California, those dumb bastards would be dead in a day, probably hanging from the bridge into Reynosa. But in California they face no repercussions because as ruthless as the cartels are they have nothing on sociopaths like Gavin Newsom when it comes to abusing American citizens.
So what happens when the polls shut down on election night in the midst of a Trump landslide and dawn reveals that somehow millions of Harris ballots turned up and she’s declared the winner? You know what’s going to happen; nothing. Just like the last time, and this time we already know any protest about a stolen election in Washington DC will be treated in the exact opposite manner as leftists rioting. And riot they will after The Bad Orange Man kicks Cackling Kamala’s ass in this election despite endemic democratic voter fraud. Trump needs a fraud proof landslide and he is well on his way to getting one.
All my life I assumed that one of the safest places in the world would be anywhere near an American President. I remember being mere feet away from President Regan once and felt totally intimidated by his secret service detail because of their size and demeanor. I’ve attended high speed shooting schools with FBI, DEA and Secret Service agents and always thought them to be great Americans. But time, experience, and the reality of last weekends gross incompetence has changed that. I left the FBI firearms instructor course with 2 cases of .45 cal golden saber rounds and level 3 body armor. Normally once bought I stay bought so when discussing the FBI on All Marine Radio years ago I was the only pro FBI voice. I’m no longer bought, I’ve unfriended the FBI and every other three letter agency.
I was given the armor because I was heading to the intermountain west on recruiting duty and the agents thought it best I carry body armor (and lots of guns) in the trunk of my government vehicle. That would have got me a court martial if caught but I appreciated the concern even though I figured (correctly) the people out west didn’t have any problems with the Marine Corps.
Here’s a picture of president Regan’s USSS detail in action in Augusta Georgia, I remember them being much larger and meaner looking in person.
What are we to make of the attempted assassination of President Trump? It’s hard to say because of the lack of trust Americans have in their institutions. Is there anyone in this country who believes the FBI will complete a competent, transparent, investigation and then share its finding with the American people? No, we expect the FBI to lie and cover up inconvenient facts that counter Government/Media Disinformation industry. The FBI claims that antifa is just an ideology while (according to the head of the FBI) “the largest “chunk” of the FBI’s investigations involve white supremacist groups.
President Trump reacts to getting shot in the face. This is why he will win in a landslide, courage in contagious.
Congressional cowards react to the January 6th incursion and this is why America despises its congress. Cowardice is also contagious, unseemly and un fucking American.
What kind of white supremacists’ groups? The AGGAVE (other) groups I wrote about in my last post which is to say Trump Supporters. How the hell does an organization handle a real domestic terrorist when it had calibrated itself to see the victim (President Trump) and his supporters’ as domestic terrorists? It’s impossible to say or even imagine yet here we are.
It is also impossible to imagine how a gunman could low crawl on a roof to gain line of sight of the President from just 150 meters away. Or why President Trump’s secret service detail was stacked with obese women with poor gun handling skills who were too short to shield Trump which is their primary function. Actually the performance of the Secret Service last Saturday is easy to explain using Jerry Pournell’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which states:
“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
Add to that the results of the Federal Government”s obsession with DEI which mandates when meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority. The results are a steady erosion of institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. The Secret Service performance on Saturday just another manifestation of the competence crisis collapsing yet another complex system. Why else would the head of the secret service make hiring women her priority when they are totally incapable of doing the job? And in case you thought the head of the USSS a remotely intelligent person her justification for ignoring a snipers perch just 130 meters away was the roof was slopped and therefore ‘dangerous‘. You cannot make this stuff up; American liberal elites are bat shit crazy.
Poor gun handling results from a training regime that failed to imprint muscle memory. Holstering a weapon under stress is simple for shooters who took their training seriously and continued to practice at home. There are thousands of Americans today who have extensive gunfighting experience and will recognize gross incompetence when they see it. Why is this woman even doing a job that calls for large aggressive men? I remember watching President Regan arrive in Bethesda when I was a corpsman and his secret service detail scared the shit out of me being all huge dudes with serious attitudes.
One consequence of this failed assassination is a subtle shift in the Overton Window of public discourse. Jack Black and his partner Kyle Gass (Tenacious D) have cancelled their tour and may be deported from Australia after Gass said “don’t miss Trump next time” on stage in Sydney over the weekend. Both John Deere and Microsoft have eliminated their DEI departments. The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart is a best selling book with the author making regular appearances on various podcasts without facing violent protests, personal assaults or 24/7 liberal media harassment. And in the utterly amazing department a democratic senator has been convicted on federal corruption and bribery charges in New Jersey of all places. Senator Menendez has escaped accountability for his blatant lawlessness for years but now he’s suddenly convicted just as the lawfare cases against President Trump collapse. Weird that.
As the Trump Train picks up momentum it is hard to anticipate how the permanent Washington bureaucracy and their handmaidens in the press will react. And things just got worse for our democratic/media/academic axis of evil; President Trump just picked a former Marine Corps Corporal as his running mate. It’s time to make America Great Again, if we can keep our candidate alive until election day, maybe then our federal institutions will be gutted of deadwood and once again exist to serve, not gas light, the people.
The Helmand Province was the scene of the heaviest fighting of the Afghanistan war for both the United States Marine Corps and British Army. Yet my experience in the Helmand was different, in fact the first time I was there the Helmand was quiet. In 2005 Sher Muhammad Akhundzada was the governor and his vast militia was designated the 93rd Division of the Afghanistan National Army. When I drove through Grishk on my way to Herat in 2005 the ANA troops manning the checkpoints looked like Taliban because they were wearing shalwar kameez (local man jams) and turbans but they kept commerce flowing and security incidents down on the vital ring road.
Five years later I moved to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, to take over the USAID Community Development Program for the southwest region. The Marines had locked down the southern and central regions of the province and I could drive from Lashkar Gah to Marjah or the district center in Nawa without a problem. Just three years before that my friend Cody Elmore was working out of Lash and witnessed a truck full of his Afghan Boost demonstration farm workers vaporized by a Taliban IED. Of course when the Marines pulled out at the end of the Obama surge the Taliban eventually re-gained the ground they lost, but during the time Marines sustained an unsustainable deployment tempo into the province it was sort of safe.
Was there a better time to be an American than the 1950’s? This is a photo of the Lashkar Gah housing area for the Morrison-Knudsen firm circa 1958.
The Helmand wasn’t dangerous because there was a war on between two uniformed combatants as defined by Clausewitz, it was dangerous because an infidel military was trying to force a corrupt, worthless, central government down the throats of the Afghan people. Which was the height of irony because the only thing the people of Afghanistan expected the central government to do was to protect them from foreign soldiers especially if they were infidels. I had lived in Afghanistan for five years before moving to Lashkar Gah but had not figured this out yet because effective redevelopment program managers were treated well by local Afghans, especially if they lived embedded inside their communities.
Before the 1940’s Lashkar Gah was a desert fort, Lashkar means soldier in Pashto and Gah translates as home so Lashkar Gah was home to the soldiers before the development of the Helmand Green Zone. In 1949 King Mohammed Zahir Shah hired the American Morrison-Knudsen firm to turn the desert into agricultural oasis with electricity Lashkar Gah was the headquarters for the Americans thus Lashkar Gah became known as Little America from the late 1940’s until the early 1970’s . Morrison-Knudsen had built the Hoover Dam and San Francisco Bridge, but they failed in the Helmand because they never addressed the fundamental problem of salty soil that drained poorly. That problem was mitigated by the American government and the Helmand green zone finally reached its potential just as the Soviet invasion ended our involvement there in the 1970’s.
in the 1950’s Lashkar Gah had the only coed pool in Afghanistan In 2008 my happy home – The Taj in Jalalabad had the only coed pool in the country. I don’t think there will be another anytime soon.
I had lived in Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, and Jalalabad when those cities had been full of westerners living and working outside the wire. Mazar and Kabul had several bars and restaurants that catered to westerners and Jalalabad had the Taj Guesthouse and Tiki Bar where the international aid community gathered weekly on Thursday evenings. That was not the case in Lashkar Gah where the few westerners living in town kept a low profile. There were no weekly gatherings, booze was hard to find, and the internationals rarely mingled outside their secure compounds.
I did not live like the other USAID implementors in Lash who followed the UN Minimum Occupational Security Standards (UN MOSS) which mandated enhanced outer RPG screens, hard rooms, 24/7 communication capability with the regional UN headquarters, B7 Armored SUV’s, and international personal security details. We used local vehicles, wore local clothes, and I lived in a regular compound using the Jeff Cooper rules for compound security that mandated concertina wire inside (not on top of) the outer walls, the use of dogs, turning bedrooms into barricaded fighting positions, and not arming local guards with AK’’s that could be turned against us. We armed our guards with shotguns and they were instructed to fire them and run if attacked, the resident expats would take over at that point.
Living outside the wire in the south forces one to adapt to the situation as it is. Adding three feet to the exterior walls and topping them with concertina is not practical because it costs money we didn’t have and drew attention we didn’t need.
This part of the Jeff Cooper compound defense plan failed when Tor Spay (Black Dog in Pashto) chose to hide under my bed whenever fighting drew close to our quarters. He was great at keeping strangers out of our sleeping area though – the only Afghan who could get near him without getting mauled was my Terp Zaki.
I had inherited some projects from my good friend Jeff “Raybo” Radan, the only Marine officer I ever met who thought attending Ranger School was a good deal thus the call sign “Raybo”. Raybo had turned hippy on me but was also a fan of the FRI blog which is how he got hired to go to Lash in 2009. I wanted to stay in Jalalabad but my boss wanted a former Marine officer in the Helmand and Raybo was all about experiencing the outside the wire lifestyle. Being an energetic optimist Raybo had moved into the northern portion of the province to rebuild the Naw Zad bazaar. His first two attempts to get a convoy loaded with building material failed and ended up in the hands of the Taliban. By the time I arrived he had gotten enough material to start work so he passed the project off to me.
Jeff “Raybo” Radan and I heading out to the far reaches of Helmand Province on an old Marine Corps CH 53D that leaked hydraulic fluid all over us. We returned in an Osprey that didn’t leak a drop of fluid which was caused old grunts like us undue concern.
This was the main street of Naw Zad bazaar in 2009
Naw Zad bazaar in 2010 – this was the only project of mine that took longer than planned. It still came in on budget though because we did no subcontracting.
Reconstruction projects in the Helmand Province were supposed to be coordinated through the British PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team which included American, Danish and Estonian government representatives). In practice that meant every project needed to be approved by a trilateral commission consisting of DFID (British Department for International Development), DANIDA (the Danish Governments development agency), and USAID. How long do you think project proposal took to work their way through that sausage machine? I wouldn’t know because I refused work through them after the USAID rep gave me shit about carrying a pistol on base and the PRT SgtMaj refused to let me drive my vehicle on post because he thought it might have a bomb attached to it.
I believe the Taliban attached a bomb to a parked vehicle in a targeted attack exactly never during the 20 year conflict but the reality of outside the wire living could not be understood by soldiers or civilians who never left the wire. My company had run out of experienced Afghan hands and hired an NGO worker from New York City to manage the Helmand projects. He was unarmed and restricted to doing project in Lashkar Gah but he also finished the Naw Zad bazaar which I appreciated. That left me with 10 million dollars to burn and I knew exactly who to ask about where to burn it, the Marine Corps G9 (Civil Affairs) shop at Camp Leatherneck. They wanted me to dump it all in Nimroz province because they could not deploy Marines there due to the capital, Zaranj, being on the border with Iran and having armed Marines on the border of Iran was bad according to the genius’s in Foggy Bottom.
I had a fantastic Afghan provincial manager in Zaranj so although I spent a lot of time in the Nimroz I had plenty of time to burn hanging out with the two Marine Corps Regimental Combat Team commanders currently working the Helmand. The three of us had been Infantry Officer Course instructors, then went to the Amphibious Warfare School together, and we then commanded the three most successful Marine Corps recruiting stations (in the late 90’s) even though we were assigned to stations that had not been previous powerhouses. I was in Salt Lake City, Dave Furness next to me in Sacramento, and Paul Kennedy next to Dave at RS San Francisco and none of us ever missed mission.
Colonel Paul Kennedy, the Commanding Officer of RCT 2 in his Ops center
Colonel Paul Kennedy had just moved into the Delaram 2 firm base and was responsible for the northern districts in the Helmand. He did not have much time left in country and the air strip on his new base wasn’t open yet but that was no obstacle for the South Africans who flew our company 12 seat turboprops. All they need was a bottle of scotch each and I was on my way to see Paul. The pilots kicked me out of the plane and hauled ass after landing because the control tower was giving them a hard time. A pair of MP’s pulled up to ask me who I was and why I was there and you should have seen their faces when I told them I was the Regimental Commanders best friend. They looked both dubious and annoyed which I expected, when they raised Paul on the radio he ordered them to arrest me and bring me directly to him. They knew better than to really yoke me up but they didn’t find the situation nearly as amusing as I did. My visit with Paul was brief – he got me on a helicopter out the next day because they were heavily engaged with the Taliban and he had better things to do then entertain me.
LtCol Sean Riordan, (one of our IOC students in the early 90′) Col Dave Furness and me after a 5 hour foot patrol. – We’re hurting too but it was an interesting experience.
But not Dave Furness who commanded RCT 1 out of Camp Dwyer down in the south. He was still taking casualties and doing some hooking and jabbing with the Taliban but for the most part (by Marine Corps standards) his area was quiet. I was able to fly into Dwyer and link up with Dave several times which I blogged about here, here, and here.
When you’re hanging out with a good friend commanding a Marine Corps Regiment in combat its a good idea to go out of your way not to be a dick around the enlisted Marines. But the first time I got into Dave’s MRAP I couldn’t help myself when his MK 19 gunner briefed me on what to do if he opened fire with his grenade launcher. When he finished I said “I bet I can shoot that MK 19 better than you can” (and took this picture). Is his expression priceless or what? He said “Sir, let me try this again; when the big dog starts to bark you unstrap the ammo cans. Then you sit and wait for me to yell for ammo, only then do you break the seal and hand the can up. Then you sit right back down until I tell you to do something different or that I need more ammo. Got it”? His expression never changed so maybe I wasn’t so damn funny after all.
The only problem I had in the Helmand was when I foolishly agreed to inspect a road building project in Grishk, a large town on the Ring Road that was inside the British Army zone by 2011. When we arrived at the project site there was no paved roads and no people as all the local businesses appeared to be abandoned. That is a pre-incident indicator for an ambush and I didn’t”t hesitate to order my crew to immediately head back home and we almost made it out without incident. Almost.
Yukking it up with the workers at one of our road building projects. Dressing in local garb didn’t fool anyone once they saw your walking gait but the Afghans seemed to appreciate the effort.
My time in the dangerous Helmand province wasn’t that bad because I spent most of it in Nimroz province or with the Marines. I was never comfortable in Lash although I was treated well by local Afghans who thought of me as a direct link to the Marines controlling the province, which wasn’t always the case. After Paul Kennedy and Dave Furness headed home they were replaced by Colonels I knew well, but avoided like the plague. Now security in the Helmand province is like it was before 9/11 – safer than any major city in America. There is lesson in there somewhere but it eludes me for now because all I feel now about Afghanistan is humiliation over our dreadful performance there.
These two Marines taught the daughters of a local teacher in Naw Zad how to read and write English. I’m not sure we did the girls any favors in the long run but this is what Marines or soldier did when given the chance. They were unquestionable the good guys while they were in the Helmand.
But I got to see the pointy end of the stick at the small unit level where junior Marine interacted daily with Afghans who saw their tiny spartan combat outposts as a legitimate source of protection from both the Taliban and Afghan Security Forces. It was no mystery to me who the good guys were when we had boots on the ground. Yet in the end all the good intentions in the world can’t compensate for foreign policy based on path-dependent groupthink that results in George Floyd murals and gay pride flags painted on the Kabul embassy walls.
Super Bowl Sunday is a big day for dive bars across the land, but none are closer to the crisis at our southern border than the Junk Yard Bar in Granjeno, Texas. The hamlet of Granjeno is located south of the Military Highway just east of the Anzalduas Bridge, outside Mission in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s a one-road town with a population of 303 people pinned between a string of industrial parks to the north and the Rio Grande River to the south. On Super Bowl Sunday, as you drive into the village, you can see dozens of vehicles spilling out of the Junk Yard parking lot onto the shoulder of the road because the Junk Yard always has a full house on Super Bowl Sunday.
A portion of the Border Wall is right behind the bar and there is a gate in the border defenses just to the left which is now in constant use by the Border Patrol.
The Junk Yard Bar caters to two easily identifiable subsets of the Rio Grande Valley population: Winter Texans and old bikers. Both groups are from the tail end of the boomer generation; the bikers live here year-round, and the Winter Texans flock into the gated retiree trailer parks that dot the Rio Grande Valley every winter. They are the remnants of a generation that expected a steady job would deliver them into the American middle class. They expected to own a home with two cars in the garage, kids who went to college, and annual vacations, and they were satisfied. The system worked for the American worker in the 70s and 80s, but that changed when our industrial elite moved their manufacturing plants overseas.
These Rust Belt refugees are primarily white and married and like to party. The elites hate them because they own recreational vehicles and guns they don’t want to register, and they’re prone to cluttering up the wilderness with dirt bikes or snowmobiles. They all smoked cigarettes for years, too, so now they look hard, flinty, and mean in their old age.
You can see the border wall behind the Junk Yard and a Border Patrol truck sitting on the levee in the upper right of the picture
There isn’t just one border wall along the McAllen section of the border fence but several bands of wall that appear designed to protect the valuable farmland adjacent to the river. Thousands of acres are under cultivation in this valley area, and it is susceptible to large groups of migrants trampling through them. It’s essential to realize the border wall is an obstacle that forces friction into the equation for illegals crossing the Rio Grande. There is no such thing as a wall that cannot be climbed; humans can climb up and over anything if they want to, so the border wall is not a magical, impenetrable barrier. It’s a practical obstacle that forces illegals to take the path of least resistance to areas where they can be collected for processing before they can trample planted crops or wander onto private property.
The continued cost to local farmers from the massive influx of illegals may well explain why the RGV went from a dark blue democratic stronghold to riding the Trump Train during the last presidential election. And Trump will dominate the Rio Grande Valley this election cycle, too, in a landslide, which will trump the RGV democratic politiqueras who are paid big bucks to harvest Democratic votes.
Here is one of the white buses used to collect illegals and this one is heading for the gate behind the Junk Yard.
The Junk Yard Bar is not dangerous because of illegal immigrants; it’s risky because the clientele consists of old bikers and skinny, hard-drinking winter Texans. The locals mix well with the Winter Texans because everyone down here has a gun on them. An armed society is indeed a polite society, but the old boomers partying at the Junk Yard have a bigger nemesis—slips and falls.
Do you notice how clean and level the entrance is? It’s the same on the inside – craftily engineered to remove all slip and fall hazards that could cost one of these old coots a hip replacement. All of us Boomers know what happens once you get your hip replaced – you’re toast.
Do you notice how clean and level the entrance is? It’s the same on the inside – craftily engineered to remove all slip and fall hazards that could cost one of these old coots a hip replacement. All of us Boomers know what happens once you get your hip replaced – you’re toast.
The people filling this place hours before the Super Bowl don’t nurse their drinks because they’re afraid of all the law enforcement constantly driving by. They’re afraid of taking a hard spill and breaking a hip, so they watch the booze and tend not to get too rowdy. At their age, all the crazy bastards are long gone, and the survivors seem to prefer dive bars with level floors and packed full of people standing around, which reduces the chances of slipping and falling. And there is the added coolness of hanging in an outdoor dive bar right on the border with our friendly neighbors in Mexico.
Hanging out on the Mexican border was the original draw for the Winter Texans. They like to drink booze and smoke, and Mexico was a great place to do both on the cheap. Nobody crosses the border to party anymore, but the Junk Yard Bar remains open for the last of the boomers who love quirky, one-of-a-kind bars tucked in out-of-the-way places.
In May of 2012 my team of Afghan cut throats and I were dispatched to investigate persistent rumors concerning ISAF vehicle convoys transiting the Salang Pass. The complaint was that ISAF units would close the pass causing Afghans to wait up to 24 hours in the freezing cold before they could get through. The international community was up in arms about that and wanted a boots on the ground report which meant me, or my boss (call sign Bot) would have to go, and I was up. This would be my 10th and final trip through the Salang and I was not happy about going, the pass scared me.
The Salang Pass tunnel entrance in 2005
The dangers from being trapped inside the Salang Tunnel were obvious. The lights inside the tunnel didn’t work, nor did the closed-circuit TV cameras that were installed to warn of problems. The tunnel roof leaked massive amounts of water turning the pot-holed roadbed into a mixture of icy mud, broken concrete, and pieces of asphalt. Ventilator fans in most of the tunnel were broken resulting in such high levels of carbon monoxide that the Afghan government was reportedly exploring ways to pump oxygen into the tunnel.
History is always a good guide to potential problems and the history of the Salang Tunnel had some grim milestones. On the 3rd of November 1982 two Soviet military convoys collided inside the Salang tunnel causing a massive traffic jam. A fuel tanker in one of the convoys exploded inside the tunnel, unleashing a chain reaction of fiery explosions and death. The cause of the explosion remains in doubt, the Russians claim it was an accident, and the Mujahedeen claimed it resulted from a successful attack. Drivers of cars, trucks and buses evidently continued to enter the tunnel after the explosion. Soviet troops, fearing that the explosion might have been a rebel attack, then closed off both ends with tanks, trapping many inside. Some burned to death; others were killed by smoke or by carbon monoxide poisoning. Although records from the era are suspect up to 700 Soviet troops and 2,000 Afghan soldiers and civilians may have died in the 1983 tunnel fire.
The Salang Tunnel entrance in 2012
What we found in 2012 was ISAF had indeed started to use the Salang Pass for logistic convoys. We did not find any Afghan worker who remembered ISAF closing the tunnel to civilian traffic and suspected that reporting in local media was rumor mongering. We did determine that ISAF convoys routinely hit civilian traffic in the tunnel and did not stop or acknowledge the accidents. The tunnel was only 16 feet high (at the centerline) with a sloping, concave roof over a two lane roadbed and it was routine for overburdened trucks, MRAP’s, and fuel tankers to get pinned to the tunnel wall when trying to pass each other.
Typical minor traffic jam in the tunnel
It was also routine for tankers to tip over inside the tunnel due to the poor roadbed condition. When this happened a giant Soviet Era bulldozer was sent in to drag the truck out.
Dragging a fuel tanker full of fuel was an obvious fire hazard
During the trip we interviewed The Director of Maintenance and Protection of Salang Pass, Lt. Gen. Mohammad Rajab, who claimed that overloaded trucks were destroying the tunnel adding that less than 5% of those trucks were civilians – the rest belong to ISAF. Judging from the traffic we observed in the tunnel that statement was questionable, nobody overloads Jingo Trucks better than Afghans.
The Salang tunnel is one of the few places in Afghanistan where the American Army cannot force all traffic away from their convoys. The open air ventilation to the right is blocked by avalanche rubble for 10 months of the year.
Attempts to interview or even talk to any of the American soldiers transiting the pass were unsuccessful. As usual we found the soldiers to be agitated and aggressive, and completely freaked out when a fellow American in civilian attire walked up to chat with them. The refusal to interact with American citizens in Afghanistan was something new for me, when I was on active duty we did the exact opposite no matter where we were in the world.
This was the preferred method for traversing the tunnel – hauling ass on an empty road but by 2006 finding the tunnel empty like this was not going to happen.
The Salang Pass was a dangerous transit for well maintained vehicles which was a problem in a country famous for its inability to maintain vehicles. Mechanical failures were routine inside the tunnel which cause long delays stranding motorists in subzero temperatures for hours at a time. In response the Salang Pass Department of Maintenance and Protection of the Salang Pass Route constructed a purpose built shelter that provided assistance to 6,700 people during the 2011 -2012 winter. When Gen Rajab told me that it surprised me, Afghans can be incredibly altruistic at the individual level, especially with us foreigners, but at the government level we were conditioned to look for a catch and we detected none.
The Salang Pass Department of Maintenance and Protection of the Salang Pass Route (its official title) had taken the initiative to provide life saving aid for thousands of Afghans because it was the right thing to do. The few locals we talked with confirmed that graft in the pass was a thing of the past. That pithy explanation was met with laughter by the diplomats who funded the trip which was gratifying. It’s not easy to be pithy when working for foreigners.
I’ve done many reckless things in my life but eating Salang Pass crabs is not one of them. I was partial to the fresh trout served al fresco and I got a discount by providing the frag grenade used to harvest the fish.
In 2019 the Russian film Battle for Afghanistan was released and is now available on Amazon Prime. The movie is reportedly based on true events surrounding the withdrawal of the Soviet Army through the one chokepoint they could not force – the Salang Pass. It’s a good film that captures the craziness of Afghanistan and well worth a watch. You can’t help but notice how Soviet troops frequented local bazaars and Afghan restaurants while off duty. That never happened with ISAF units who were restricted to their FOB’s (forward operating bases). Only a small percentage of the troops deployed to Afghanistan ever got outside the wire, for most perceptions of the land and its people were distorted through the prism of electronic warfare collection, boredom induced gossip, and questionable media reporting.
The force protection mentality of ISAF was made possible by their (American taxpayer funded) unlimited budgets which they used to completely isolate their troops from the local population. In a country famous for its melons every bit of fruit consumed by ISAF soldiers was flown in at enormous expense. Something the Soviets and every other nation on the earth would be unable and unwilling to do. The only reason the pass was being used in 2012 was the number of American units operating north of the Salang Pass after the Obama surge. That forced ISAF into running a lot of logistical convoys over the pass for a couple of years. I don’t think the logisticians in Kabul liked the pass any more than I did but I wonder what the soldiers who made those runs thought about the experience.
Old Soviet combat outpost on the plains north of the Salang PassIn the early days of our Afghan adventure there were still many abandoned Soviet bases north of the Salang Pass. with all sorts of interesting Soviet army messaging directed at both their soldiers and the Afghan Army. These propoganda paintings were long gone by 2007.
In the early days of the Afghanistan conflict it was easy to see that the money pouring into the country was being used to start business’s like restaurants or to buy used vehicles to be used as taxi’s for another income stream. But Afghanistan is a wild place with wild rivers that often overflow their banks and when they destroy a new business there is no insurance money to collect thus the common refrain Inshallah (if God wills it).
This new restaurant was a great place to stop in 2005.By 2007 the restaurant was destroyed by raging flood waters. This gas station lasted about two years before the BTR’s became unstable and it started to wash away. Now the Afghans have HUMVEE’s, MRAP’s and M1 tanks to use as river weirs, maybe they’ll work better.
The biggest surprise I found in Afghanistan over the years was their high regard for Russians. If you could speak Russian you could talk with most Afghans in any part of the country. If you asked about the difference between the Soviet military and ISAF you got the same answer in every part of the country. The Soviets were brave and supported the local people but the ISAF soldiers are cowards who hide on their bases and never interact with local people when off duty. The Afghans never understood that and it infuriated me to hear it because I knew cowards among American infantry were astonishingly rare. I’m a retired grunt myself and know. our infantry well.
The number of American soldiers who could speak Dari or Pashto numbered less than 100 for most of the war. The number of American soldiers who spent enough time to learn the country, its people, and the limitations of its central government cannot be counted because there were none. Check that, there was one – Commander Baba D turned special contractor Baba D who worked directly for the ISAF commanders for several years in RC East .
And there he is Baba D photo bombing me during an interview with ABC news. Ms. Raddatz taped an hour or so of Baba Tim explaining in detail why we were losing the war and never aired a second of it.
It is impossible to gauge the consequences of our humiliating retreat from Kabul. The military/political leadership responsible for that fiasco remains in charge of our depleted military to this day. The only military leader held to account over the Kabul evacuation fiasco was a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel who was thrown out for pointing out the disgraceful lack of accountability of our flag officers (generals and admirals) responsible for the mess.
The northern side of the Salang Pass and yes that herd of goats was heading up and over the pass but I’m not sure how because they weren’t allowed on the roadway inside the tunnel.
After spending 20 years floundering about in Afghanistan what is the senior leadership of the uniformed military concerned with now? Fixing the force? You wish . . . the real emergency our country faces is climate change according to the Army War College.
Watching a great power implode is unpleasant because there are bills that will come due. There is a price to pay for rampaging around the world sending “carefully calibrated messages” with killer drones just as there will be a leveling for the folly of introducing women into the combat arms. The military/government duopoly used brute digital force to try and alter reality in Afghanistan to construct a reasonable narrative. Here’s what that looked like:
It’s important to note that I supported our approach throughout most of my time in Afghanistan. I once battled the media contention that Marjha was a bleeding ulcer by driving to Marjah and blogging about it. I was not an impartial observer but a retired Marine and my friends were the running the show in the Helmand Province allowing me to embed with their units and write really cool blog posts.
In time the average Afghan correctly deduced that the Kabul government was installed and maintained at the point of infidel bayonets. And that was all most Afghans ever knew or needed to know. They hadn’t heard of 9/11, they had no idea why we showed up and spanked the Taliban in 2001. The Afghans supported us at first because we appeared to be the strong horse but any chance of maintaining that perception ended with the invasion of Iraq.
Get some Army! This is how you fix recruiting woes
What I learned in Afghanistan (besides don’t drive over the Salang Pass if you can avoid it) was our senior military and government leadership have lost sight of the stewardship function integral to their posts. That was reflected by their inability to define a coherent military mission or articulate a reasonable end state. They were incapable of vigorously defending the interests of the United States because those interests were never adequately defined. When unable to determine or accomplish what is important the unimportant becomes important. A lesson the smartest kids in the room never learned while supervising a war we could not lose . . . or win.
Here’s an update in an attempt to counteract the thoroughly depressing news of Tim going silent. (Anyone who knows Tim in person knows that you can’t actually silence him; he’s still ranting but we’ve turned off the blog-mike). With Kanani’s help, I’ve put this post in Babatim format.
This weekend’s New York Times has several photos of FabFi Afghanistan in this piece on subversive community communication networks. (We’re in the slide set). To be clear, the FabFi project in Afghanistan was not one of those secretly funded projects described in their article (see here where I itemize the bulk of the costs and how they were funded – mostly through personal savings accounts of those who participated and in part through a National Science Foundation grant.) However, the urgency and significance of the project are the same. As long as there’s pressure from those seeking a reasonable life where they can go about their business, there’s hope we can throw a lifeline with these so called undermining capabilities.
New York Times Sunday July 12, 2011
< Insert non-sequitur rant about donkeys and hearing crickets. >
As the director of the Jalalabad Fab Lab and Fab Fi project lead, I’ve been asked several times about how to scale the Fab Lab and Fab Fi experiences to more fully saturate a city, as well as spinning this off into more cities. While I can provide a technical, programmatic answer, Fab Lab/Fi doesn’t solve everything. It’s only one piece: the rest have to develop at the same time. Infrastructure like roads, power, water, schools, teachers, and systems maintenance as well as the user terminals (laptops and computers), people who use them, and the content they’ll consume. It’s crazy to think that there was no cell phone service in the country in 2002 and now it’s pretty solidly working in every major population center (at least when the tower isn’t turned off or bombed). From roads to power to water, the task at hand (officially US or not) was to set off a program that could go from zero to servicing 30 million people in a few years. Imagine colonizing Mars by sending 30 million people first, ahead of the infrastructure. < Insert photo of BabaTim on Mars >
As requested; Baba Tim on Mars
I think there are maybe three kinds of places in Afghanistan:
1. There are safer, quieter places that have known better times and whose residents are working to get back to those better times. There’s still crime and killing but it’s a shocking event when it occurs. 2. Poor, forgotten places that have never known modernization and are harder hit by economic problems (some of which we’ve unwittingly caused). 3. Places like Kandahar with an almost insidious infestation of crazy. Remember those boys you grew up with that would pull the wings off of bugs and set ants on fire? Beliefs aside, an environment like Kandahar doesn’t provide the social pressure that prevents them from growing up into full fledge people-hurting psychopaths.
In the first group are cities like Herat, in the western sector of Afghanistan. BabaTim went to Herat in 2005, and since then it’s continued to grow. It’s plainly ready and asking for a Fab Lab and associated wealth of possibilities. You could imagine a Fab Lab and Training Center there augmenting and strengthening the communications infrastructure with a parallel or overlaid subversive mesh, perhaps through the school system which I hear is quite healthy and respected.
The second group of towns, like Jaghori in Ghazni province, need only to follow the good examples of the first so much the better if there is strong municipal leadership that both welcomes business activities while keeping them in check < insert Big Government vs. Liberal rant here >.
Big government can't do this because it only costs a few thousand dollars to dig concrete drainage ditches which isn't enough money for them to even think about spending. Big Government talks money with a "B" as in billions. Liberlas can't do this knd of work because it involves work. No talking, no sharing of emotions, no community organizing, just work. Dig the ditch, build the forms, mix and pour the concrete and you have flood and some pestilence control. It isn't sexy it isn't fun its just work and the work here never ends.
The third are places like Kandahar, which is our biggest opportunity. Mel King, famous community organizer in Boston, often says that the wheels in the back of the bus never catch up to the wheels in the front unless something extraordinary occurs. Fighting over raisins, road tolls, heck, fighting over fighting, these are the things that they know about. New doesn’t always mean good on it’s own right, but in this case new can simply bewilder long enough for the skinny gimpy-legged kid to grab the football and run. Mixed metaphors, I know. It’s late. Another recent article from educators highlights how the labs are excuses to try something new with rewarding results.
In a recent round of catch-ups with the Afghan collaborators who helped start Fab Lab and the Fab Fi projects in Jalalabad (many of whom were university students when we met), I’m thrilled to tell you that all are gainfully employed in technically enabled positions. A (surprising?) majority have taken the plunge to starting their own technology, logistics, or consulting companies, bravely negotiating the bewilderingly paperwork intensive contracts with ISAF and providing jobs to Afghans. I believe in the need for the private sector to create jobs. < Insert anti-union rant here, take non-related pot shot at Anthony Weiner >
What is the difference between Anthony Weiner and a dead chicken? Nothing - they're both disgusting when stripped of their plumage and they are both full of shit
With the depressingly slow rate of new job creation at home in America, it’s hard not to be extra proud and amazed at their optimism and willingness to give it a go and make forward progress in their little corner of the world. I won’t take credit for their success they were shaped by a long chain of parents, family, teachers, and other opportunities but at least one was nice enough to say that it was his experiences of previously unexpected self-enabled successes in the Fab Lab that was his inspiration.
ps – join me in whining at Tim san to add some unrelated but interesting photos to this wordy piece. Thanks to edits by Kanani Fong of the Kitchen Dispatch.
The place I’ve been calling Mudville, vaguely in the eastern part of Jalalabad, is known as Base Eckmunblahblah. It means “military logistics area” and is owned by the Department of Defense. I’ve forgotten the word exactly – today’s new vocabulary includes reshwat (bribe), tofa (gift), bakshish (tip, alms, gift-for-something-you-did-or-’cause-you’re-poor) – but just like the name implies, the residential population are considered squatters and not welcome to rebuild.
It’s the kind of story that just makes you sigh because what else can you do? Long long ago the land was government owned military use land, then during the time of the war – during the mujahadeen times, the folks that seized power gave the land to people who promptly built houses. The recipients were already wealthy people and continue to be even wealthier now. These recipients don’t have the cleanest hands but no one will talk about that stuff outright. But now you get why I was learning the subtle differences among gifts, bribes, and tips.
After the legitimate government was restored, there is a stalemate because the military / government can’t or won’t bulldoze these large, expensive houses and the residents have no reason or desire to move. They didn’t pay for the land and don’t have deeds for land rights, so they also can’t sell their biggest asset. But as far as they are concerned, they were given the land and have every right to be there.
We see a cross section of people in the lab and I ask them about the flooding and damage. No one seems too broken up about “those people with the ruined houses” because they refer to them as “They are rich people. They have big SUVs. “. There are complaints about them exploiting the situation – “Even if they have 1 or 10 million dollars they will stand there on the street and say to the UN or USAID, ‘I am a poor person and I have no house. You must help me.'”
But what about the people I see who’ve hung up sheets and mats and who’ve thrown their soaked bedding on to the street?, I ask. And I show them pictures. More shrugging. Those are only the kids. I’m aware that the pictures tell the story and I’m just not seeing. The windows alone in those houses cost over $100 and some of the debris is super ornate mirrored tile. There are beds and mattresses, not simple carpet and floor cushions. They are rich people, they can fend for themselves. One groped for the right words, then said a fat chicken will not lay eggs, that is they are so wealthy they need for everything to be given to them, they will not rebuild on their own.
The municipality sent out 500 workers again today to help remove the mud and debris. “Since the elections there is no government”, one of the residents told me when I asked him what he would do, “there is no organization, no plan. No one can make a decision.” People have sent their families to live in other houses or with relatives while they wait for foreign donations and help. Waiting is a past time here. “You people must help us, you must give to me.”
