Another 9-11-01 anniversary rolls around. There will be solemn ceremonies today. Bells will toll. The names of the dead will be read on national television, which won't stick around for all of them but will cut back now and then. As a nation we've expended a dozen years of time, effort, money, and soldiers. This is an appropriate day to look at the state of the nation as a participant in the war against terror.
Just a reminder: We're not supposed to call it the war on terror anymore. I forget what its official name is now. Something like "irritating disturbance of international proportions having nothing to do with religion."- The enemy is a cancerous growth. Al-Qaeda makes no silly pretense about fighting for the rights of the people; the intent is to impose Salafism on the world. Period. My opinion on the subject or yours wasn't requested. It's a top down system, with no room for disagreement, no variations allowed. It's a system where human life has no value, its avatar the suicide bomber. In the end, radiation therapy could very well be necessary. And by that time the metastasis may have gone far enough to to kill us with them.
- The post-cold war legacy of political correctness continues its self-destructive growth long after the Soviet Union is dead. What would the Lord High Executioner make of an entire generation of children who've jumped directly onto his little list:
The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own; They're the same (useful) idiots who can see no danger from a murderous culture inimical to their own, who're perfectly happy to ally themselves with it because they've been taught that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism." In the morning they'll take part in a "slut walk" for feminine equality, in the afternoon they'll rally for the rights of gay-lesbian-polysexual-transgendered-cross dressing-species neutral rights, and in the evening they'll turn out in their diverse numbers in support of the Religion of Peace, which calls for burying all those categories under either burkas or piles of rocks.
- We've built a society in which people feel so secure they literally can't imagine not being safe. Our parents and grandparents, in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, raised their children in a cocoon of safety. Wally and the Beave existed, and we were them.
They did the job too well. Today, most of us are at bedrock convinced there is no way the underlying certainties of the lives we lead could change. Therefore it's perfectly alright to batter continuously at the foundations of that society: Mom has her own life to lead, so the kids have to look after themselves while she pursues a lesbian relationship with her true soulmate. Apple pie is laced with alar and dripping with cholesterol; best to stay as far away from it as you can get. The Boy Scouts are on the national poop list for not making homosexuality mandatory. We are doing away with the very concept of "citizen." Because the relationship between cause and effect has been informally declared non-existent, there will be no consequences to these attitudes. Will there?
- We're a squeamish lot. When we go to war we try not to hurt anyone, which would seem to our fathers and grandfathers an odd notion. Kabul doesn't look like Berlin used to look, Kandahar doesn't resemble what Hamburg used to look like, and Nangahar doesn't look like Dresden. Being a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban isn't a frightening thing, bringing with it a certainty of death. When bad guys surround themselves with women and kiddies, and those women and kiddies get killed or maimed, we assume it's our fault, not the fault of the guys with the turbans they're surrounding.
- We go for the low-hanging fruit. We don't do this all the time, but when we do, it shows. Kunar and Paktia become interchangeable with Tay Ninh and Quang Tri.
Rather than stacking up the bodies of the leadership of international terror organizations, we bump off the occasional cannon fodder, tout the equivalent of a company commander or a platoon leader as a "major Taliban commander," and leave the actual leadership intact in a sanctuary maintained by our supposed ally.
We didn't do that in Iraq. There we won (yes, we won a military victory) by concentrating on the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the displaced Iraqi Baathists. The strategy was to kill or capture the 52 "playing cards," of which a bunch, though not all, were killed or captured. Zarqawi was a separate problem, actually a second war, but once he was stuffed and mounted there was dancing in the streets, the organization started to crumble, and the problem had been whittled down to a size the Iraqis could handle.
The fact that they're screwing up that handling has nothing to do with the way the Americans handled the war. It's a political problem and it's their country, to screw up as they will. They'd have been better off from the first if we'd imposed a constitution on them and forced adherence, but that wasn't the question, was it?
- As a people, we're not good for the long haul. We'd have lost the Hundred Years War. Shucks, we'd have walked away from the Thirty Years War. We'd have quit the Indian Wars if there hadn't been so many Indians. The national attention span isn't doing well at all with the Dozen Years War.
Iraq was won militarily and President Obama walked away from it to concentrate, he said, on the "Good War" in Afghanistan. He assigned the architect of the Iraq victory to do the same in Afghanistan, and put his foot in a bucket by telling him how to do it. Hamid Karzai put his other foot in another bucket when he began thinking about joining the Taliban. After a while General Petraeus was kicked upstairs, eventually to be character assassinated. We're walking away from the "Good War" next year. Mullah Omar's where he was in December, 2001. Al-Qaeda is still in existence. Bin Laden is dead but Zawahiri's still kicking and it's entirely possible he'll die in bed of old age.
- We have (maybe had) a competent, well-trained military. Great or even really good generals are a matter of individual genius. It's hard to pick the Grants from the McClellans. But producing good soldiers and Marines is what decent NCOs do well. Developing and testing good doctrine is something that staffs do well. Both were characteristic of our military.
Don't believe it? In nine years (2003-2012) we had around 4800 killed in Iraq, or an average of 533 per year. It was a war of intense combat operations, of roadside bombs, fanatics who exploded without warning, tough guys who arrived from all over the world, raring to kill some infidels. They were able to kill an average of roughly 1.5 allied troops per day.
Compare those casualty figures with Vietnam. There were approximately 58,000 dead. The first KIA were reported in 1956, but the festivities didn't really get going until 1965, with 1,928 dead. In 1967, the year I got there, there were 11,363 fatalities. The next year was worse.
When I retired from the Army in 1985 it was an entirely different organization from the one that had been in Vietnam. That was the result of good doctrine and good training. That's why the casualty levels are so markedly different. That's why the press was flabbergasted at the Gulf War.
We've yet to see what the long-term effects of tinkering and fiddling with the internals of the military will do to it. I don't think the women in combat thing will last past the first few women shredded from the waist down. Men are designed at the instinct level to prevent that sort of thing. Nor am I convinced that overt swish will instill confidence in combat leadership.
- Competence isn't allowed to flourish in a decadent society. Both Stilicho and Aëtius were murdered at the behest of incompetent emperors: Honorius the former, his son Valentinian III the latter. Nowadays we don't send them to a better world physically--our politicians are squeamish about that in an age where every phone is a video recorder. Instead, their characters are assassinated. The list of generals is getting so long now it's hard to remember all the names, much less all the circumstances. Once Stilicho was out of the way Alaric was free to waltz into Rome and sack it, making off with all the gold and jewels and fair maidens he could lay hands on. Once Aëtius had been murdered Valentinian's own death warrant was sealed, and the Western Roman Empire itself had only another 22 years to live.
- Our own society is rapidly changing in an unpleasant direction because of terrorism. We're seeing rule by decree from the White House, the proliferation of SWAT teams to even small towns, and shocking levels of intrusion into our private lives. Actual dissent ("the highest form of patriotism", recall) is ruthlessly suppressed, using the mighty arms of the IRS, TSA, DEA, and who knows what other agencies. This is merely the beginning. In that respect, al-Qaeda has won.
- Pakistain is an evil place. It's there that Osama bin Laden lived a quiet, unobtrusive existence, right down the road from the national military academy. The Haqqani network is headquartered in North Waziristan, carrying on a war against NATO forces without the least interference by the "sovereign" government in Islamabad. Mullah Omar is headquartered in Quetta, doing the same. Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda's international command center are probably in Miranshah. Hafiz Saeed and Lashkar-e-Taiba are protected within Pakistain. He's got a police guard at his house. The organization is sending fighters to Afghanistan to be blooded. Their actual target is in the other direction, to harass India in Kashmir, maintaining intel networks and front organizations throughout much of India.
Pakistain is a place where people are murdered routinely, where explosions are part of the daily background noise. It has such a proliferation of religiously-themed terrorist organizations that you can't remember all their names. There are few arrests, far fewer convictions, and virtually no executions. It's also the only effective path to supply troops in Afghanistan.
- We're really good at entertaining each other. We must be the most entertaining folk who've ever lived. We're intensely interested in the doings of the many-headed Kardashians. We're a nation that teems with Honey Boo-boos and Family Guys. We've all (nearly all, then) seen what Paris Hilton's and Britney Spears' genitalia look like. We have seen Miley Cyrus and we now know what "twerking" is.
Conversely, there aren't that many people who actually read news anymore. When they do, it's entertaining news. Looking at the ABC News homepage for September 9th, the day I started writing this, you can read about "12 Happiness Myths Debunked," "Largest Ferris Wheel Nears Completion Near Las Vegas," and "Gaga Transforms into Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch." If you're really interested, you can pick through it to learn that "Syria suggests it's willing to destroy chemical arsenal," "Hillary Clinton foes say she can't be trusted," and "4 confusing weight loss concepts cleared up."
- There is a form of insanity that consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. All the peace processors that have ever been fired up have ended only a small number of conflicts. I'm not sure they've ever ended one permanently. Literally thousands of prisoners have been released and to date not a single peace treaty has resulted. The same applies to land for peace. Confidence building measures have been proven time and again not to work if one of the parties is made up of duplicitous bastards in whom no sane person would ever have any confidence.
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[NYPOST] 
...not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
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[An Nahar] U.S. pop veteran