Hell, there are barely enough military police left on active duty to cover existing facilities, which is why the gates are now guarded by “rent-a-cops”, not MPs. He would have gotten rid of them all if it wasn’t for the problem of jurisdiction, i.e. no one else has police powers on military facilities.
Terrorism is a police problem and always has been. You can’t conduct an investigation or follow-up leads from a cockpit or tank turret. You have to get out on the streets and talk to people, in their own languages. There was plenty of time before the invasion of Iraq to run people through the Arabic, Farsi, or Pashtun courses at DLI, but Rumsfeld wouldn’t do it.
You cannot successfully interview anyone through an interpreter. You need trained linguist/interrogators, and there was more than enough time to train them, but the Hedgemony wouldn’t do it.
The morons in charge are constantly looking for the “magic bullet” that is going to make the job quick, easy, and cheap. Well, there isn’t one, because people don’t work that way. Profiling generally only works after the fact. Once someone is in custody all of these clowns come up with “proof” that the person matches their profile, without mentioning that so do thousands of innocent people, making it worthless.
The level of awareness is so low in this country that the Village still doesn’t understand that the only thing the people in Tahrir Square really have in common is the desire to get rid of Mubarak. You have a cross section of Egyptian society with that one common goal, and they don’t seem to be ready to accept anything else.
You can have meetings with “opposition groups”, but the protesters in the Square are not represented by any of those groups. These people aren’t there in support of any group except Egyptians, be they Muslims, Christians, Jews, or secular. Until the “powers that be” figure out that Mubarak is the roadblock to a return to “normalcy”, and get him on an outbound aircraft, the protests are likely to continue.
]]>The current “surge” in Afghanistan is inadequate just from a standpoint of military control, but it would be inadequate even if we did have the manpower (which would likely be three times what the Soviet’s final number of soldiers in Afghanistan was — the Soviets had about 104,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at the peak). It would be inadequate because the entire concept of our involvement in Afghanistan is fatally flawed and inadequate. If you have a bomb and an artillery shell, everything looks like it needs to be a crater. Well, that’s fine and dandy if you’re taking out an entrenched enemy soldier, but useless when you’re trying to take out a guerilla who has melted back into the general population.
]]>The fools that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq did not have enough troops to even effectively subjugate the country, much less control it, and then they sent in incompetents who managed to alienate even people who would have normally been on their side. They armed their opposition by lacking the capabilities to secure the multiple arms dumps, and provided the command and control structure by summarily dismissing those officials who hadn’t fled, well as the military in Iraq.
The Rumsfeld concept of the Pentagon would have been out of step in a one-man parade by firing the people who knew what to do, and promoting political officers who couldn’t successfully navigate the drive-thru window at a McDonalds.
The current effort is led by people who know the right words, but don’t know what the words mean or imply. There is no point in taking land, if you have no forces ready to hold it.
]]>But you don’t have that security apparatus, what you have is the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan — controlling only where your soldiers are walking, and not one stretch more. Or the end game in Iran in 1979, where the much-hated SAVAK just melted away and the Army largely stuck to its barracks after the situation got out of hand…
]]>The generals really need to stop screwing around, or some ambitious colonel is going to become a populist and demagogue his way to power, probably by invoking religion or socialism, are just “Becking out”. That scenario has played out all too often around the world, and is bad news for everyone.
Yes, the security apparatus is the next obvious target. There were tentative moves against the Ministry of the Interior early on, but if the “powers that be” don’t stop stalling, the people in the Square will return to that target with serious intent, and it will get very bloody, very quickly.
]]>– Badtux the Revolutionary Penguin
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