Ok, that was a long title, but I just merged two topics I have been meaning to talk about into one. The Afghanistan proposed 18 month decision and the recent Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. You see, for the first one, the United States Department of Defense and The Joint Chies of Staff brought us (via PA Consulting Group / PA Knowledge Limited) the layout for Afghanistan.
Full PDF presentation from PA Consulting
As you can see, it's beyond complicated on how they're going to do this... and do it in 18 months.
Then again, I could make a similar chart trying to decide what cereal to buy at the store. One could even say that this was him being scared. Every time I've tried to map out every nuance of a decision it was because I was too scared to just make a move.
The New York Times - At War From the Front Lines Blog posted:
For anyone wondering why it took President Obama three months to decide on a strategy for Afghanistan, a look at these military schematics uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel might help explain the weeks of deliberation that went into the plan. The material outlines the military’s counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy.
The maps, which look like something Cy Twombly might put together on a spirograph, make it plain that whatever the timeline for deployment and withdrawal, there appears to be no straight line to victory in Afghanistan
In hindsight, it is sort of a waste of time simply because all his careful deliberation still led him down the BURN AFGHANS path. It looks like half of it is cultural/belief tolerance and respect and building some sort of infrastructure. We're still going to lose tho... but maybe if they do A LOT of humanitarian aid it won't be a complete waste of blood shed. Maybe the US will even work to remove every landmine... ahahahahahaha yeah, never mind.
I know it would be a task to try to complete, but it would actually do a lot more good. There's people in Laos that still fear walking in the field do to landmines and other explosives we dropped on them. It wouldn't be that difficult. there's Sprayable "eco-friendly" bacteria that illuminates on contact with organic explosives vis-a-vis landmines. The site is pretty impressive and it includes a photo of an elephant who's hoof was blown off by a landmine.
Back to the graph and let's see what it actually says:
1) despite being there a while, we still don't understand the all-important local situations very well
2) the central government is a complete and utter failure
3) because the government is fucked nobody trusts it enough to support them over the insurgency. if they're on our side it's for reasons which have nothing to do with the government and everything to do with local politics which we still don't really understand.
4) we can't seem to fix their economy, which goes hand in hand with the central government being worthless
5) at least the insurgents are having trouble working together and haven't all allied under the banner of some third party to drive us into the sea
This is why Obama's decision was basically a catch all that let him make no decision while buying himself 18 months of free reign and making pullout of Afghanistan a non-issue for the next election. We've been here before. I'm not even going to say Vietnam. That's not what I'm talking about. During the whole Rambo II style of liberating Afghanistan from Russia by armoring them, it was a mess. The guerrillas didn't work together during the soviet-afgan war. They were fighting36 different groups.
Moving on to the second part of this. The Peace Prize... specifically the speech given. Well, let's get to the prize first. The Dalai Lama, who never says anything bad about anyone ever, had this to say:
As President Barack Obama prepares to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the Dalai Lama told Sky News he believes the award is "a little early" and cautioned the U.S. president against relying too much on his advisers.This is a guy who praises and prays for the leaders of the CCP who order monks and nuns to be rounded up and tortured for owning pictures of him. He is the DEFINITION of patience. And he thinks it was unwarranted.
The exiled Tibetan leader won the Nobel prize 20 years ago for his peaceful opposition to Chinese rule in his country.
President Obama is in Norway to collect his award, which he has controversially been awarded in his first year in office. Some commentators have joked that the award was for "not being George Bush".
The Dalai Lama told Sky News: "I think if you are realistic, it may have been a little early but it doesn't matter, I know Obama is a very able person. Sometimes these individual persons rely on different advice from different people so like former President Bush junior, as a human being I really love him, really wonderful person, very honest, very truthful.
"But I think due to his advisers' views, some of his policies have been a disaster."
Obama declined to meet the Dalai Lama during a recent visit to Washington, with observers pointing out it may have been awkward to do so just before the president travelled to China.
In the speech Obama said things like;
"Peace movements wouldn't have stopped Hitler"I'm sure the two dozen or so remaining members of Al-Qaeada hiding somewhere in Afghanistan are not Nazi Germany...
"I reserve the right to unilaterally defend my country"Against? Again, the terrorist have moved to Pakistan. So I don't know what we're defending ourselves from. Then he goes on and name drops Ronald Reagan.... That has to be worse than anything else. The whole visit so far felt like a bunch of backwards villagers trying to impress the cool city guy.
"We can have war and still strive for peace"Summary: we need to kill everything in afghanistan because of peace. Obama, I'mma let you finish, but Kissinger had the best peace price troll OF ALL TIME. The Kissinger Peace prize was pretty awful in retrospect, but at least it was given for a specific reason (the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam) and was shared between him and whoever the Vietnamese representative was.
You have to be ballsy and evil to accept the Nobel Peace Prize fter committing nmore troops to an unjust war. Oh, and after you just sold out your country to the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. Ha, now that's the slap to the face.
In other news, Obama accepted the Slimmer of the Year award while wearing curry-stained track pants. His speech was largely inaudible, as he insisted on eating a 12" deep-dish pizza through the ceremony.
My Nobel speech would be something less preachy and with more buzz phrases.
"Bring back Chappelle Show, cancel Gossip Girls." "I hope Avatar bombs."
I guess the real problem here is that it's not even so much that he's a politican and goes back on his word and promises. It's the way he does it. Obama ignited the passions of a generation of youth whose political coming of age was to rally around this HOPE and CHANGE of Bush's policies coming from one of the most traumatic single incidents in the nation since the Peal Harbor attacks and he just seems to follow the same sort of mentality, only he's a lot better at giving the speech to why he's doing it.
It's only now that those who voted for him are actually aware of what his policies were the whole time. it's not that he just lied or he baited an entire demographic who up until then had nobody acknowledge their fears, they lied to themselves. They never really knew his policies and were dazzled by the idea of change. But this speech as well as his recent actions just shit on those voters dreams and idea of what is change. It's not like he actively shit upon the hopes of a generation, he just opened their eyes to what the reality of politics is.
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