Winning Strategy for Afghanistan

As a former Air Force Systems Analyst Officer (1972-1976), the part of Vietnam that I remember is that in 11 days of unrestricted bombing and air dropped mines, Operation Linebacker II put all of North Vietnam's ports out of business.  This cut off all supplies, because the Red Chinese skimmed 90% plus of what was shipped overland.  If Linebacker II had been launched in 1965 instead of December, 1972, it would have saved a lot of lives and made Counter Insurgency (COIN) a lot more effective, a lot earlier.  We lost in Vietnam because between 1973 and 1975 Congress cut aid to South Vietnam by 75% and outlawed US air strikes anywhere in Southeast Asia.  Congress and the American people lost patience with the Vietnam War.  If we had bombed in 1965 and kept bombing, we would not have had Congress outlaw air strikes after we had won in 1967 or 1968.

The part of strategy in guerrilla war that the US has forgotten is that without supplies, guerrillas die. Guerrillas don't have the luxury of growing food or manufacturing ammunition for themselves.  They're on the run.  Rangers in the American Colonies originally got their name because they ranged through Indian territory and attacked Indian farming villages, which were the base of Indian supplies.  The US beat the Plains Indians by almost exterminating the American buffalo, which the Plains Indians used for food, clothing and shelter.  Hunting the American buffalo to extinction was an intentional strategy originally proposed by General William T. Sherman.  It was carried out ruthlessly, and it worked exactly as planned.  The Plains Indians moved onto reservations because they had nothing to eat.

Recently, we have watched ISIS go from strong to dead because we eliminated their source of income, oil sales, by bombing their tanker trucks, oil fields and oil handling facilities.  I don't mean to make light of the combat efforts it took to eliminate ISIS, but I do want to point out that ISIS was far less formidable broke than they were when they were rich.  Eliminating their financial resources made them far easier to defeat.

Which brings us to Afghanistan.  The Taliban runs on opium sales.  Everybody knows it.  To eliminate the Taliban, we need to eliminate their opium sales.  We can either legalize opium world wide, which would lower the value of the opium sold, or we can destroy all Taliban opium exports coming out of Afghanistan.  Since legalizing opium is highly unlikely, the only alternative is destroying all opium exports.  Anything less and we still have a rich Taliban who can hire soldiers and pay for food, guns and ammo.  We haven't done this because Afghanistan's main foreign exchange earning export is illegal opium sales.  However, unless we do something about Taliban opium, the best outcome we can hope for in Afghanistan is a steady state of what the Israelis call "mowing the lawn."  We can use air power and special forces to limit the Taliban to controlling 40% of Afghanistan.  We can't win in Afghanistan unless the Taliban can't sell their opium to finance operations. 

To defeat the Taliban, we would have to eradicate opium systematically, using air power, in all areas the Taliban controls or even partially controls.  If the Taliban controls your poppy field, the US will destroy your crop.  If you want to keep your crop, keep the Taliban out of your area.  Otherwise, the US puts napalm on your poppies.  Displaced farmers will move to areas under government control.  There will be no people, and no money, for the Taliban to use to support their operations.  At that point, COIN (COunter INsurgency operations) will work a whole lot better.

Original article I reacted to.

Why I Dislike Coastal Elites

I generally find leftist elites hard to tolerate because they take no responsibility for their actions. For me this started at the end of the Vietnam War, when Democrats in Congress outlawed US air strikes in Southeast Asia and cut the aid budget for South Vietnam by 75% between 1973 and 1975. From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed about 2 million Cambodians. Victorious communists in Vietnam and Laos killed several hundred thousand more people. Roughly 2 million people fled South Vietnam to escape communist rule in leaky boats. The "Give peace a chance" folks maintain to this day there was no bloodbath.

The same people, like John Kerry, or people mentored by the antiwar crowd, like the Smartest President Ever, are still leading the left. The number of dead and the number of refugees in Syria that resulted from Obama's self restraint in the Middle East, where, like in Vietnam, we chose not to use air power effectively, are reminiscent of pictures of refugees from Vietnam for a reason. The same policies by the same people gave the same outcomes.

As to why I dislike coastal elites more than fly over country elites, that's easy. Coastal elites are snobbier. They are much more likely to tell me that I can be ignored because I have horse manure on my boots and my degrees from fly over country schools are far inferior to their degrees from Harvard.

I interviewed to go to Harvard. I was a 3rd generation legacy at Harvard, with the grades, SAT scores and extra curricular activities to get in there. Their snooty attitude, and the aniti-war slogans all over campus, repelled me. I didn't even apply. So part of why I dislike coastal elites is that I could have been one and chose not to be.

 

Then there are people who say that if you are elite yourself, you can't complain about elites. These folks are also very irritating. John Hinderaker wrote a piece in his Power Line Blog about "Why Normal Americans Hate the Elites." The comments claimed that since Mr. Hindraker graduated from Dartmouth and Harvard Law, he was an elite and had no right to complain about other elites. I thought that was a particularly funny socialist class solidarity argument, so I wrote this comment in response:

 

I need your advice urgently. I have an MS in Management from Northwestern University (Kellogg Graduate School of Management) and an MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign, both in fly over country. Since I went to grade school in Missoula, Montana, I identify as a redneck, even though I am over educated for this status and can turn the accent on and off like a faucet. My alternate accents include Montgomery, AL, and Skokie, IL. I live in North Suburban Cook (Crook) County, Illinois, which is a very blue state, but I voted for Trump in the general election (not the primary). I'm a Vietnam Era veteran with a low tolerance for leftist malarkey. Do I have enough street cred to be tired of coastal elites with leftist attitudes, or am I still too elite myself to have this position? In your answer, please state your credentials for judging when people can be fed up with elitist fertilizer of equine origin. 

Then there was a woman who argued that elite status was just superior intellect and should be celebrated. She said the author and other bloggers on the site should "own their elite status." For her, I had this response: 

The problem with leftists, ma'm, is they know so much that just ain't so. When their arguments break down, intellectually, these folks depend on the authority of their credentials to carry their arguments. They claim it's true because they have elite credentials, and you ain't. Well ma'm, my MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign, tells me that extrapolating from less than 100 years of observations of statistical noise to forecast climate patterns that last hundreds or even thousands of years is statistical folly. People who make the "settled science" argument use their better credentials to claim better credibility, but their arguments remain statistical folly. That's why people like me, in fly over country, are tired of elites who refuse to engage intellectually, when they can condescend instead using their "superior credentials" to avoid having to face the fallacies of their arguments.

The same lady demanded, "Give me one concrete example of a member of a member of "majority" being "tyrannized" by an "academic."  I responded, "If Republicans were a protected class, almost every university in the country would lose an adverse impact lawsuit."

 

War Actually Does Solve Problems

The slogan, “War never solved anything,” and the hidden agenda behind the slogan, need to be clear to everyone.  Democrats need those big bucks for domestic spending to buy votes.  Military spending is easier to cut if the military looks ineffective.  So Democrats adopt policies that limit air strike targeting, and rules of engagement generally, that render US military force ineffective.  At that point, Democrats argue that "war never solved anything," so we might as well spend the money domestically.

The problem right now is the same problem we had in Vietnam. Since World War II, Democrats seem to intentionally mess up running wars. They try half measures that prolong the conflict until everybody wants to give up and go home. Democrats' motivation is to increase domestic spending over the long term. If military efforts are seen as ineffectual, it's easier to cut military budgets and use the money to buy votes domestically. Lyndon Johnson prolonged the Vietnam War by refusing to use US air power to shut down North Vietnam's seaports. Barack Obama is prolonging the ISIS conflict by also refusing to use US air power effectively. Obama has refused to hit oil production, transportation targets and infrastructure targets that are crucial to ISIS funding and operations. ISIS makes a million dollars a day selling oil. ISIS is moving men and supplies over open desert highways. ISIS has vehicle maintenance and bomb factories in civilian neighborhoods the US refuses to destroy.

War actually does solve problems very well.  War solved the world's Hitler problem.  War solved the Imperial Japan problem.  Through history, war solved the American Colonies' British problem, as well as Rome's Carthage problem.  War is the only solution to the ISIS problem.  

The slogan is absurd.  The only reason for it is to excuse poor military performance followed by budgets which shift spending to domestic investments in crony capitalism and programs encouraging government dependence.  If you're dependent on the government, you have to vote for the Democrats, or the gravy train is over. Quite easily done.