Wreck-it Ralph

By now, we ought to be used to him.  But, we can't.  The guy destroys one good thing after another, and then goes outside the country in order to destroy one good thing after another.

However, we ought to give the guy credit for one thing: Unlike other politicians who say one thing while campaigning and then do something else after winning the elections, this guy's words and rhetoric have not changed one bit.  If at all, he seems to have been further emboldened by his victory, and now he has successfully grabbed the Republican leaders' pussies.

So, when 63 million who care only for coal and fetuses voted for him, they knew exactly what they were voting for.  And for people like me, we know exactly why we opposed him and continue to oppose him.

He is now off to Europe on a demolishing mission. And has been successful so far.  After bombing the life out of NATO, he landed in the UK and promptly started dissing the British Prime Minister, in an exclusive interview with the Sun, which just happens to be a part of the Murdoch media empire that also includes his favorite news channel.

Source

He goes around wrecking everything in sight, yet casually tosses out that May has wrecked Brexit!

May is dealing with “the practicality of Brexit”:

In the past few months, it has become increasingly clear that making a clean break with the E.U.—what the so-called hard-Brexit crowd is demanding—would wreak havoc on Britain’s economy. It would deprive businesses based in the United Kingdom of free access to the European market and to the extensive supply chains that many of them have in the E.U.

Of course, he couldn't care about nuances.  It is the harsh rhetoric without a real plan that always appeals to him.

Which is also why he rubs it in with the comment that Boris would be a great PM.  The Boris who will also do anything for power and fame, and who opportunistically became a Bexit man.

Early in his career, as a Brussels-based correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, he concocted all sorts of scare stories about the E.U. bureaucracy, including one claiming that the E.U. gauleiters were threatening to outlaw English sausages. After switching to politics and getting elected to the House of Commons, in 2001, Johnson made his mark as an articulate and socially liberal Conservative, a platform he used, in 2008, to become a fairly progressive and forward-looking two-term mayor of London. But after returning to Parliament, in 2016, he re-created himself again—this time as a pro-Brexit Little Englander—and in doing so he aligned himself with some of the most reactionary and xenophobic forces in the country.

Wreck-it don, wreck it.

But, we will survive and prosper.

Cartoon of the day: Afghanistan

The latest news?
More US/NATO fatalities, including one from Oregon:

Lance Cpl. Joseph Rodewald wanted to enlist for as long as anyone can remember, even asking his father if he could attend a military school as a boy, family and friends said Thursday.

Rodewald's family couldn't afford to send him to the expensive school, so the energetic young man waited until after his graduation from South Albany High School in 2007 to sign up with the U.S. Marine Corps.

The former high school football player and wrestler, who would have turned 22 next Tuesday, was killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.

So, is the US at war in Pakistan, too?

The Wall Street Journal (via the Hindustan Times) reports that:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using aerial drones and weaponry being diverted by the US military from Afghanistan to step up its anti-terrorism operations in Pakistan.
"The shift in strategic focus reflects the US view that, with Pakistan's military unable or unwilling to do the job, more U.S. force against terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan is now needed to turn around the struggling Afghan war effort across the border"

 So, what is the Pakistan government's response?

Responding to a point of order raised by Lt Gen (r) Abdul Qadir Baloch, the PM said, “If they (NATO) don’t apologise and remove our apprehensions, we may consider other options as well.”

He said cooperation in the war on terrorism did not mean compromising on national integrity and sovereignty. He said Pakistan is a responsible and nuclear state, adding that being political people, “we have lodged a civilised protest” with NATO headquarters over the force’s violation of the country’s air space”.

I have no idea what he means by "options" ...

The prime minister, who did not elaborate “other options”, appeared miffed by the outburst of Mr Baloch who, speaking at the top of his voice, said if Pakistan continued to tolerate strikes by drones and now manned helicopters, “a time will come when they will come overland” and, referring to Pakistan’s military strength, added: “We will have to beat them back.” 

other than, say, choking off the NATO supply lines and making them easy targets?

Looks like we have put the Pakistan government in one hell of a legitimacy-questioning awkward position, which has already been in a weak state ... no wonder Musharraf is smelling opportunities :)  Here in Washington?

Meanwhile, in response to reports of political upheaval in Pakistan, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that the United States considers Pakistan a "key ally" and believes that "the government of Pakistan is committed to democracy and to the preservation of civilian leadership."

So, here in the US, any tough questions being raised in the Congress about the way this war is escalating?  Yeah, right!  All bloody war mongers out there, who are now too busy with their re-election scams campaigns :(

Sometimes a cigar is not a cigar?

With all the escalation surge in Afghanistan, commentators are beginning to offer competing narratives for what is really going on.  Consider the following excerpt from an opinion essay in The Hindu:

The international community has been led to believe that the India-Pakistan fault line is the pivotal concern in the U.S.’s diplomatic strategy in Afghanistan. However, it is more a subplot. The U.S.’s principal protagonist is China, while India and Pakistan — and increasingly Russia — are more like jesters in forming the confusion and the humour in an Elizabethan drama. The main plot is about the expansion of NATO in Central Asia.

So, it is not really about Afghanistan or AfPak, according to the author, a former Indian diplomat, but is to strategically position the US and NATO in Central Asia in order to counter China.
I think this is a little exaggerated.  However, there is an element of truth here: like in Africa, here in Central Asia too China is beginning to flex its soft power in a big way.  For two reasons: one, the resources (oil and natural gas, in particular) and second, the Islamic population that China believes is more sympathetic to the Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Province.  Wait, this is all sounding way too familiar; is it because I have blogged about it before?  Of course, yes!!! :)

Meanwhile in Afghanistan ...

Forget not that there is still a war there in Afghanistan, and the US troops coming back home depends on a government in place.  So, what is the latest about good governance in Afghanistan?

The Afghan parliament has rejected 10 of 17 new cabinet nominees suggested by President Hamid Karzai.

The vote comes two weeks after MPs turned down most of Mr Karzai's first choices, dealing him a serious blow.

So, how about everything else? British soldiers dead:

TWO British soldiers have been killed by a Taliban bomb while on foot patrol in the north of Helmand province.
The troops from 3rd Battalion The Rifles died on Friday evening near the town of Sangin. Their families have been informed. ....
The latest deaths came as David Miliband, the foreign secretary — visiting Kabul yesterday — renewed his call for Nato allies to do more, saying: “The burden [of fighting the Taliban] should be fairly shared.”

How about the regular Afghan life, you ask?

A suicide bomber killed 20 people -- including three children -- Thursday in a market in central Afghanistan in the deadliest attack against Afghan civilians in more than three months.

The bomber detonated his explosives in front of a currency exchange shop in an arcade of stores in the town of Dihrawud in Oruzgan province, a mostly ethnic Pashtun area about 250 miles southwest of Kabul. Thirteen people were wounded, according to a NATO statement.

District police chief Omar Khan said the attacker might have been headed for a regular security meeting of NATO and dozens of tribal elders. Khan, who was at the meeting, could not explain why the bomber detonated his explosives before reaching the heavily guarded venue.

Can we please end all these wars?  Enough already!
Oh, BTW, in neighboring Pakistan:

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives on the Pakistani side of the Kashmir region on Saturday in a rare attack on the Pakistani military there.
The bomber blew himself up as a Pakistani military vehicle passed, wounding two soldiers, a Pakistani military spokesman said. The attack took place near the town of Rawalakot, in the Pakistani part of Kashmir, a Himalayan region at the center of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.
For years, militant groups had focused their efforts on the Indian side of the disputed territory, some with the support of the Pakistani state, though those attacks have fallen significantly. The Pakistani side had long been free of violence, but a number of attacks in the past year have broken that calm and raised worries that militant groups in Pakistan are widening their fight.

Afghanistan: not very Jungian

From the international edition of Germany's Der Spiegel:

A deadly airstrike on two tankers in Afghanistan in September has proved to be a political timebomb in Berlin.

On Thursday Germany's top soldier and a deputy defense minister were forced to resign after revelations that the German army command and the Defense Ministry had been sent reports showing that there had been civilian casualties after the German-ordered airstrike. This was contrary to the initial claim by the government that only Taliban fighters had been killed in the attack. On Friday it was former Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung's turn to fall on his sword. The clamor for his resignation in the light of his disastrous handling of the aftermath of the airstrike had grown too loud.

Afghanistan: photo of the day

After looking at this photo and spotting the military vehicle, remind me why we need to be there for years to come?

Photo from latimes.com

Bush's role in the Georgia-Russia Conflict

I noted earlier Brendan O'Neil's observations on how Bush's insane policies helped trigger this crisis. It will be a while before such analysis will be openly presented in the US--after all, people have been called unpatriotic for ordering "french fries" instead of "freedom fries" :-)

Here is Fred Kaplan, one of the best analysts around:
Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

Putin arrives at the Georgia war front

So, Vlad "the impaler" Putin has arrived at the conflict area to personally supervise the massacre. The Australian reports that prime minister Kevin Rudd witnessed a heated discussion between Bush and Putin, as athletes paraded before them in the Opening Ceremony on Friday night.

When Bush looked into Putin and was "able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country", I suppose Georgia did not show up anywhere. All we have been doing since then is irritating the cold, calculating, shrewd, and highly political Putin.

Anne Applebaum writes in Slate that the time to deal with this conflict was two years ago or four years ago. That there was a security vacuum in the Caucuses; that this vacuum was dangerous; that war was likely; that Georgia, an eager ally of the United States, would not come out of it well; that a successful invasion of Georgia, a country with U.S. troops on its soil, would reflect badly on the West—all of that has been obvious for a long time. Cowardice, weakness, lack of ideas, and above all the distraction of other events prevented any deeper engagement.

If you are like me, you probably are wondering how much President Bush's bizarre policies contributed to this. Well, here is Brendan O'Neill of Spiked: The bloodshed that occurred over the weekend, as Georgian forces bombed the breakaway territory of South Ossetia and Russia responded by attacking Georgia, can be seen as the destructive outcome of Washington’s increasingly hungry and erratic foreign policy. .... From the Ukraine to Uzbekistan to Georgia, Washington has backed a string of dodgy ruling parties and dictatorial leaders as they have upped the ante with their former rulers in the Kremlin. ....
Georgia, like many of the former Soviet republics, is a state with no real reason to exist. Lacking a unified national elite or identity, it is another of those Caucasian and Central Asian states that were born by default when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It is fragile, changeable, and has various ethnic or ‘national’ groups within its borders – not only in South Ossetia (which wants to join with North Ossetia) but also in Abkhazia, a Black Sea region that has largely run its own affairs since defeating Georgian forces in a war in 1992-1993.
Over the past decade, Washington’s foreign policy – increasingly patternless and self-defeating – has helped to make the unstable state of affairs in the former Soviet republics worse. America has sought to turn these republics into outposts in its ‘war on terror’.