The Newshour and John Nagl

The Newshour persists in inviting the COIN charlatan, John Nagl, to comment on the "progress" of the Afghan War.  Last night (transcript not yet available) they used him and Vali Nasr, dean of SAIS, for interrogation by Judy Woodruff.  For some reason the Newshour has misidentified Nagl as a retired lieutenant general when in fact he retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel.  Perhaps they think that gives his remarks greater weight.  I wrote to them about this and they have changed the label on their website.

Nasr was the sensible person that he always is.  Nagl continues to expect us all to believe that all is well in Afghanistan, that the training of the Afghan military and police is proceeding well in spite of minor disturbances caused by the murder of NATO people by these same Afghan security forces.  Nagl said at the end of his self destructive comments that all will be well because the US will persist in Afghanistan for another ten years at least, and remain committed to Afghan security indefinitely.

Well, he doesn.t have anywhere else to go rhetorically.  When the end comes, his end as a public person will come with it.  Perhaps he could write another seminal book about how wrong he was in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  It could be entitled, "Learning to play Buzkashi without a horse."  pl

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/july-dec12/afghanistan2_09-17.html

Comments

[Alba Etie]

I repeat ,,, insanity is repeating old addictive behaviors and expecting different results . I mourn the loss of the NewsHour as a nonpartisan fact based news program .
I will now send those discretionary donations to SST & Globalpost .

[The Moar You Know]

My local news radio - KNX in Los Angeles, perhaps the last actual non-talk "news" station on the West Coast - had an idiot on this morning. This is nothing new.

Today's idiot was basically repeating Nagl's line, and it occurred to me that just like Iraq, the media has bought the COIN myth hook, line and sinker. Nobody could understand why this hasn't worked!

Do people just not read anymore?

[Matthew]

Col: I've met Mr. Nasr. He is one of those charming people who can let down an audience without the audience knowing it!

He foresaw that the Shia would "let us down."

[Patrick D]

"When the end comes, his end as a public person will come with it."

I wish. These guys just get warehoused in some "think tank" until the damage their ideas caused is forgotten.

[TWV]

Start moving people and equipment out right now.
Forget the diplomatic nicety bullshit.
Anyone gets in the way gets gone.

Leave a cadre of intelligence/Special Ops people - plus drones - to make sure that no new AQ groups become a potential threat.

If these primitives want to live in the 12th century and kill each other for sport - fine.
The miserable place has NO strategic or resource value.

More than enough American lives have been lost there AND, BTW, we're BROKE.

[turcopolier]

TWV

Yup. This is what i have been advocating for a long time. BTW I think that 12th Century is too late a date for the average Afghan mindset. when I wa sthe DEFATT in Yemen, a Jordanian colleague said of the Yemanis that they were as the Arabs had been before the coming of Islam. yup and the afghans are the same. pl

[Basilisk]

I am envious, I just finished Vali Nasr's "The Shia Revival." He writes a particularly clear prose.

[Jose]

"Learning to play Buzkashi without a horse." pl

They also use Yaks!

Can you imagine the fun...lol

I can see Nagl riding a Yak before COIN succeeds.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Do you think Anabasis is a possibility?

[VietnamVet]

Colonel,

Life sure does cycle around if you live long enough. The Taliban won’t have to ride T-54 tanks into Kabul. They are already there. We have to see if the Mayor of Kabul lives on the Rivera with the wealth he deposited in his Swiss Bank Accounts or not.

I concur with earlier the comments about the NewsHour. On the same show they had a segment with a Climate Change Skeptic without once mentioning the unprecedented arctic sea ice melt. Today Henry Hudson can sail to Cathay through the Northwest Passage instead of finding New York City.

[Lars]

One reason for this folly may be that some careers, military and political, depend on further dreaming about a imaginary future.

It would be nice if we can redirect the geniuses who design stock trading systems to figuring how many soldiers, sailors, ammo, planes, not to mention generals, that we really need to meet actual military threats.

[turcopolier]

lars

There is a very clear process for doing that now. it is the principal subject taught at the War Colleges. The problem is that the dreams, ambitions, etc, of politicians both in and out of uniform get in the way. pl

[Medicine Man]

The problem is that if the supply is found to be overstocked, instead of cutting back they can try to generate demand.

[Fred]

Great, so Nagl points out that 'only' 25% of the green on blue killings are due to Taliban infiltration, the other 75% - 'disgust' with the way their people are being treated culturally. Doesn't this man understand what he is saying? Stay committed to the Afghan "state" for another ten years? Keep Karzai the crook in power for another decade for what, doesn't that gang of thieves have enough of our money already?

[Tyler]

The Arctic Ice has melt before, and will freeze again in the future.

Its alright to be skeptical when you realise that the Roman era was about 10 to 15 degrees higher than what we experience now.

There's also the fact that I was bombarded with messages telling me that Miami would be 20 feet underwater when I was in elementary school. It seems the "Day After Tomorrow" always gets pushed back by another decade when it doesn't happen this time.

[Matthew]

Tyler: It is true that climate does naturally change over long time spans. For example, the Earth wobbles on its axis over a 13,000 year cycle. This greatly accepts temperature during the cycle.

However,Climate Change is short-hand for acknowledging that green house gases are accelerating the change at a socially unmanageable rate.

Yes, the Greenland Norse disappeared and will reappear. New land will become fertile while old other land becames desert. But in most of the world the social upheaval caused by rapid climate change will be disasterous. Do you think the Canadians want 100 million new citizens? I don't want to be a modern-day Goth crossing that Danube.

[Tyler]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/

Tell me some more about those greenhouse gases accelerating things? I'm all ears.

There's no proof about so called "greenhouse gases" doing anything, just a bunch of liberal crank science.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I agree with you, Mand-made Global Warming is just scientific moonshine.

Look at the book

http://www.amazon.com/Astronomical-Causes-Springer-Environmental-Sciences/dp/3540437797/ref=la_B000AQ4JZ6_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1348085553&sr=1-8

That book captures the scientific Truth in this case; in my opinion.

[Tyler]

I concur. That and the intellectual dishonesty consistently shown by the global warming cult (the hockey stick graph suppression being one of the more noteable) is little more than another liberal article of "faith" that must be defended at all costs.