Build It, They Will Come

You know I just got paid
I got my hot rod wheels
So if you wanna find out how it feels
Call me - Pennsylvania 6-5000
--Pennsyviania 6-5000, Glenn Miller

You were my pills, you were my thrills
You were my hope baby, you were my smoke
You dropped a bomb on me, hey baby
You dropped a bomb on me, baby
--You Dropped a Bomb on Me,
The Gap Band

I have known many adventures in my time. . .
but war is not really an adventure at all, it is only a substitute. . .
War is a disease. Like Typhus.
--Pilote de Guerre, Antoine de St. Exupery
_____________

Analogies can be helpful things. But one must be careful when dealing with the intricacies of modern warfare to select the appropriate model. Ranger believes a model from his childhood fits hand-in-glove with modern counterinsurgency in the Middle East.

After reading U.S. News & World's reports this week on the Taliban's "New Superbombs" -- even bigger drums filled with bigger hunks o' explosives, it became clear that Looney Tunes' Roadrunner and his nemesis Wile E. Coyote provide the perfect analogy. The Taliban is the Roadrunner, usually outrunning the wily Coyote, who is the U.S. in our current scenario.

The 55-gallon-drum is such a useful item. During our Florida A & M University Homecoming weekends, a revered tradition has the drums lining the sidewalks, where inside braises the best barbecue this side of the Apalachicola. Rednecks find joy burning every example of household toss off of in same such. Every ammo dump is rife with such flotsam.

Against such brute realities, Coyote is ever reading, plotting, and purchasing new destructive technology from the ever-ready ACME Tool Company. For sure, Coyote possesses more weaponry, and the theme song does say that "if he catches you, you're through." However, Coyote usually becomes ensnared in his own well-laid plans. His problem is that he does not understand his nemesis.

Roadrunner sees the holes in the road, and moves them, or chooses to take another path. He is not predictable, and Coyote thrives on understanding the psychology of his enemy, who alas is a shape-shifter. Despite Coyote's increasingly violent methodology, he never gets his bird.

Just as roads figure largely in the Roadrunner cartoon, so it is in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is road-bound as usual, with the added problem that Service and Service Support are no longer protected in the Corps and Division rear areas.

Since there is no Forward Line of Troops (FLOT) or Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA), all of our vehicles, to include combat vehicles, are subject to attack at any time and place. Running unsecured roads is military folly. Fighting dirty little wars for no quantifiable objective is another level of insanity. Fighting unconventional threats with conventional means is neither cost-effective nor sound.

"Roadside bombs that once weighed 10 to 20 pounds have morphed into multigallon drums packed with 200 to 500 pounds of explosives, which insurgents roll into culverts with wheelbarrows (Taliban's New Super-Bombs Threaten U.S. Troops, Even in Pricey MRAPs)."

So U.S./NATO forces are running the roads in multi-million dollar vehicles and the Taliban are countering this threat with explosives hauled out of the fields in the precision delivery modality of -- wheelbarrows. When Sheikh Omar escaped U.S. forces, he did so on a Vespa motor scooter, while multimillion dollar drones with multimillion dollar bombs searched for him. Which side of the battle will you place your money on the win table?

"The enhanced bombs have in some cases proved effective in destroying the U.S. military's expensive new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles—the product of a multibillion dollar investment by the Pentagon that features a V-shaped hull to absorb and disperse the impact of roadside bombs.

"The vehicles were not built, however, to withstand 200-pounds worth of explosives. "They've flipped MRAPs 15 feet in the air sometimes," says one U.S. officer in Afghanistan. "And they break them in half." U.S. troops inside the overturned vehicles have been crushed and seriously injured by falling equipment."

The U.S. answer to the problem is Coyote's: Do something, even if it is wrong. Spend your way out of the problem, for ACME has a new handy-dandy tool just right for you. But the MRAP's are folly, as they are not combat vehicles and they are not fighting platforms. What purpose do they serve?

The MRAP is like the 55-gal-drum is to the barbecue: a containment device for being shaked-and-baked. They are classic bomb magnets. They are slow, unmanueverable and most importantly, MRAPs serve no discernible military purpose.

The new bombs, which U.S. military officials say began cropping up in June, are part of an insurgent effort, they add, to disrupt commerce, create chaos, and strike at the heart of government efforts to bring progress to strategic provinces like Ghazni.

This editorializing attempts to overlay meaning on the project, but it is false. There is no progress and the government is as useless as the MRAP's are to address the Taliban insurgency. There is no realistic government in Afghanistan; it is a puppet regime bolstered totally by external military power. This is not a formula for success.

Even if the US/NATO forces control the roads, they will never control the countryside. This means that the government is a sham. Controlling the cities does not counterbalance the popular insurgency, and it IS popular or it would have been defeated in seven years.

The construction-grade explosives are trucked in from Quetta, a Taliban stronghold in neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But the material is manufactured elsewhere, leading officials to believe that insurgents are bypassing border crossings in eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have a greater presence, to bring them in through southern provinces.

Other possible sources of explosives are the Afghani Army and Police Forces sympathetic and loyal to the Taliban. The U.S. supply system is a probably source of these stolen explosives.

Insurgents and guerrillas will flow around U.S. blocking positions just like the Mississippi flooded around New Orleans. U.S. intel always claims the explosives were produced elsewhere since this exonerates their poor performance in insurgent settings, but Ranger doubts all explosives came from Pakistani sources.

Even if they did, what does this say about the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) in Afghanistan and Pakistan? What would be the logical conclusion?

The article claims "good news" when U.S. forces tracked down "five IED-planting teams, leading to a decrease in roadside bombs in the area from 30 a month in July and August to some five a month in September and October." This is not good news, simply a fact. Yes, a nine-man team was killed and eliminated, but their replacements are a cell phone call away.

That there was a tactical decline in the number of IED's is meaningless over the long haul. It may look good on Officer Efficiency Reports, but it does not translate into strategic success. Absent the active presence of Afghani Army and Police, the U.S. will never quell the insurgents.

You can not create something out of nothing. There is no nation, and killing Afghanis to produce a puppet state will not be successful. What exactly are U.S. forces fighting for in Afghanistan?

To reiterate Ranger's position:

1. A free and democratic Afghanistan is a chimera
2. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda
3. A free Afghanistan will not enhance U.S. security in the PWOT
4. Who gives a rat's ass about Afghanistan?

T-t-t-t-that's All, Folks!