16 Years Later: Lessons Put into Practice?

Today marks the 16th anniversary of al-Qaida's 9/11 attacks. We learned much that tragic day, at enormous human and material cost. Perilously, however, America has already forgotten many of Sept. 11's lessons.

The radical Islamicist ideology manifested that day has neither receded nor "moderated" as many naive Westerners predicted. Neither has the ideology's hatred for America or its inclination to conduct terrorist attacks. Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution brought radical Islam to the contemporary world's attention, and it is no less malevolent today than when it seized our Tehran embassy, holding U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

The Taliban, which provided al-Qaida sanctuary to prepare the 9/11 attacks, threaten to retake control in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida persists and may even be growing worldwide.
While ISIS's caliphate in Syria and Iraq will not survive much longer, countries across North Africa and the Middle East ("MENA") have destabilized or fractured entirely. Syria and Iraq have ceased to exist functionally, and Libya, Somalia and Yemen have descended into chaos. Pakistan, an unstable nuclear-weapons state, could fall to radicals under many easily predictable scenarios.

Read more>>>

This is what winning looks like

Charlie Sheen's kind of winning, that is...

"This Is What Winning Looks Like" is a disturbing new documentary about the ineptitude, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and corruption of the Afghan security forces as well as the reduced role of US Marines due to the troop withdrawal.

Pandering without Profit

May 30, 2012

By G. Murphy Donovan


Two successive administrations now have sought to appease Muslims by minimizing the threat from Islamists. Indeed, science has now been enlisted in that effort. Early stimulus came from the White House.

Hours after 9/11, a Republican president allowed a host of Saudi elites to flee the U.S. by chartered aircraft before the blood was dry at the World Trade Center. Never mind that most of the Manhattan suicide martyrs were Saudis. The political cue then was meant for domestic and foreign consumption; to wit, America would not hold passive aggressors, sponsor-nations, or Islamic propaganda accountable for the atrocities of "extremists."

From the beginning, the majority of Muslims were anointed "moderates," on the authority of an asserted conclusion. Concurrently, fellaheen danced in the streets of Arabia. No matter; blame for the terror threat was still confined to specific non-government agents like al-Qaeda or the Taliban. By fiat, Islamic terrorism was fenced as isolated criminal phenomena with local motives; in short, militant jihad was represented as a perversion of, not a tenet of, Islamic theology or Muslim politics.

This politically correct illusion was reinforced by an Obama administration in a series of forays into the ummah, where the American president declared unequivocally that America, and NATO by extension, is not at war with Islam or Muslims. Never mind that NATO or American troops might be killing Muslims in four -- or is it five? -- separate venues. "We are not at war!" was the party line. And never mind that Obama has yet to visit Israel as president.

Read more at:  American Thinker

‘Die, Die, Foreigners!’

By Mark Steyn

Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:

“Die, die, foreigners!”

And foreigners do die. USAF Lieutenant Colonel John Loftis, 44, and Army Major Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.” Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.

Some news outlets reported the event as a “security breach.” But what exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of the Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building and its secure room, and “liaising” with his U.S. advisers and “mentors” was part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by Westerners, and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual that the Pentagon, as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term for it: “green-on-blue incidents,” in which a uniformed Afghan turns his gun on his Western “allies.”

So we have a convenient label for what’s happening; what we don’t have is a strategy to stop it — other than more money, more “hearts and minds” for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders of the bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, an Oprahfied heap of drivel extensively exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional Washington insists on sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound officer class.

Don’t fancy the tea? A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine in the coffee. As Navy Captain John Kirby explained, “We don’t know if it was deliberate or something in the cleaning process.”

Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of expeditionary forces over the centuries: “Afghanistan. It’s something in the cleaning process.”

Read more at: National Revies Online

Mark Steyn: You Can Feed the Crocodile...

...but sometimes he'll still eat you first. While the initial US reports on the Times Square car bomb concentrated on the by now traditional denials that this was anything to do with terrorism and, even if it was, it was "amateurish", the Telegraph in Britain was the first to note the parking space:

The dark green Nissan Pathfinder with tinted windows was parked near the junction of 45th Street and Broadway.

The location is also adjacent to the Viacom building, fuelling speculation that it might be linked to the company's controversial South Park cartoon which recently depicted Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit.

The important thing to remember about Iraq and Afghanistan is that, from the jihad's point of view, they're sideshows: The real battlefield is New York and Chicago and London and Paris.

The Corner

Update: Taliban claiming car bomb on Times Square?
The Long War Journal

U.S. troops try in vain to train Afghan soldiers

American tax dollars at work...

Hot Air

Troops fear corruption outweighs progress of Afghan forces