Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Ready Made Excuse

By Steve Hynd


Bernard Finel has a must read post on the Bush-style rhetorical tricks some establishment COINdinistas use to supress dissent - amid which he has this glowing gem of good sense.



look, if your strategic concept � you know, that which connects your proposed military operations to the political outcomes you desire requires the Afghans to do certain things which are unlikely or impossible, that is a problem with the strategy, not with the Afghans.


As Bernard notes, we heard the same wrong-headed thing about the Iraqis. He's correct that some wavering COINdinistas are getting ready to trot out this excuse again, along with another hoary chestnut from the neocon playbook of 2005-06. The line is going to be "I wasn't really wrong, because COIN would be the way to go if it were properly resourced and the Afghans had their s**t together".


But this whole "the troops are great at counter-insurgency" line is such BS. They're only good at it on paper military-wide or in small doses for real. Even McMaster's success in Tal Afar didn't really outlast his successor's involvement. The overall story of the Iraqi Surge's success is just PR and spin, it didn't achieve its stated mission. All the evidence is that the US military is as institutionally unable to do widespread theatre-level COIN right as the US Govt. is at resourcing its ill-conceived interventions.

A deep-seated paradigm of force protection, aka Fobbitmania, means: airstrikes based on bad, bought intel; contracted mercs running over civilians with whole convoys; relying for an appearance of success on bribing already corrupt warlords; relying on security forces manned by criminals who are already in the pockets of warlords; corruption and bribe-taking within the military (Petraeus' aide Lt. Col Lavonda Selph et al); acceptable "collateral damage" ratios of 50-1 or worse (e.g. drones in Pakistan); freefire orgies on civilians after attacks - and a whole lot more, none of it condusive to long-term COIN success.


Never mind the Afghans, when the connection between theory and real-world outcome requires America to do some things that are unlikely or impossible, you should know your strategy and it's theoretical foundations are in trouble.


Bush-era neocons never made that leap of commonsense. Many of the neoliberals who are so gung-ho about counter-insurgency as a panacea for foreign interventions won't either. Others will quietly change their minds but never, ever admit they were wrong in the first place. Only a few will have the integrity and honesty of a Francis Fukayama, and recant publicly.



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1 comment:

  1. dcroweAugust 20, 2009 at 3:11 PM

    Great post. It occurred to me today that there's probably a very strong case to be made that the U.S. civilian policymakers' obsession with COIN has quite a lot to do with the various service branches' excellent PR operations and their constant assertions of relevance in response to irrelevant problems for budgetary and other reasons.

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