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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Sunday, September 6, 2009

Af/Pak Instahoglets Sunday

By Steve Hynd


Some linky goodness for your Sunday evening:


-- Derrick Crowe has been blogging up a storm since becoming the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Check out his latest, over at OpenLeft: "War Gone Wild in Afghanistan". The big-money question is "How is it possible that when the populations of both countries and the Commander-in-Chief's political base agree on a policy direction we find ourselves moving in the opposite direction?" Would Obama and his commanders really have us believe that to protect democracy in America and to build it in Afghanistan, we must trample it?


-- The London Times looks at the massive vote fraud which has brought Mohammed Karzai within a carefully US-managed hairsbreadth of a first round victory in the Afghan election and asks "If substantial numbers of Afghans decide that the vote was rigged, what do other governments do then?" More to the point, perhaps - if substantial numbers of Afghans take up arms against their own illigitimate government, as they've been promising to do, what will the occupying ISAF forces do then? Will they try to tell these disaffected insurgents apart from Taliban fighters or just bomb the lot and let Allah sort them out?


-- Talking of which...Joshua Foust and Derrick Crowe both take on the recent debacle in Kunduz province that caused so many civilian casualties. It's painfully obvious that NATO forces in theater can talk about avoiding civilian casualties until they are blue in the face but when it comes down to it "force protection" always wins out. That's a major reason I've argued that the U.S. and its allies cannot do COIN except on paper.


-- But it looks like McChrystal, rather than admit that or admit he can't make his subordinate commanders from allied nations obey orders, is leaking like a sieve in advance of blaming the Germans for this one. (Sorry, that last link is to an AP report.) Expect that to blow up in ISAF's faces as either the German left will use the carnage to pressure for withdrawal or the German right will get its collective nose out of joint at McChrystal's CYA and begin to wonder why they continue to support the Af/Pak quagmire.


Update: Thomas Rid at Kings Of War blog agrees that McChrystal may have made a serious political misstep, landing his German allies in the shiesse just in time for the elections in 3 weeks. I've a suspicion his own resume is more important to Stan The Man than such larger considerations (just like his patron, Saint Petraeus). I repeat, the constant failure to observe R.O.E. restrictions on airstrikes either means that the ISAF allies are institutionally incapable of such fine-tuned restraint or McChrystal can't control his subordinates. Blaming the Germans for this single case doesn't help that and neither looks good on McChrystal's record.


-- I've already written about why I think Britain is getting ready to head for the Af/Pak exit whether Obama wants it to or not...and Robert Naiman is encouraging that British exit. Dear Britain: "Get Out of Afghanistan, So We Can Get Out"


-- Finally, kudos to Zaid Jilani, blogger/reporter at Think Progress, who has bucked the trend at the Center for American Progress - "one of the main intellectual forces behind our current strategy in Afghanistan" - to join the blogging team at Rethink Afghanistan. Zaid writes:



I have deep disagreements with my colleagues like Lawrence Korb, and I want to use this space to voice many of those disagreements. It�s time we, as Sanders recommends, have a real national debate about the war in Afghanistan and our greater national priorities. It�s in the spirit of a liberal democracy that I encourage you to reach out to your friends, co-workers, neighbors, and whoever else will listen, and ask them to rethink their views on what�s happening in Afghanistan. Encourage a lively debate � that�s the only way we�ll turn our disastrous course around.


That debate has been months late in starting outwith the DFH blogs, but seems to have suddenly picked up momentum. Good.



2 comments:

  1. "force protection" always wins out
    But Steve, from what I've read, this incident had nothing to do with force protection at all, at least not directly. They simply blew up a fuel trucks that were being pilfered by Taliban and local civilians. That is not force protection.
    In fact, it is also about as counter-COIN as one can get: right there, in front the local Afghan population and for all to see, the Taliban were providing free fuel to locals, and NATO blew them up as they scrambled at the Taliban-provided largess.
    Yes, they are doing this badly.

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  2. Hi Anderson,
    The German commander on the ground didn't send a ground force to reclaim the tankers when he should have according to doctrine, deciding to avoid casulaties through an airstrike.
    Regards, Steve

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