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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Monday, November 29, 2010

Confidence destroying measures

By Dave Anderson:


The official US counter-insurgency doctrine has a significant amount of reliance on confidence building measures.  US troops are there to build up the legitimacy of the local governments by increasing the disputed populations' confidence in the governments' abilities to provide public goods (including security).


A frequent part of this mission is building up the capabilities and the numbers of competent local security forces.  The best way to do that is by embedding US trainers and mentors with the local security forces.  The mentors are supposed to be deeply intermeshed with their mentees (eat, sleep, shit, fight, clean and fart together).  That only works when there is mutual trust on the parts of the mentors and the mentees' officers and non-commissioned officers. 


So when the New York Times reports the following blurb, that trust (which is hard to establish anyways) becomes a lot more fragile:


Six NATO service members who were training the Afghan border police were killed Monday when a border police officer turned his gun on them, according to a NATO statement and Gen. Aminullah Amarkhail, the Afghan Border Police commander for Nangahar Province....


It was at least the fifth time in 13 months that Afghan soldiers or police have turned their weapons on their NATO partners....


Oh well, the foreign internal defense mission, as part of the softer side of COIN is going away anyways as the US is pivoting to Special Ops raids and large scale sweeps again (hey it did not work for the Russians, but why not try this one more time).



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  1. One FlyNovember 29, 2010 at 10:45 AM

    And once again the "Nato" troops turn out to be American. I get so sick of that. It's a ploy to give this 10 year nightmare legitimacy.

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