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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Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Levels of Violence in Afghanistan

By Dave Anderson: .


At the height of violence in Iraq, attacks averaged around 100 attacks per day. A plurality to a majority of these attacks were either IED or mine attacks. This level of violence was sufficient to create and sustained state failure in Iraq until the Shi'ite militias and military units undertook systemic ethnic cleansing in mixed sect urban areas and Sunni elites flipped to have the other group of heavily armed foreigners with their own agenda bash the more annoying group of heavily armed foreigners with their own agenda.


Wired's Danger Room has some data on the pace of violence in Afghanistan. It is down to only the height of Iraqi levels of violence now and we call that success:


Enemy attacks are down to about 3,000 per month, from approximately 4,000 last year....

And this is success... levels of violence minus the urban ethnic cleansing that makes the Sunni Triangle look quiet.  There are no majoritarian ethnic/sectarian militias that are able to conduct large scale ethnic cleansing campaigns against a determined minority (the Pashtuns are at least the plurality of Afghanis,) nor is there a high probability of the Pashtun elites flipping their support between one group of heavily armed foreigners to another. 



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