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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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Learning The Lessons We'd Rather They Didn't

By Steve Hynd


There are many, many problems with training the Afghan police which make it unbelievable that "they'll stand up so we can stand down" in any sense accept a paper-thin PR one. And just to add to those woes, it seems they're learning lessons by emulation as well as by formal training.



Afghan police have shot dead seven villagers near the Pakistani border after mistaking them for insurgents, police officials said.

The seven young men were collecting firewood after dark in the southern town of Spin Boldak, a common transit route for Taliban militants.


I've written often enough that the U.S. military and it's Western allies seem systematically incapable of translating COIN theory on paper into COIN reality on the ground. They're passing that failure onto the Afghan security forces by example, as might be expected.



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