The ISI and the Kabul Attacks

Well, it looks like the ISI had a hand in the Kabul attacks.

Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency communicated with Afghan insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in central Kabul last week and appear to have provided them with equipment, according to U.S. military officers and former officials.

Communications gear used by the insurgents "implicated" the directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan's spy service, a senior U.S. military official said Thursday. The equipment was found in a 14-story building under construction that the attackers used to lay siege to the embassy compound for 19 hours on Sept. 13, according to the official, who would not describe the equipment recovered.Bruce Riedel, a former White House advisor on Pakistan and a retired senior CIA official, said administration officials told him that "very firm intelligence" linked the Pakistani spy agency to the embassy attack, which killed at least nine Afghans.

"There are [communications] intercepts and the attackers were in cellphone contact back to Pakistan," he said.

In a dramatic appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged that the insurgents had received "ISI support" not only for the attack on America's most prominent diplomatic and military symbols in the Afghan capital, but also for a massive truck bomb assault this month on a U.S. combat outpost in Wardak province west of Kabul that wounded 77 U.S. soldiers.

Pakistan's government angrily denied any involvement. But Mullen's comments are the most direct, and most explosive, accusations by a senior U.S. official of direct complicity by Pakistan's chief intelligence agency in attacks on American facilities and military personnel.

Not any sort of surprise that they would deny it. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been strained for a while, and this is likely to seal their fate.

It's almost certainly true, though, and it's difficult to say what it'll mean. Pakistan's a nuclear power, so any sort of direct action is impossible even if it weren't a bad idea, but the United States will have to do something to make it clear that the ISI cannot be allowed to continue supporting this sort of action.

What's likely, then, is that the American government will take this as a go-ahead for continued drone attacks in Pakistan on the Haqqani network that was behind this attack.  It keeps Americans out of harm's way, and they're insulated from Pakistani objections by the fact that the ISI is partially responsible for this in the first place. It won't solve the problem, but it's the only plausible action that presents itself.

Krauthammer's Tiger Rock

All these years, and Charles Krauthammer is still insisting that the lack of a second AQ attack proved that the War on Terror worked.

Of course, you could just as plausibly argue for the release of Alice Cooper's Dragontown  as the reason why there was no second attack.

What's really funny is that he's pretending that two "hot wars" in the War on Terror didn't cost a truckload of money because it was only a little more than a trillion dollars. Apparently a fair percentage of THE YEARLY DOMESTIC PRODUCT OF THE UNITED STATES isn't a big deal to him.

"Entitlements" are a big deal to him. Of course. They usually are to wealthy apologists for the ultra-rich, especially ones like Krauthammer that haven't the faintest clue how any of this works, and are just mouthing the words they're told to say by their handlers and sponsors. Social Security and Medicare, unlike the botched conflicts that he advocates and apologizes for, actually help people. Krauthammer wouldn't know what "helping people" was like if you gave him diagrams.

It isn't as bad as the spectacle of a Bush-admin neoconservative trying to take credit for the Arab Spring, like Michael Gerson. That goes beyond wrong to simply nauseating. But it still shows us exactly why America is in the fix it is: because people like this are given newspaper columns, fame, and power... instead of people with ideas, insights, track records and a positive outlook.

One of the lessons of the last decade is really simple: never trust neoconservatives. They cannot govern countries, they cannot fight wars, they cannot budget responsibly, and they cannot be trusted to provide advice about anything.   Mock them, deride them, and dismiss them if you want...just never, ever trust them. Their ideas are poison and their doctrines corrupt.

They were wrong. They were ALWAYS wrong. They always will be.

Osama's Dead, and Obama Got Him

Yep. It's true. That bastard's toast, and it was the demmycrat that was responsible.

Not even in a figurative sense, either. Go read Chris Bowers' Twitter feed. Obama was given the information back in February, chaired the meetings that set out the operation while they confirmed the location, and gave the go-ahead on Friday.

Bowers quotes officials as saying "Administration officials believe bin Laden's death will put Al-Qaeda on path of decline that will be difficult to reverse." Can't disagree there. They were already on the downslope; this is going to be a body blow that will likely be the end of the organization. We can only hope.

It's instructive, though. Eight years of Republican rule, and nothing happens. After a little over two years, it's the Democrats that get it done. It's just another reminder of how incompetent the Republicans really are. I can only hope that, when 2012 rolls around, the American people will remember that too.

(Edit: fixed tags.)

Jeffrey Goldberg is a Goddamned Idiot

How stupid do you have to be to write this:

All of this analysis would be true if America were using its drones to launch unprovoked attacks against targets in Pakistan. But it is not. These attacks are provoked. And who is doing the provoking? Jihadists, who, for all the obvious reasons, want us to believe that it is our actions that cause the violence they inflict on us. Ask yourself this question: Did American drone attacks in Pakistan cause 9/11? Or the attack on the U.S.S. Cole? Or the embassy bombings in Africa?

No. Really. HOW? How is it possible?

It is the most trivially obvious thing in the world to realize that people are going to pay one hell of a lot more attention to attacks on their friends and family than they are to attacks that happened almost a decade ago and almost a world away, and they are sure as hell not going to pay much attention to this sort of reasoning when the attacks are being made on people who were not directly connected with either the Cole or 9/11 bombings? Yes, they might be jihadists—though predators aren't exactly the most accurate platform in America's arsenal so there's a good chance that many might not be—but they are not going to agree with Goldberg's reasoning, any more than Goldberg would believe that blowing up a building in DC is acceptable because of what America got up to in, say, El Salvador.


Look, idiot, this is absurdly simple. The whole "predator attacks cause more retaliatory attacks" idea is based on the notion that they don't care whether or not you think your actions are justified. It's not a normative argument, it's a factual argument: bombs drop, they get mad, they "respond". The fact that the bombing is a response to something that they did does not mean that they aren't responding in turn to what you did. That's what escalation IS: response building on response building on response. Nobody gives a shit about "he started it!"

That's why one has to be thoughtful about any sort of military response to terrorism: even if it is justified, it's going to carry consequences, and you have to recognize and understand those consequences before making those decisions. Saying "he started it!" is what a CHILD does.

(Not that it's surprising to see someone from the Atlantic acting like a child. They provide a platform for Jane Galt, after all.)

The truly hilarious part of the story is here:

"No terrorism group has the word 'terrorism' in its name. They see themselves as reluctant fighters, always retaliating, never initiating."

Well, nobody should say that terrorists never learn. Looks like they learned that little trick reeeeal well.