My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves

Taliban Comedy

By Bernie Reeves

A recent PBS “Frontline” program boasted firsthand coverage of a secret Taliban insurgent force in northern Afghanistan. I must say I was underwhelmed. The Islamic banditos — a splinter group controlled by a former prime minister of Pakistan — reminded me of the Three Stooges with an attitude.

The al-Qeada representative imported to make roadside bombs used an instruction manual that didn’t appear to help much. His new Taliban friends gathered around to help, stating they might all be blown up — but what the heck, to die for the cause is the goal anyway.

Predictably, the roadside IEDs all failed when put to the test on the main highway north to Tajikistan where the America-led coalition sends supplies down to the fighting in southern Afghanistan. Even if they had gone off, the inept guerillas were too confused to follow up and attack any vehicles that may have been waylaid. The only action involved arguments between the members of the raiding party, each criticizing the other for not providing adequate warning or reacting too slowly.

Certainly this branch of the Taliban effort is not representative of the entire fighting force, but they share traits. The insurgency forces all use weapons buried by villagers and townspeople during the unsuccessful Russian occupation of the 1980s, augmented by smuggled arms from rouge nations, al-Qeada and other jihadist groups. And their strategy and tactics are centered on one unifying principle — heard over and over in the PBS documentary — hatred for America. No other nation is mentioned, just America, although the coalition forces patrolling the northern area are German.

The Germans don’t do much patrolling — or fighting. Their job is to win the hearts and minds of the local population with aid packages and public works, the centerpiece of the counterinsurgency policy in vogue in the US and Western Europe. Consequently, jihadists roam around freely and strike aimlessly.

And herein lies the problem, pointed out brilliantly by Mark Moyar, chair of the US Marine Corps University’s insurgency and terrorism program. In his 2009 book — A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq — Moyar presents detailed accounts that prove the need to throw out the handbooks and start all over by focusing on leadership to a far greater degree than practiced in the “hearts and minds” methods employed today.

Under Moyar’s scenario, the German forces in northern Afghanistan should be searching out insurgents with alacrity, led by officers with initiative and dedication to success — although the jihadists in their patrol area are more likely to blow themselves up than pose a threat to coalition forces.

Notes from La-La
Seven percent of private sector workers are members of a union. In the public sector, it’s 12 percent, representing 51 percent of all union members. This raises the specter of worker-controlled government agencies focusing on their own needs over citizen services. No wonder a recent Rasmussen poll discovered 70 percent of public sector employees were satisfied with their jobs and job security. In North Carolina, the State Employees Association has affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the same crowd working with President Barack Obama to force all healthcare workers to be members of SEIU. This is called syndicalism, a form of socialism we hoped we had extinguished when we won the Cold War. The dictionary definition of syndicalism says: “a development by trade unions that aims at the possession of the means of production and distribution, and ultimately the control of society, by federated bodies of industrial workers, and that seeks to realize its purposes through general strikes, terrorism, sabotage, etc.” Enough said.

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Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, has bravely dared to state that tenure for college professors needs to be studied and modified. I posted a piece on American Thinker (www.americanthinker.com) about the horrors of tenure, reviewing specific cases of the depredations of tenured radical scholars and the damage this cadre has done to individual scholars who don’t toe the prevailing campus party line (The Duke 88 comes to mind here). Many readers around the nation were horrified to know that, in North Carolina, it only takes K-12 public school teachers three years to attain tenure and a job for life. They are discovering this is true in their state too. No wonder we can’t fix the education system.

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The latest data show that young voters are going cold on Obama, with only 40 percent approval from 18-29-year-olds who played a decisive role in his victory in November 2008. Perhaps they too are looking at the numbers. The Obama stimulus promised 3.3 million new jobs; the actual result is the loss of 3.7 million jobs — for a net/net loss of over 7 million jobs — with the resultant rise of total unemployment from 7.4 percent, when Obama took office, to 10.4 percent today. Or the young folks are realizing that politically motivated scientists cooked the numbers on global warming — which led Obama to promise $300 billion to Third World countries labeled as “climate debt” for the sins of first and second world productivity. Or maybe they just don’t like the Gestapo tactics used by Democrats to force through a healthcare plan that forces them to have health insurance or face heavy fines and jail time.

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It’s not just young voters who are nervous about national security and the threat of terrorist attacks on American soil. While Obama’s attorney general holds tribunals to prosecute CIA and other intelligence officers accused of using excessive force in interrogating captured terrorists, the intel services — our front line of defense against an attack — are afraid to take initiative for fear of attack by their own government, even for actions approved in writing. This sorry state of affairs leaves us dangerously disarmed and vulnerable.

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We all should be disappointed that our vaunted space program has been cut off at the tail fins in an empty gesture by Obama to act like he cares about the deficit. Space is the only new frontier, and America is the Lewis and Clark leading the way. NASA is winding down the old shuttle program to restart with a new mission to places far, far away. Now we aren’t going, and our existing space efforts will rely on other nations to shoot up our astronauts and scientific equipment. As I wrote recently in this column, the Obama crowd has stolen the future away from Americans, and now the world.