"a wind of 18 months to 2 years"

Headmaster J. C. Manners recently gave us at the Ann Arbour Idiot Academy a stiff pep talk about always washing behind our ears and worrying sufficiently about ‘our’ Afghanistan -- and look what has come of it: no two idiots have a common theory of what ‘we’ are doing wandering about in the wilds of Khorasán in the first place!

The only primâ facie presentable khabar wáhid is second-hand and belongs to Shaykh Pepe Escobar -- not exactly a first-rate transmitter, despite his impeccable tiersmondiste orthodoxy. A second glance at the account indicates it is not the article wanted anyway, though it might do if the unaccountable mucking-about had begun "In the past month." Of course one could always fantasize that ‘we’ knew years and years ago that last month was coming and were trying to get ready. [1] On the other hand, if you believe that, you’d believe anything.

The idiocy about "hell bent on setting back the clock to another epoch, which ... simply should not allowed to happen" has already drawn some fire, so rather than pile on, let’s be perverse and see if we can find a pony in it somewhere.

There certainly do exist folks (off the AAIA campus) who take that line, though possibly it is more a tautology than a profundity, inasmuch as ‘we’ are in Afghanistan (one presumes) because SOMETHING or another "simply should not allowed to happen." The challenge is to think of any one definite ‘something’ that does not apply to forty-six other nations and provinces and administrative districts as well.

This challenge I cannot meet, and, more to the point, as far as I can make out, nobody at Le Club Colonial can meet it either. Take the Commissariat for the New American Innovation™, that liberal, or at any rate bushevik-free, octopus of a thousand tentacles. [2] The violence-professional neocommisars of CNAI go on and on, drearily enough, about their Petræo-McNamaran COIN ("counterinsurgency") product, but they never explain how ‘we’ came to be a Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower awash in a sea of surgency, or spell out why those forty-six other candidates should not get COINed as well. They would rather die than talk policy.

Now it is not only true, but obvious, that ‘we’ can definitely not afford to run the whole world at the same rate per capita of natives and locals that ‘we’ now run [3] Afghanistan and the former al-‘Iráq. The neocommissars, however, are so pluperfectly devoted to Mr. Blake’s notion that "To generalise is to be an idiot," that one will not catch them coming even that close to a statement of High Policy rather than mere strategy and operations and tactics.

Their evasion might pass for humility: violence pros and PowerPointers know their place as hired hands and avoid getting uppity. "Civilian control of the military," don’t you know? Very pretty! -- if only it did not seem so probable that these neogentry are actually making most of the imperial and colonial decisions that get casually attributed to ‘us’ and to poor buck-stopping Mr. Obama. [4]

Our Academy’s esteemed Head has guessed as follows:

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, cautioned that there is hard fighting ahead in Afghanistan. He sees a wind of 18 months to 2 years during which the US and its NATO allies must reestablish as much security as possible even as it trains tens of thousands of new Afghan troops. The window is probably how long the Obama administration expects there to be support for the Afghan war in the US Congress.

That’s not much better guesswork than kiddies’ own, is it? But here, too, one can always do a pony quest, and take the paragraph to be not really a guess about Afghanistan but a satire on Capitol Hill, where one can always count on a couple years of support for anything at all, as long as one relentlessly refuses to explain it.

(( There was, I believe, an eighteenth-century projector who announced "An Undertaking of the greatest possible Publick Utility, but nobody to know what it is." [5] ))

Happy days.


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[1] Somebody should command the good and forbid Shaykh Escobar to keep working from those delightful Victorian maps of "the vast network of oil and gas pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet" that he finds in his Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.

Another of us id..., of us Kolean kiddies, that is, offered a YooToob from beautiful downtown Asmar in the Outer Khorasánian province of Kúnar. Folks who seriously project fetching petroleum from the Caspian Sea by that route probably favored the plan, mentioned right before the March 2003 aggression, of placing one of ‘our’ aircraft carriers in the Cap so as to have the Beast of Baghdád surrounded.

And Pepe’s, remember, is the BEST kiddie notion going. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison!


[2] The tentacle du jour calls itself The Center for a New American Security and is not to be confused with, say, The Center for American Progress . And of course not with The Project For the New American Century -- that one is the bad guys.

There are several more neotentacles -- I keep meaning to take a complete inventory but do not get around to it.


[3] There is a strong case for shudder quotes around ‘run’ too. But God knows best.


[4] It’s no worse than any other AAIA guess to propose that the COINsters chiefly need Afghanistan as a sort of sandbox in which to play their Petræo-McNamaran games. But the guess is no better than the others either, because there is no glimpse in it of why our current neogentry should consider that proficiency at precisely those games is urgent and critical.

With their predecessors, the Yoos and Feiths and von Wolfowitzen and especially Viceroy R. B. Cheney, it was at least easy to know wrong what they were up to, viz. that were doin’ it all for dear old Zion. Or, alternatively, to demonstrate their hereditary flair for Big Management.

Whereas the Commissariat of Innovation is blankly inscrutable. As the current Idiot Academy performance indicates, one can scarcely make even a good wrong guess about their knavish tricks.


[5] Not bad for a quotation from memory at several decades’ distance! The exact wording runs "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

As you may read at URL cit. (p. 65), this intrepid forerunner of the Petræo-McNamaran whizkids seems to have made a success of it.