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He says that his father is out in the hills in a cave (which agrees with the background scenery from his videotape last weekend. The son also says that his father took several trucks full of satellite equipment with him. If he's got satellite dishes set up somewhere, they can be spotted from the air or via satellite reconnaissance. If he's hiding in a cave, it can be collapsed with bombs. If he's got 300 bodyguards, they'll die with him. bin Laden's son is a fool to have said those things. (discuss)
"I know that a number of NATO countries don't simply want to back all of the Americans -- they want to be there on the front line with the United States in this campaign against terrorism, which is after all, an affliction that could as easily happen to them or damage them," said [NATO Secretary General George] Robertson. And why aren't they? Because the US didn't ask them, and hasn't taken them up very enthusiastically on any offers. That's what I suspect, and here's what I suspect is the reason why. From what I've read, the crisis happened because of Kosovo. (Throughout what follows, "European" means the continental European military members, i.e. everyone except the UK.) The US wanted active military involvement against Serbia to break the power of Milosevic, and the Europeans dragged their feet. There's long been tension in NATO about Yugoslavia, with the US pushing for military action and the Europeans being reticent, and it came to a head over Kosovo where the US made an ultimatum and forced the Europeans into action, kicking and screaming. And their involvement was minimal and half-hearted, and most of the attack was made by the US -- and nearly all of the rest by the UK. While Italian air bases were used for much of the attacks, actual sorties by anyone except the US and UK were negligible. And the US came out of that experience realizing that the only NATO partner it could really rely on was the UK. The Europeans were focused on their short term qualms over Kosovo and didn't realize the long term consequences of their behavior. So when the US was brutally attacked, we asked the UK for help, which they freely provided. The UK stepped up and acted like an ally should; it didn't criticize the US, rather it said "We're on your side in this. We care about this and we're going to put our asses on the line with you because that's what friends do, and we're your friends." The continental European nations, on the other hand, dithered and wrung their hands, and talked about "measured response" and tried to point out historical US foreign policy mistakes -- and basically made it clear that they were not in favor of a major military response. And the US didn't ask them to get involved in one, either. Instead, the US began to mobilize its own forces, which are formidable, and went into action anyway. It didn't ask NATO for permission or even for help. NATO passed its Article 5 declaration, and the US said "Thanks; we'll let you know." NATO offered ships, which are useless, and one French frigate joined the US fleet, so that its sailors can get a sun-tan in the Arabian Sea. The UK, on the other hand, provided a substantial naval presence and more important it actually helped in the first day's attacks. Militarily, the UK contribution was small, but politically it's been invaluable. Tony Blair has been making speeches and travelling to talk to people and helping to make deals. Has any major head of state from continental Europe done even a fifth as much? No, and I suspect they haven't even been asked to because the US doesn't trust their motives. British submarines fired some of the Tomahawks which hit Afghanistan last Sunday. For the moment, that was all that Britain was militarily capable of doing; the importance of it was that it made the UK a protagonist. The UK chose sides and stuck its ass on the line, and now it's just as much of a target for al Qaeda as the US is, and it may well eventually be the target for a terrorist attack because of that. That took guts; and it was exactly what the US expected, which is why the US trusts the UK and considers it the closest ally in Europe it has. In a crisis, a friend proves friendship by actions and not words, and the UK is the only one to act like a friend. I think what's happened is that it's beginning to dawn on the continental European NATO members just how badly they've fucked up. By not asking for help, the US showed its true attitude towards the Europeans -- and I think they're not happy with that. But they can't really blame the US for it; the US hasn't issued any recriminations or condemnations or in any way tried to embarrass them; it's just ignored them. Actually, that's the most humiliating thing the US could have done. If we'd denounced them in public, they could have denounced us back and gotten righteously indignant and saved their pride. But how do you denounce someone who ignores you? American silence is becoming exceedingly embarrassing, both internationally and at home. They've been involved in intelligence and law enforcement operations, but Kosovo proved to the US that they can't be trusted militarily or politically in a crisis, and the US isn't interested in trying again. So their newly stated willingness, even eagerness, to get involved in the actual battle is partly an attempt to redeem themselves with the US government and to atone for how acted during the Kosovo operation. It's not clear it will work; the simple fact is that the US doesn't really need them and isn't really interested in taking a chance on them. So far, their only actual military involvement has been to send AWACS to the US so that the US can send its own AWACS to the zone of combat. Even that was a snub; why weren't the European AWACS themselves sent to the zone of combat? Because the US doesn't want them there. And, as Robertson himself points out, the next major terrorist act could happen anywhere, including in continental Europe. Indeed, it's known that there were plans for attacks there. The US and UK are fighting to try to stop or at least minimize future terrorist actions everywhere, which in a sense protects Europe, and the Europeans aren't even welcome to help. That is an even worse humiliation, I think. It's not that they are not considered to be militarily up to it; French and German forces are as good as any in the world. It's that they're not trusted politically. That is galling. The British were welcome. Likely eventually British jets will be involved in the air strikes. If there's ground action, British forces will unquestionably be involved. (They probably already have been.) The British naval base on Diego Garcia has been essential and probably their permission to use it has been the single most valuable military move they've made. Any help offered by the rest of the NATO powers is going to be eyed suspiciously by the US, which is going to ask "And what is it going to cost us?" For example, if the price for 20 French jets and a frigate and a couple of battalions of special forces is that France will have veto power over the strategy and tactics and potential theatres of the war, then the US will think back to what happened in Kosovo and answer will probably be "Don't call us, we'll call you." (France did offer military assistance on those terms, and it was turned down.) And eventually French and German and Italian voters are going to start asking why their governments aren't helping their ally out the way the UK is, and there isn't going to be any good answer for that. The answer is, "They didn't ask us because they don't trust us," but they won't be able to say that publicly. I can't prove any of this. But I'm as certain as I can be that this is what is happening in the back channels. The United States is going to accept non-symbolic military assistance from the continental NATO powers only if it is offered unconditionally. (discussion in progress) Update: And the UK is indeed now a formally-declared target of al Qaeda. Notable by their absence were any threats made against Germany or Italy or France. Update: A friend from continental Europe informs me that I have misjudged the political feelings of voters there, and that their lack of participation is not an issue.
Or at least that's what he's announced. I can't figure out whether this is actually what he believes, or whether it's what he's saying back home in order to mitigate the embarassment caused by the refusal. This, at least, makes him look like a victim. The truth -- that he was acting like a boor -- isn't something he really wants to admit, to others and maybe even to himself. It wasn't the message he was delivering that was rejected, it was the time and place and method he used to deliver it. (discussion in progress) You know, if the Jews didn't exist, we'd have to invent them.
Update: It turns out that there were two suspicious letters sent to NBC, and the other one has tested positive for anthrax. None of which changes what I said. Update: A suspicious letter in Nevada now seems to have tested positive.
Their message is that "War is not the answer." But until they can provide another answer that's better, then they're whistling in the wind. Their implied answer is that if we stop bombing then everyone will go back to living in peace and harmony and loving brotherhood. That's very difficult to believe. (discuss) This, for instance, was apparently delivered straight -- but it reads like parody. I swear, I could have believed it to have been written by The Onion. And it's blatantly slanted; point 4, for instance, doesn't bother mentioning the possibility that violence now might prevent violence later. And point 8 is right out of the touchy-feelie manual. Apparently no-one ever starts a war; they just happen.
But in the spirit of the now removed "Bert is Evil", the Tourist of Death has become the subject of numerous doctored pictures. Like all memes, this one will fall by the wayside eventually. In the mean time, I feel sorry for the guy whose picture it actually is; he's probably getting a lot of ribbing about it from people who know him. (Of course, if he was responsible for the original hoax, then he deserves everything he's getting.) (discuss)
But the troops in Saudi Arabia (and in Kuwait) are doing other things. We have prepositioned a great deal of materiel, especially tanks and IFVs, in those areas. The troops who are there are, among other things, guarding them and also doing the routine maintenance on them which is necessary to keep them ready for use. Equpment like that degrades with time and even when it's sitting unused it requires routine maintenance. The reason that stuff is there is so that the next time we have to fight (if there is one) it won't take as long to get back up to fighting strength. Men can be brought in by air, but that kind of materiel has to come by ship if you need it in quantity. Last time it took six months to build up; next time it will be much quicker because much of what we need is already in place. (discuss)
The Taliban have been claiming all along that bin Laden and al Qaeda were not associated with the Taliban in any important way. In actuality, the two are closely intertwined. bin Laden has been giving the Taliban huge amounts of money, and the core of the Taliban army are foreigners (mostly Arabs) who are loyal not to the Taliban but rather to bin Laden himself. Bush's offer would only make sense for the Taliban if reality were as the Taliban had been representing it to be; given that the reality is that bin Laden owns the Taliban, they don't actually have the ability to accept the offer even if they had the desire to do so. But the offer also forced them to cleave to bin Laden even as most of the world acknowledges him as a blood-soaked monster. They continue to try to ameliorate that with lame excuses of "not being given evidence of his guilt" but that is getting less and less effective as time goes on, in most of the world. Where the propaganda war is really being played out is in the Muslim nations themselves. The Taliban have no chance whatever of convincing the vast majority of people in the US or Europe of their claims, but they've done somewhat better with the populaces of nations like Indonesia and Pakistan. They've been trying to cast this war as being between Christianity and Islam; we have been trying to cast it in terms of Civilization versus Terrorism. So far it's been a draw with maybe a slight edge to us; there have been numerous demonstrations and even some riots in the Muslim nations, but not to the point of being politically significant (i.e. to the point of forcing the governments of those nations to change their foreign policy). It's lead to empty gestures, though, such as the VP of Indonesia publicly asking the US to stop the bombing. That was an easy way for him to show solidarity with the Muslim radicals in his nation, since he knows there is no chance whatever of his request being honored. It has the potential for somewhat defusing their wrath without actually representing a substantive move by the Indonesian government. (discuss)
But for people who want to create an effective police state or to otherwise seriously invade my privacy, having a single number is priceless. If someone now wants to know all about me, all they need is my SSN. They can access my health records, my credit record, they can trace me back to all the places I've lived in my life, find everything out about me. If they were doing those things with my permission and knowledge, then I could give them all the access keys they needed to do it; it's only when they're doing it without my permission that a single number becomes useful. The use of a unique number created by the database is not a new concept; it's what they used to do. In many cases they still do: my credit card doesn't have my SSN on it; rather, it's a number issued to me by my bank. No-one needs to know that number except when doing something I want done, and in that case I can give them that number. The bank can probably access my database entry using my SSN, but they don't do so routinely, and if they ceased to have that ability it wouldn't noticeably affect their day-to-day operations. (They have to have my SSN in the database but it doesn't have to be an access key.) And the same thing goes for all the other databases. There is no problem finding my records if I'm cooperating with them -- and if I'm not, then I want it to be as difficult as possible. Even more to the point, if I'm in a database without knowing it, then I want access to that database to be difficult and error prone. As to the ambiguity of names and the difficulty of using them for access keys -- that is precisely the point. What that means is that if I am in several databases which don't use the SSN for access keys (and don't actually contain the SSN at all), then cross-correlating those databases becomes prohibitively difficult. This is a virtue, not a fault. It's precisely the reason I don't want the SSN used. I recognize that sometimes this will cause me grief -- and that is a price I'm willing to pay to protect my privacy. (discussion in progress)
Both of these, written independently and probably without knowing of the other, write the same thing: about how they love their kids and about how they'd feel if they were to die in a biowarfare attack -- and about how they'd be quite willing to do anything, anything at all, to prevent that. If we're attacked big-time with bio-weapons, we are going to start using nukes. (discussion in progress) How's this for a "modest proposal": Pass a law that if any bio-attack on the US results in 1000 or more confirmed cases, that both Mecca and Medina would be multiply-nuked? Think that would deter Muslim extremists?
One thing to watch for is a collapse of the Taliban. The political and psychological result of losing the nation's largest city may undermine confidence and support for the Taliban elsewhere in the country. There are already reports of wholesale defections and of loss of local control; it's apparent that the forces commanded by the Taliban were not quite as loyal and motivated as they would like us to believe. Moreover, there will probably be a lot of outright desertions among young men forcibly impressed into service. The wild card in the deck is the core of Arab (i.e. foreign) soldiers who are mainly loyal to bin Laden; they're likely to continue to resist. With any luck, they'll be somewhere that can be attacked by air. Their bravery and discipline will do them little good against cluster bombs. (discuss) Update: I think the chance of a Taliban attack on Uzbekistan is now nil. The supply lines to that area are extreme long and uncertain, and any movement towards the border would make that area absolutely top priority for bombing.
That's the point: freedom of expression does not include freedom to be free of being criticized. What the First Amendment prevents is any laws which punish free speech. But that's all that it prevents. It does not, for example, guarantee a platform. People who are used to having a channel whereby their political speech is spread widely do not have that by right. In the marketplace of ideas, there are enough different channels so that all the important ideas will get out. So, for example, it is completely legal for a newspaper to fire a reporter because of what he writes, or for a magazine to stop carrying a syndicated column because the author says things the magazine's publisher doesn't care for. Neither the reporter nor the syndicated columnist have a right to have their work published. While a teacher in front of a class is entitled to a certain level of decorum when teaching their assigned subject, they are not entitled to be free of criticism if they use that position to express political opinions. As soon as they do so they cease to be professors and start to be citizens, equal to the citizens who sit in their classes. They have a freedom to express themselves but so do the students. And the students have the right to criticize the professor if they disagree with what he's said. If he truly believes what he is saying is important and valuable, he will not let that stop him or dissuade him. If, on the other hand, he is somehow intimidated by this then it suggests that he isn't truly certain of what he's saying -- for part of freedom of expression is the responsibility to take the consequences for your expression. Freedom of expression extends only as far as preventing criminal penalties for speech, but it does not prevent, in any regard whatever, other people from deciding that they do not wish to associate with you because of what you say. That is their right. If your message is important to you, you'll accept that -- and many people have. Some very brave people have accepted social ostracism so as to deliver messages they think are important. Cowards, on the other hand, will bow to social pressure. I happen to think that Chomsky is an ass, for example, but in this regard at least he has it right. He's been roundly criticized for what he's been saying lately, but I have seen nothing to suggest that he's complained about that fact. He seems to understand how important the free flow of criticism is in the marketplace of ideas. He delivers his ideas, and others deliver theirs, and all of us listen and decide who is right. And that is how it should be. If any one person has the freedom to express themself without being criticized or having anyone express a dissenting opinion, then no-one else is free at all. Freedom of expression must include freedom to criticise and disagree. The proper response to criticism is not to complain, but to step up to and answer the criticism and to try to prevail based on the issues. (discuss)
About four hours later, U.S. planes struck again. A fireball was seen from the direction of Rishkore, an al-Qaida training base near Kabul. The camp has been empty for months, but buildings, training facilities and offices remain. If the camp really was abandoned, then there wouldn't be anything on the ground to create a fireball (i.e. a cache of gasoline or ammunition). Conventional HE munitions don't make a fireball; they go off in a very bright flash. Either the camp wasn't actually abandoned, or we've started using the most effective non-nuclear area affect weapon in our arsenal. That would also explain some of the "nothing left standing" before-and-after pictures showing bombing effects which have been released by the Pentagon. (discuss)
Unlike Iraqi and Yugoslav troops, which tried to scatter when targeted by American air campaigns over the past decade, the Taliban forces have appeared to hunker down and remain concentrated in their encampments, the officials said. I wonder if it may be because they don't really know what they're up against. Their experience with defending against bombardment will have been from Russian bombing and more recently with artillery and mortar fire. I suspect that the Russians were primarily using high explosives, and that's certainly what their artillery and mortars are firing. What you get is small number of concentrated explosions which have a wide area of lethality if you are out in the open. But if you're dug in, in a trench or deep foxhole, then your best chance of survival is to stay down. If you get up and run, you'll be caught by shrapnel. Stay in your hole and it will go over your head unless you take a direct hit. But that's not the case with cluster bombs. A cluster bomb is a large package which falls to a certain height, and then bursts and scatters a huge number of bomblets over a wide area. Each of those is sort of like a super-duper hand grenade. Men in trenches and foxholes are not protected, because the bomblets scatter all over the place and are likely to fall in with them. Pretty much the only way to survive a cluster bomb is either to be underground or in an armored vehicle, or to not be within the scatter zone. If you don't have a bunker or a tank, therefore, the best thing to do is to run and hope you can clear the area of effect before the bomb goes off. I suspect the reason that the Taliban's forces are not scattering is that they truly don't know any better. (And at the rate they're going, they're not going to get the opportunity to learn, either.) (discuss)
In markets like computers or cars or motorcycles, where at least some customers become partisans of their products and come to identify with them, this shakeout can seem like some sort of plot or tragedy. It isn't, though; it's simply the normal life cycle of a market. The early diverse experimental stage is unstable. People can come to love that and feel nostalgic about it, but it can't persist. It never has. This is particularly true for products which are susceptible to the "network effect" (which doesn't mean they're networked together). The value of such products increase as a function of the number of people who use them. Sometimes this is because they are literally networked together (such as telephones) and in some cases it's because it improves the support structure. In many cases it is aided by economy of scale. A car is more valuable to me with more than a hundred million of them in the country than it would be if there were only a thousand, because a hundred million can economically support a large number of gas stations and a mature road system. The network effect promotes concentration and shakeout, because the value it adds isn't represented in the product price. The classic example of this in recent years was the video-tape format wars. Betamax partisans will claim up and down that it was always superior to VHS, but videotapes are very subject to network effect and VHS crushed Betamax through simple numbers. Betamax is now dead and there is only a single standard. There is an advantage in buying the most popular choice irrespective of any other merits it or its competitors may have, and at a certain point that merit may outweigh all other criteria, at which point all the other choices are doomed. That's what happened to Betamax; when VHS achieved 75% marketshare, the only way for Betamax to go was down. But minority platforms can start nearly at parity and watch their support decline as they lose ground to another competitor as it grows, and if the other competitor is viewed as being inferior then this can be an ego-bruising experience. That is what Betamax partisans observed. This explains the "computer wars"; Windows has won because quantity has a quality all its own, and that quality happens to be more important than any other: broad support by third party hardware and software vendors. At this point in the state of the market, that factor is more important than any other, so the Amiga and Atari ST vanished, OS/2 is nearly gone, and the Mac is on the critical list but hanging on, just barely. And the cry goes up: "But it just isn't fair!" True, it may not seem to be. But that is how markets work, and they don't really have anything to do with "fair". And that same thing happens in the marketplace of ideas. Memes and philosophies compete in exactly the same way. Successful ones spread, unsuccessful ones fall by the wayside and die or are absorbed by more successful ones. Many of them are subject to network effect, which strengthens the winners and weakens the losers. Take languages, for instance: once there were thousands in common use, but as the centuries have gone by, a few large ones have spread and become more and more common. The value of a language is extremely enhanced by network effect: the more people who speak it, the more useful it is to each person who is fluent in it. While it's possible to be multilingual, as time goes on less popular languages will decline and vanish because there becomes less and less reason for new speakers to pick them up and older speakers die. Gaelic as a language probably won't survive another century, for example. Many languages are already gone. And a few languages now dominate the world: English, Russian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese. One sign that a language is endangered is when the majority of its speakers are multilingual. At that point, its days as a useful language are numbered. Eventually one language will dominate because its value through network effect will overwhelm all others. That doesn't mean no other language will be spoken, but nearly everyone will speak it either as a first or second language. Right now the odds-on bet for that language is English; it already dominates certain important areas such as science and engineering. English is the most common second-language on Earth. It doesn't matter how this happened; the point is that the direction of the future is clear. There is now a very strong incentive for people all over the world to learn English because there is so much important information available in it. Many smaller languages may be preserved essentially by putting them in zoos; there is an active effort, for example, by some American Indian tribes to work to preserve their languages. But while that may work, there will exist no mono-lingual speakers of those languages; they'll be museum pieces, not living languages. The same thing happens with cultures and economic systems. There is a network affect for those, though some gain more advantage from that than others do. Capitalism gains more from network effect than does any other economic system, because of the gains possible through trade and because of economy of scale. The more people there are in capitalist systems, the more opportunity there is to take advantage of economy of scale to produce more goods at a lower price per unit, because the markets exist to absorb them. As a result, overall more goods are created per participant and the standard of living rises, to the benefit of most of the people in the capitalist cultures. And political systems also compete in this way. If you study the history of Europe beginning shortly after the death of Charlemagne, what you find is thousands of petty tribes and city states all of which were independent. For much of Europe the only uniting factor was the Church and its control was limited (though it darned well tried). As time goes on you find more and more of them banding together or being conquered by others, and larger and larger nations being created. There was a time when Normandy and Burgundy were separate nations, for example; now they're part of France. There was a time when Venice and Genoa fought wars. The most recent examples of this were the combination of the German city states into a single nation, and the creation of the USSR. The latter didn't hold together, but Germany is united (after a temporary setback during the Cold War). Europe is in the process of making another step in that direction with the creation of the EU. It's going to be a difficult road but the end result is certain -- and it's also necessary. The adoption of a unified currency is one example of where this will create great benefit, because currencies are also subject to network effect. The Euro will ultimately be stronger than any other currency on the planet except the US Dollar. Fundamental political philosophies go through this, too, and unsuccessful ones also fall by the wayside and die. Monarchy is now essentially dead. There do still exist kings but most of those are symbolic; the few hereditary rulers remaining control second-rate nations or worse and are only peripherally important in the world. The only monarchies in the world which remain even somewhat important are those of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and that is only due to an accident of natural resources. Ralph Peters makes a good case that the most profound cultural change in history was the invention of the information society. It begins with the development of movable type printing, goes into high gear with the telegraph and matured with the creation of the Internet; it is exceedingly subject to network effect, and it is taking over the world. This quote is particularly apropos: Today, collisions between cultures infect weaker cultures with self-doubt (loud assertions of superiority are the symptom indicating that the disease has entered a critical phase). We live in a world where the success stories are increasingly evident to all, while the fear of failure haunts the majority of the world's population. That fear may manifest itself as rabid pride and spur aggression, but we must not mistake the terrorist's or tyrant's desperation for anything other than what it is: fundamental, inarticulate terror. Spite, hatred, and fitful violence are hallmarks of decline. They are the responses of frightened men who cannot bear the image in the mirror held up by the globalization of information. Many liberals have been asking (nay, screaming) the question "We need to know why they hate us!" The real answer is there: their cultures are doomed because they can't compete, and they're holding on with all their strength to the past. bin Laden hates us because we are the future, and he doesn't like it. He is nostalgic for a golden era 800 years gone, but that is just as pointless as people being nostalgic for horse-drawn buggies. His demands amount to a requirement that Western culture and values not pollute the Muslim nations; his demand for removal and disassociation of all western people from those nations is because whereever we go, our culture goes with us and outcompetes what's already there. Regardless of inherent merit, the other cultures will ultimately lose in the marketplace of ideas, because the overwhelming advantage that liberal democracy has due to network effect has become so strong as to make all other systems obsolete. Mutterings of "quality of life" or "traditional values" or "cultural imperialism" are pointless; the competition isn't based on those things, and just as in products the technical merits don't necessarily determine the winners in commercial markets. One culture may be stronger in one thing and another in something else, but there can be and inevitably will be only one winner -- and it's going to be ours. Peters makes a convincing case that widespread access to information serves as an economic and cultural "force multiplier", making each citizen more powerful than those in societies where information is tightly controlled. The problem for those cultures is that if they open up access to information, their other values will fall. But if they don't, then they can't compete and they'll fall anyway. It's not that we're actively trying to stamp out their cultures, it's just that in the marketplace of ideas, their cultures will lose. That is the dilemma that nations as diverse as China, India, and Saudi Arabia are facing, and they're all approaching it in different ways. Ultimately only full embracement will succeed; of the nations just listed, India has the best chance for that reason. Yes, the losers hate us. No, that doesn't prove that we're wrong or that we must necessarily change. It may well be that some of our policies will need to be reexamined, but there will be no wholesale pullback. The future cannot be stopped, not by Muslim reactionaries and not by bleeding heart American liberals. (discussion in progress)
Mayor Giuliani agrees, and more power to him. He's rejected the check. They're not going to cash it. Whether you agree with Prince bin Talal's opinion or not, that was entirely the wrong place and time to deliver it. (discuss)
The problem with that is that it makes it much, much too easy to cross-reference all those databases with each other. The threat to privacy is obvious, and where it's been showing up the most lately is in identity theft. So it's good to see that the State of California has outlawed the use of the SSN for most of those purposes. Health Plans will no longer be able to use the SSN, banks will no longer be able to print the SSN on bank statements, and credit reporting bureaus won't be permitted to key on the SSN. It's about damned time. This doesn't apply to the rest of the US, but since California has over 15% of the population of the nation, a change like this will inevitably affect everyone else -- and once the new systems are in place to serve California it will that much easier for other states to pass similar laws. (However, expect lawsuits trying to overturn this law.) (discussion in progress)
In the missions ahead for the military, you will have everything you need -- every resource, every weapon, every means to assure full victory for the United States and the cause of freedom. That sounds more like a statement that we're not going to let budget constraints keep us from fully supplying our troops with all the equipment they need in combat, which is a much different thing. I believe that this statement was not meant by Bush to imply that we were considering the use of nuclear weapons; I think it's being taken out of context by reporters. Which is not to say that we are not considering the use of nuclear weapons. But it has to be understood that military planning is not the same as military intent. A great deal of planning goes into doomsday scenarios. Somewhere in the Pentagon, there are plans for how the US would invade Canada if that nation were to be taken over by forces inimical to the US. It won't happen, of course, but I have no doubt whatever that the plans exist, just in case. The reason is that planning is extremely time consuming; the result isn't five pages long and done in a week. (More like 5,000 pages, actually, taking six months or a year.) Most of the plans have to be made ahead of time so that they can be updated rapidly when needed. Equally, while a war is going on, there will be lots of lower level plans being made primarily so as to give options to the top commanders and the President; most of those plans also won't be used, but the main reason to do the planning is simply to work out feasibility and to estimate results, so that they can be evaluated for political and military effectiveness. I have no doubt whatever that there are planners in the Pentagon working out various ways in which nukes could be used in Afghanistan and elsewhere, so that if Bush asks "What would happen if we were to nuke Kandahar?" they'd be able to give him an answer. (discuss)
And I think there may also be some political pressure in Europe to get involved. With the US being hurt and going into a war, the fact that Britain stood right up and got involved too makes
The flip side of this is that Graymatter requires certainservices and server privileges to run, and not everyone has those available. Blogger will work with any place on the web that provides storage; everything else is remote. But if Evan ever decides he's tired of paying his own money to provide a free service to other people, and throws in the towel and shuts Blogger down, there are going to be a lot of people dead in the water. I guess you pays (or don't) your money and takes your choice. I paid about $1500 for my own server so that I wouldn't be vulnerable that way, but not everyone has that kind of pocket change to toss around for a hobby, let alone easy access to broadband. (discussion in progress)
Many, many amendments have been proposed over the years, and most of those have been stupid or misguided. But the barriers for amendment are sufficiently high so that there's only really been one amendment which did pass and shouldn't have (Prohibition, later repealed). In recent years, we've seen proposals for amendments to ban school busing, or to prevent people from burning the flag, or numerous other things of that kind. That is not what the amendment process should be about. So it's refreshing to read about a proposed amendment that actually makes sense. In wake of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, Representative Brian Baird of Washington has proposed an amendment that would permit the governors of the states to appoint replacement Representatives in case one quarter or more of the members of the House die or are incapacitated in an attack. It answers a question which wasn't ever considered before: What if Washington DC got nuked? Certainly all of us hope we never find out, but it is a possibility that can't be ignored, and if it happens there must be a way for the government to go on. The Constitution currently permits governors to appoint replacements for Senators, and there's a large body of law and constitutional principles for rapidly replacing the President, but the only way now to replace Representatives is to hold emergency elections, which in time of war would be both too difficult and too slow. This amendment corrects that; I think it is an excellent proposal and I expect it to pass and be ratified easily. (discuss)
If you were looking at this war from a strictly military standpoint, without regard to the political situation behind it, you'd probably strike when the iron is hot. Now that we control the air over Afghanistan, we'd go after Taliban troop concentrations and artillery installations and try to roll over them as fast as possible. But that would win the battle but maybe lose the war, by exchanging a bad situation for one which perhaps would be worst. The "Northern Alliance" is less than allied; it's more like they're temporarily cooperating to prevent them all from being annihilated by the Taliban. But once the threat of the Taliban was removed, there's every reason to believe that the four factions in the Northern Alliance would begin to fight each other, again, as they were doing before the Taliban showed up. So until that problem has been solved, we can't take out the one thing which is keeping them from fighting each other: the Taliban's army. Ironic, is it not? (discuss)
In 1980, there was an attempt to use the military to rescue the American hostages being held in Tehran, which ended in disaster. Two aircraft collided in the desert in Iran, killing a large number of men. As with any military operation, there was analysis afterwards to find out what had gone right and what had gone wrong. At that time, world military operations were planned in the Pentagon through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In this case, when the operation was planned, the one thing which stood out on analysis was that in the planning, everyone had to play. The only way that the Joint Chiefs could come up with an agreement on the plan was for there to be members of all four branches of the military involved in the operation, whether it made sense or not. In particular, the pilots of the helicopters were Marines even though they were Navy helicopters with which they were not familiar This may have contributed to the collision. There were other problems, too, which lead back to a command failure. Senator Barry Goldwater led an effort in Congress to pass a bill reorganizing the military command structure. Instead of military operations being planned in Washington via the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a series of regional commands would be set up, placing one man in charge of all forces from all branches in a given zone. When military operations in a given area were needed, the specific regional command would be responsible, and regardless of which branch he was from, every US military asset in the area would work for him. He was then tasked with solving a problem, not with trying to make sure everyone got a chance to play. The first use of the new command structure was Operation Desert Storm, the war to retake Kuwait. Army General Schwarzkopf was the regional commander, but he used his resources as he should, and didn't favor the Army. When it made sense for an operation to be handled by Navy jets, the Navy did it and the Air Force kept its mouth shut, for example. And as we all know, the result was one of the most lopsided military victories in the history of the US. There were many reasons for that, not least of which was that Schwarzkopf himself was a truly superb commander. But the localized unified command structure was another piece of the puzzle. There wasn't the kind of inter-service wrangling involved which loused up the Tehran rescue. My fear is that the reorganization that Rumsfeld is contemplating will take us back to the bad old days of centralized planning-by-committee, which was such a failure. Ultimately, every military operation has to have one single officer in charge, who can make decisions and issue orders and have them followed without argument. (discuss)
A flag with 48 stars. Don't Hawaii and Alaska count? The flag has had 50 stars since 1959. Where did they find that thing? (discuss)
They're both right about that latter, actually. But Ambassador Zaeef is not correct that phase 1 failed. It was never the goal to totally destroy anti-aircraft defenses. The point was to destroy all the anti-aircraft defenses capable of reaching jets at 10,000 feet or higher i.e. their SAMs and the radars that guide them. The guns don't matter; there was no point in attacking those, and since many of them are in the middle of densely populated areas there was considerably political risk involved in attacking them because of the danger of causing excessive civilian casualties. So phase 1 didn't fail because of it not knocking out the guns, because it was never intended to knock out the guns. It succeeded in gaining air supremacy, as proved by the fact that we are now making attacks during the day. And Ambassador Zaeef as much as admits that in the press conference. He's in the position of having to try to put the best face on events that he can, but it's a thankless and hopeless task, and his performance so far has been pitiful (and it's going to get worse as things progressively deteriorate for the Taliban). It may eventually be necessary to go after some guns, if we finally start using helicopters in a big way, because they'll operate low enough for guns to reach. But helicopters aren't going to be operating anywhere near the cities, and any guns in the countryside can be attacked later if need be. The only case I can think of in which it might be necessary to take out guns in the cities would be if we were moving ground forces into the area, because anti-aircraft guns are also rather good anti-tank guns. (discuss)
No. They are not an enemy. They may be wrong, they may even be fools, but they are Americans exercising their civil right to have and publicly express an opinion about the political decisions being made by this country. Free speech must protect unpopular speech or it is an illusion. That is part of what we're fighting this war to preserve, so let's not ourselves destroy what our enemies cannot. (discuss)
There was a piece on NPR this morning about Internet security and how hard it's going to be to do because software is designed for efficiency and then the security issues are plugged when they occur and that leaves lots of holes open for cyberterrorists and the only way to fix it is to get designers to build in security from the start. Security issues are a subset of the more general problem of finding bugs. It sounds as if NPR reached someone who knew what they were talking about: in fact the best way to prevent bugs is to work from a clean design. It is virtually impossible to take an existing unclean design and really find and fix all the bugs. For one thing, it's impractical to actually thoroughly test any non-trivial software package. The number of test cases becomes astronomical; it would literally take until the Sun explodes to try them all. For another, as a general rule, for every two bugs you fix, you create one new one -- and it may be more serious than the ones you just fixed. During the final stages of a project, the testing staff will report bugs as they're found, and what we usually do is to evaluate each bug on the basis of risk and reward: how serious a bug is it and what is the chance that fixing it will create something new? If it's not serious but the risk is high, we usually make the decision to deliberately not fix it. Any bug with low risk (i.e. fixing a mispelling in some text) will usually get fixed if time allows. When you have a bug which is important and also risky, then you have to search your soul and make a call. (That's when software managers earn their pay.) None of this has anything to do with who is actually doing it (hackers or hired people); it's simply a mathematical fact that full testing can't be done in any reasonable amount of time. It is, however, possible to create highly reliable programs, but doing so requires using rigorous design procedures and maintaining a lot of discipline. Far and away the most important thing to do if you want true reliability is to freeze the performance specification. "Feature creep" is easily the biggest source of problems; it makes it almost impossible to create and stick to a clean design. The second most important thing to do is to not start coding too soon. On a well run project, you won't write a single line of production code until at least half the project duration has passed. But these things are rarely done; they're expensive and they make management extremely nervous. (The third most important thing is to not try to be clever. "Straightforward" is better than "nifty", because "nifty" is usually fragile.) As to applying hackers to the problem, I think that would be worse than useless. The kind of discipline which is needed to really do it well is almost diametrically opposite to the hacker approach to life and code, which is almost totally undisciplined. When was the last time that hackers wrote the user manual before they started writing code? But that's what you really need to do, because the "user manual" is the detailed performance specification. (discuss)
But this event is truly remarkable, not for what was said, but for how it was delivered. Ordinarily these announcements would have been broadcast by the Voice of Shariat, a radio station in Afghanistan. However, it's been destroyed in the bombing. So a tape of this speech was delivered to Voice of America and to the BBC. (And they broadcast it. Both of them did.) (discuss)
One thing that is interesting is that the so-called "Religious Right" in the US, epitomized by Jerry Falwell, seeks to reimpose four of these seven on us: Domination by a restrictive religion (obviously), family or clan as basic unit of social organization (i.e. "Family values", neighborhood schools [i.e. apartheid], etc.), Restrictions on free flow of information (suppression of science and "secular humanism", other forms of censorship), and arguably also the subjugation of women. The American far-left actually also suffers from four of them: restrictions on information (in the name of "political correctness", suppression of everything which could conceivably offend anyone else's sensibilities), inability to accept responsibility for failure (the cult of the victim), domination by a restrictive religion (actually, a restrictive belief system of political correctness and cultural relativism), and low prestige assigned to work (anti-capitalism). When the United States passed the First Amendment, it clearly ended two of these (restriction of information, domination by religion). It already had a valuation for education and a work ethic and has never been susceptible to the cult of victimhood (which is a modern invention). The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the cities ended the power of families and clans. And it's interesting that the rise of the US to status of a world economic and military power coincides almost exactly with the process of emancipation of women, ending the seventh and last one. The US began to be a world power at the same time as the Suffrage movement, and arrived just as the 19th amendment (vote for women) was ratified. The US became the world power in the 1950's and 1960's as its women began to be a major and important part of its workforce. (discuss)
There are reports of wholesale defections of Taliban troops in the north. These are from the Northern Alliance, who have a vested interest in making it seem like the Taliban are falling apart, so they may be exaggerated or even fictional. But I think that there's a lot of truth in these reports; I think that the Taliban really are weakening. Let's hope it's true. (discussion in progress)
Update: Regarding Berkeley, case in point.
It reinforces the need to always keep in mind the three questions that Ted Nelson recommends we ask whenever we read any statement anywhere: Who says? Who's he? How's he know? What person is the source of the information? How did that person find out? These are important things. "Independent confirmation" may not actually be independent, for instance. These days the news-gathering organizations constantly snoop on each other, and if one of them reports something incorrectly, many others will echo it, with or without attribution. The fact that both CNN and Reuters report something doesn't mean it's true, since one may be quoting the other and the other may have blown it. This has been happening quite a lot. One example were the reports of release of a hazardous liquid in a DC subway station yesterday; it turned out to be some sort of kitchen cleaner. Hoaxes work because they tell us things we already want, or fear, to be true. Britney Spears will die someday (everybody does) and with as many celebrities as there are, statistically speaking there's a chance that someone famous will die suddenly and unexpectedly every few months. So this was a plausible hoax. The kinds of stories about further terrorist attacks which have been going around are the same way. The September 11 attack was so completely unexpected and so terrible in its consequences that it suddenly seems as if there is no attack mechanism which might not also be possible. Since then, every time there is any kind of problem with a jet (especially a crash) the first thing every one of us will think is "Oh, no, not again!" To many people it now seems as if terrorist attack is the explanation-of-choice for
In fact, this entire press conference was ludicrous. Nearly everything Ambassador Zaeef says is a lie -- and he knows it. (discuss)
For instance, it refused to review a California case and thus established an important principle in "patient's rights". It refused to hear a case about lawsuits against gun manufacturers, ending a whole series of attempts to use product liability law to put gun manufacturers out of business. It refused to hear Microsoft's appeal of the Circuit Court's antitrust decision. It refused to hear a First Amendment case about nudism. But the two most important refusals yesterday were about much more weighty subjects. It refused to hear a death penalty appeal which contended that the penalty should be changed based on the assumption that more competent defense could have prevented it -- and I think that was a valid decision. If it had been permitted, it would have led to endless second-guessing on appeals about whether a defendant's lawyers had done as good a job as they possibly could have -- even if it was competent. It would never be possible to settle anything in court. And it established new copyright law by refusing to hear the National Geographic case. This will affect the web as we know it. National Geographic issued a CDROM collection which reprinted its entire run of magazines. One of the photographers whose pictures appeared in that collection sued on the basis of it being a new work, which wasn't authorized under the contract he had signed when he sold them his photographs. He claimed that they owed him new royalties. National Geographic claimed that current copyright law permitted them to sell old material in new forms. A circuit court disagreed, because the new collection had different advertising and was thus a "new work". By refusing to hear this case, the Court reaffirms an active decision made last June that authors do have rights to new payment for web publishing. Going forward, it means that contracts that writers and photographers sign will simply have more verbiage in them. But going backward, it means that a lot of older information available now may not be soon. (I'm still waiting for someone to sue Google for the Deja News archive, not to mention for all the cached web pages they serve up.) It's amazing how much work you can get done by sitting on your hands, isn't it? (discussion in progress)
This is probably the end of the three days of activity that was originally planned. In the next phase, I don't think that operations will cease. Instead, I suspect we'll start flying routine patrols over Afghanistan at all hours, and attack concentrations of tanks and artillery where they're found, possibly also attacking certain infantry concentrations when it is strategically important to do so. It won't be the kind of (sort of) full-scale preplanned missions, though, which they've been flying so far but more of a search-and-destroy type mission. Jets will spot targets of opportunity, radio for permission to attack, and then take them out. (discuss)
His contention was that the order was illegal. He was ordered to wear UN insignia and to serve as part of a UN peacekeeping force. It is true that a soldier is supposed to refuse to follow an illegal order, but that's supposed to be for things like violations of the Geneva Convention. In other words, you can't get away with working in a death camp just because you were following orders. It doesn't apply to things like this, which amounted to a disagreement about policy. Policy isn't a soldier's business. He's lucky he isn't serving time. (discuss)
I'm far from being an "Anyone But Microsoft" person; I use what works and I've been using Microsoft products for a long time. While they are not necessarily the absolute best products of their kind that one could conceive of, I stopped looking for ultimates a long time ago. Their stuff works and it gets the job done -- and that's all I ask from anything. I have thought for a long time that arguments against Microsoft bundling things into their operating systems were incorrect. So I don't think they should have been prosecuted for putting Netscape out of business. That was just competition, and I don't consider it to have been "unfair" competition What they should have been prosecuted for was unfair and exclusionary licensing. That was what resulted in the first consent decree, and it should have been the subject of the antitrust suit. And Microsoft's current attempt to switch to a subscription basis is a blatant use of market monopoly to raise prices. It would only be legal if it was revenue-neutral, but Microsoft itself says that's not the case and fully expects revenue to rise because of it. There's no two ways about this: for all the double-talk about "simplification", the reason for making this change is to create a guaranteed and larger revenue stream for Microsoft, and the only reason they'll be able to get away with it is because there are no real alternatives for their customers. (Sorry, Mac and Linux fans, I stand by that statement.) It is not illegal to be a monopoly. (A lot of people don't realize that.) There's no question that Microsoft is a monopoly within the definition given by the law. A monopoly doesn't have to have 100% market share; rather, it has to have enough of a market share so that it has the ability to unilaterally raise prices outside of market forces. If it then does so, it is in violation of the law -- and that's precisely what Microsoft is trying to do with this new "software as service" concept. Putting it off for a few months is no victory; the only victory will be if the old and new licensing plans coexist, permitting their customers to decide for themselves which to use. Which is why I think that these two news events are actually cause-and-effect. The licensing plan wasn't postponed because of customer complaints (despite what this article says). Microsoft no longer needs to care what its customers think (another good definition of "monopoly"). It was postponed because of the antitrust suit. Microsoft is now committed to a new phase of their antitrust trial which will include a new examination of behavior, and their new licensing plan is a blatant violation of antitrust law and would surely have come up in court had it been in effect when the trial resumed. A delay until next July may put it beyond the scope of the court hearings -- or at least, I think that's what Microsoft is hoping. The Feds should not be fooled; the details of the plan should become an issue in the trial. (discussion in progress)
"What we are finding is that when people watch a program with violence or sex, they think about violence and sex," said Bushman. "The sex and violence registers much more strongly than the messages the advertisers are hoping to deliver." Or that when people are thinking about violence and sex they decide to watch TV shows about it as a safe outlet for those feelings. (By the way, why did "sex" creep into there?) They claim that their correlation shows that more TV violence begets more violence in the real world, despite such things as the fact that violent crime in the US has declined for the last few years. Suppose, just suppose, that for some unidentified reason there is more of a tendency for Americans now to get violent feelings -- but that most of them are watching violent television shows as a vicarious way of getting rid of those feelings. In that case, decreasing television violence would increase real-world violence as those people no longer had a safe outlet for those feelings. It's not that I consider this likely, it's that they haven't disproved this with their study. Their conclusion may be true, it's just that their evidence doesn't prove it. (discuss)
But to me, what stood out was this: I watched the live broadcast and the rerun of its rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was. I looked at that, and thought about it, because my first reaction was "Of course! What else would he do?" It's possible that the story is exaggerated (a hundred floors?) but the point is made: someone saw someone else in distress and helped them. Yes, we do that. I can't conceive of not doing that. (Does anyone have a reference for that story? I hadn't heard of it before.) It's not so much that I don't consider that praiseworthy, as that I would consider anything else to be contemptible. I'm simply mystified: what else would the Romanian author have expected? I took Red Cross first-aid training. It's an interesting course. One of the things they say, and I believe it to be true, is that when someone gets hurt, people will rush to them. They want to help, but they don't know what to do. The Red Cross tells you that you should start giving orders: point to someone and tell them to do something if you need it -- and they will. And they'll be glad to have been given the opportunity to do something constructive. If you read a history of the Normandy invasion, one of the things which stands out was the extreme bravery and selflessness of American medics at Omaha beach. While they had red crosses painted on their helmets, artillery shells and mortars and machine guns don't respect such things. And yet, when everyone else was taking cover against the machine gun fire, the medics would run back into harm's way to try to retrieve a wounded man. The medics were universally praised by veterans of that battle as being the bravest of the brave. This is who we are; this is what we do. For all our divisions and internal squabbling, when it really comes down to it, we're there for each other. (discuss)Update: Mathew sends me this link which describes the men with the handicapped woman. It wasn't a hundred floors, but it was 68. Close enough for government work. Update: Iain sends these two links which say that the woman got away safely. I am glad to hear that. He also mentions that until these men helped her, others had run past her without doing so. That isn't surprising. But she did get saved; that's the point. Update 20011012: It was probably a hoax. (I don't get taken in very often; I probably should have noticed "Cassius Clay"; that's not something a Romanian would know since Muhummad Ali hasn't used that name for more than 35 years.) Update 20011014: According to Bill, it has now been discovered that it is genuine after all.
Four UN workers were killed when the building they were in was hit, prompting an appeal from their boss in Pakistan that "People need to distinguish between combatants and those innocent civilians who do not bear arms." That's all well and good, but a bomber is not a pair of tweasers. Satellite cameras are not microscopes. Combatants don't have red targets painted on them to make them easier to pick out. The Taliban have not painted all official targets dayglo orange in order to make them easier to find and attack. Our intelligence people seem to have done an excellent job so far, in fact, in identifying targets and our front line people have been doing an equally good job in hitting them. But there will always be targets which are identified incorrectly and there will always be misses. It's the nature of the beast. It's to be regretted, but it can't entirely be avoided. The only way to prevent it completely is not to fight and thus to give our enemies free hand to keep attacking us. That's not acceptable. (discuss) Update: The four UN employees who were killed were near a radio tower which was a legitimate target.
The Afghan Northern Alliance is happy (ecstatic, even) that the US and UK are bombing the Taliban. But so far the bombing has been concentrated on eliminating Taliban air power and anti-aircraft capabilities, especially radars and control centers. This is SOP for Americans in a war during the last fifty years; we always try to attain air supremacy before doing anything else. But that, as such, is of little use to the Northern Alliance, who had visions of their forces on the ground being supported directly by US air strikes against Taliban forces. It's not completely clear that this will happen. "Support for the Northern Alliance" has been one of the stated goals of this air campaign, at least publicly. But it's not that simple. The problem is that Pakistan, an essential part of our effort, strongly dislikes the Northern Alliance and doesn't want it in power in Afghanistan. Further, the Northern "Alliance" isn't really much of an alliance; they've banded together for the moment, but before the rise of the Taliban they used to fight each other. If the Taliban are defeated, there's good reason to believe that they will start fighting each other again. So the US doesn't necessarily want to hand the country to them instantly; a more controlled transition is in our best interests. Their interest in the defeat of the Taliban is congruent with ours, but there is little else we have in common. We are not on their side, we're on our own side. (discuss)
Each time we create a new instrument which is more sensitive than those which came before it, more is revealed to us and it never fails to puzzle. I have been watching the public announcements from the Very Large Telescope project in La Silla, one of the finest pieces of engineering on the planet. It will be the most sensitive telescope in existence when it is completed, but in the mean time they are already discovering amazing things with it. They have located a double star whose plane of rotation in in line with us, so that they eclipse each other. This permits extremely precise calculations of the diameters of the two stars and of their orbital period, and that combined with spectroscopic analysis has permitted a very precise characterization of them. They are both very young, less than ten million years old, and their orbital period is only three days; they are calculated to be only 8 million km apart, one seventh of the distance from Mercury to the Sun. Which is puzzling: how could two stars form so close together? Or if not that, how could they come to be in such a close orbit so soon after formation? How did they shed their kinetic energy to come into such close orbit? One possibility is that they are in retrograde orbits, so that they both spin clockwise but orbit around each other counter-clockwise. If so, then tidal bulges on each would try to fight rotational energy; and they would approach each other more and more closely as they rotated less and less rapidly; the process would end either in collision or with the two bodies being tide-locked to each other, with their rotational periods and orbital periods identical. There's no way yet to tell whether that's happened. The energy involved would manifest as heat in the two stars (from turbulence), added to the heat of collapse. Up to about 25 years ago, enormous work was done trying to explain planetery formation based on our knowledge of our own system, and a plausible mechanism was described. But most of the external stellar systems with planets which have now been discovered don't make sense within that model. They're in strange orbits: gas giants closer than Mercury, or with orbits almost like comets. There is so much yet to learn. Isn't it wonderful? (discuss)
I suspect they want us to stop dropping the bombs. Sorry, that part isn't negotiable. (discuss)
Update: Here's a more complete report. Update 20011009: Eye witness report from the jet: The stewardess yelled, "Get that guy!" And I want to tell you, people just reacted so incredibly quickly. You know Americans will never be led to slaughter again on an airplane. They just won't be. Everybody was used to just sitting down and being quiet and doing what people said. And you know what, they're just going to fight to the death now, truly. Update 20011009: Here's an extended account.
Of course, with only three weeks to mobilize, this may be all we are capable of doing. It takes a while to get supplies flowing; you have to prime a ship-based pipeline of fuel and spare parts and ordnance. (You have to figure between one and two hundred tons of cargo per sortie by a heavy bomber.) Another limiting factor may be jet tankers for mid-air refueling. One possible outline for the upcoming war is that we continue bombing with gradually rising intensity for a while (a few weeks), and hope that the Northern Alliance can defeat the Taliban or that the Taliban will crumble and abdicate; then we engage in diplomacy and nation building afterwards. If that fails, then we would build up both air and ground assets in the area and come spring begin a much more intensive air assault in preparation for a real ground attack by multiple divisions and/or special forces. For the moment we're concentrating on capital assets: guns, jets, radars, control centers, supply dumps, Mullah Omar's estate in Kandahar (heh). They're trying to destroy strategic assets, as well as to gain air supremacy. That can be done with a minimum of casualties on both sides. A transition to watch for will be when the bombing switches emphasis to human assets, i.e. Taliban troop formations. Casualties (on their side) will stairstep when that happens. Initially the point of it will be to try to break the morale of Taliban forces. But if we're really serious about it (trying to kill rather than trying to frighten) we'll be carpet-bombing, and then it's going to get really ugly. This is most likely to first happen just north of Kabul, to weaken the forces which are preventing the Northern Alliance from taking Kabul. If Kabul falls, that may cause the Taliban's support to crumble and end this phase of the war. There's good reason to believe that their grip is loosening already. (discuss) Update: Actually, it was only fifteen jets, not twenty five. Five were heavy bombers, the other ten were F/A-18 Hornets flying from our carriers. And they only launched fifteen Tomahawks. This is not what you'd call a massive attack. Update 20011009: Another possibility for how few jets have been used is that there simply isn't all that much in the way of capital assets to attack.
Yvonne Ridley is a British reporter who illegally crossed the border into Afghanistan in disguise, and was caught and detained by the Taliban. She played a high stakes game with her own life and got caught. Regardless of what we may think of the Taliban, Ridley was breaking the law. Had someone from Afghanistan done the same thing to Great Britain, they would have been imprisoned, too. And it is arguable that Ridley was acting as a spy (her purpose was to get in, find out what was going on, get out and report on that), and if so she could have been shot. So she was unreasonably lucky when the Taliban decided to release her (for propaganda purposes). Unfortunately, the timing was a bit wrong, and she was still in Afghanistan when the bombing started. Now they claim they have released her anyway. Her mother has been extremely worried, and rightly so. She was elated when she discovered her daughter was going to be released, and then again worried once she heard that the bombing started. She said the following to reporters: I last heard from the Foreign Office last night and they were doubtful that the hand-over would take place at the border. The Taleban said they were going to release Yvonne yesterday. She was coming home. My daughter Yvonne was a free woman. The British Government said she was coming home. Why then could they not delay the bombing for a few hours? I just cannot accept that. She can not be serious! For crying out loud! Did she really think that they were going to delay the attack just so that her daughter could be extracted from a problem that she had gotten herself into? It's a good thing that she's free, but her safety could not be an issue in the timing of this attack. The father of one of the American missionaries being held in Afghanistan, who have not been freed, is in Pakistan right now. He is remaining out of the public eye and refusing to talk to reporters, and that is the correct thing to do. While he cares about his daughter, it's clear that he understands that she is not what this war is about. I respect him much more for his silence than I do Ridley's mother. (discuss)
But they have a responsibility to themselves, their cause, and to all of us to try to make a rational and convincing argument for their point of view, which sure as heck doesn't seem to have happened yesterday. "I don't want to see more Americans die because of a militarist cowboy, or be dragged into a war, a long land conflict. That's where I think Bush is taking us." I'm sure not too thrilled about war, myself. But I also don't want to see thousands more Americans die in terrorist attacks on our cities. How does he suggest we stop that? Actually, he didn't even mention the possibility of further attacks on us; it doesn't appear to be an issue. Everyone here condemns what happened, but people feel that there must be an alternative policy, that war cannot be the only answer. But until you can tell us what that alternative is, then your argument is empty. The mere fact that you don't like the answer doesn't mean the answer is wrong. Sometimes there are no good choices. That's how things are in the real world. Asked about alternatives to war, she said: "We have international standards. We don't need to attack the Afghani people." That's not an answer, that's doubletalk. The question is not whether we need to attack Afghanistan, the question is how we prevent al Qaeda from attacking us in future. In fact, there's a consistent theme all through these reactions: they're very short sighted. They're looking only at the immediate events and not taking a broader view and considering secondary consequences, especially the consequences of inaction. They look at deaths which happened yesterday and are horrified, and that's legitimate. (War is a horrible thing. Robert E. Lee said, "It is good that war is so terrible, else we should come to love it too much.") But is a hundred deaths tomorrow more important than ten thousand deaths in six months, merely because it's sooner and more immediate? Or are a hundred deaths inflicted by our side more important than ten thousand killed by our enemies simply because the blood is on our hands? We're not fighting to avenge the deaths in NYC; we're fighting to prevent deaths in Philadelphia, and Miami, and Seattle. (discuss) And do they not see the fundamental inconsistency in the fact that they were able to make their protests against war yesterday because American men had died in previous wars to preserve and protect the protester's rights of free speech and free assembly? Update: Joel Achenbach sez: We understand that there are people in the world who vociferously protest the expansion of American culture and Western-style corporate capitalism, who see the spread of McDonald's and Coca-Cola as a vile toxin amid the indigenous cultures of the planet. These people are known as "American college kids."
His thesis was that bombs which went off when the struck the surface were inherently inefficient. Most of the concussion from the blast made a really big bang and was dissipated into the atmosphere. While impressive as all get out, it actually wasted most of the power of the blast. His contention was that the bombs should be designed to be ultrastrong and to have a delayed fuse, so that they penetrated the ground a good distance and then exploded. Furthermore, he believed that in this design bigger was better. The result was the legendary "Tall Boy", (and its successor "Grand Slam", an 11-ton behemoth which was the largest conventional bomb used in the war). These were known as "earthquake bombs", for they would penetrate several hundred feet into the ground and then go off. All of their explosive force was then transmitted into the ground, creating a local earthquake which would shatter structures on the surface (and under the surface) for a wide area. But what they were really good for was destroying railroad tunnels. By that point in the war it had been realized that attacking transportation, especially rail, was an exellent way to disrupt German industry. Tunnels were an obvious target; a bridge can be replaced but tunnels are much more difficult. But conventional bombing had to target tunnel entrances, and the resulting damage could be cleared away. With the earthquake bombs, the attack would target the middle of the tunnel, and a long stretch of it would be collapsed. That removed that tunnel from the transportation net for the duration. It turned out that the earthquake bomb was superb for attacking many kinds of structures. For example, to bring down buildings, instead of blasting the structure directly an earthquake bomb would destabilize its foundation. The effect was the same, except that an earthquake bomb was better at it. And nothing is better at attacking underground bunkers. According to this article, the US has a modern equivalent which uses a tactical nuke. Instead of weighing 11 tons, it weighs about half a ton. It's held within an extremely strong steel casing, and like Tall Boy it's designed to penetrate the ground and detonate well beneath it. If so, and if the US decides to take the step of going nuclear, then this may be another answer for taking out underground tunnel complexes, for the result of a detonation like this would collapse underground structures for a very wide area around the blast. It's speculated that al Qaeda actually have nukes and have them stored in such a tunnel complex; if so, that may justify use of weapons like this. Far better to set off a nuke in the boonies in Afghanistan's mountains than to set one off in Manhattan to finish the job begun on September 11. But of course intelligence on that would have to be extremely good to justify such an attack; it's not something we would do simply on speculation. (discussion in progress)
Update 20011008: It looks as if the threatened violent protests in Indonesia were actually a wet firecracker.
Update: In a poll of Americans, 77% approved of the use $320 million in US tax dollars to send supplies to Afghani refugees.
That's a firestorm There hasn't been one in a city anywhere in the world since 1945. What we did today was to carefully bomb military targets. The Taliban claim that civilians were killed; that's very likely true. They were not deliberately targeted, but it is impossible to avoid killing at least some of them if we are to win this war. But if we actually do set off a "firestorm", you'll know it. (discuss)
Now I'm seeing reports in various places talking about the possibility that the Taliban may have upwards of a hundred operational Stingers.I don't believe it. If they were still working, Al Qaeda would have used some of them by now. A jetliner is a piece of cake for these missiles; they're slow (subsonic), they don't dodge, and they don't drop flares. They're also huge and have multiple engines to hit. Anywhere within ten miles of an airport along a flight path the Stinger would be deadly. I don't believe that if those Stingers were still working that they wouldn't have been used in this way by now, somewhere in the world. (discussion in progress)
Update: President Chirac says that French troops will get involved. As to how much information they were given, they were informed of the attack about an hour before it began, which clearly means they were
I'm afraid for our pilots. On every flight, they put it on the line. Equipment malfunction or a lucky hit by Afghani AAA or a missile may bring them down. They could be killed, or even worse they could be captured. I shudder to think of what might be done to them if they're taken alive. I'm afraid for the American people. I'm afraid of the counterattacks which will surely come. I'm afraid of how much damage we may take. The continental US hasn't been seriously attacked since the war of 1812; our people are used to thinking of war as something that happens somewhere else. This is the first war in our lives where the US itself is going to suffer. There will be more dead bodies in the streets. I'm afraid for the Constitution. This kind of crisis brings out the best and the worst in people; in the name of security some will try to take our rights from us. This cannot be permitted; it's what we are fighting for. If we destroy ourselves in the process of defeating an enemy, we have not won. I'm afraid for our allies. Terrorist counterattacks will surely not be limited to the US. There will be attacks elsewhere in the world. They may be directed at US citizens or interests, our embassies or our people or companies we own, but there will be many others who will be hurt in those attacks, as there were many people from elsewhere in the world who died in the WTC bombing. And I'm afraid for Afghanistan. The people there have already suffered so much; their nation is a shambles after 25 years of war. Their civilians will cluster in ramshackle refugee camps and starve or freeze or die from disease; they'll be caught in bombings or used as human shelds, and their sons will be kidnapped at gunpoint and taken away to fight. And once the fighting ends they'll come back to find a nation destroyed. But I'm not uncertain. What we're doing is right and it is necessary. Awful things are going to happen, and we're going to do some of them. But worse things would have happened if we had not done this, and that's all that matters. (discuss)
Power is off in Kabul, but whether that's because the power system was knocked out or because of civil defense procedures is unknown. As a civil defense procedure it's completely useless. Cruise missiles don't depend on that. They use GPS and terrain mapping radar. Our bombers have inertial guidance systems and GPS and likely also terrain mapping radar if they feel the need to switch it on; they know where they are at all times. They also have FLIR. Any bombing we do for the immediate future is probably going to be from very high altitude from heavy bombers, especially B1's. They will be out of range of Taliban AAA, and will have countermeasures against any SAMs that may be launched. SAMs are guided either by radar, which can be defeated by ECM, or by IR homers, which can be decoyed with flares. Whatever they have (which won't be much) it's old, and certainly something that the US knows all about and will have prepared for. So it's unlikely that we will lose many bombers, if any. (discuss) Update: Power has been restored; it appears that it was intended as a civil defense measure. The bombing was concentrated on the airport.
Of course, the fact that we can communicate with people instantly doesn't mean that they'll tell us the truth when they talk to us. (discuss)
The Taliban's leadership is between a rock and a hard place: they are not capable of giving the US what the US demands, and nothing less will prevent the US from attacking. They cannot give bin Laden up and shut down Al Qaeda. A quarter of their military might (and in fact the best, most disciplined part) is directly loyal to bin Laden rather than to the Taliban directly, and if the Taliban turns on bin Laden those forces will at the very least stop fighting (opening up the Taliban to an attack by the Northern Alliance) and very likely begin directly attacking the Taliban itself. In addition, Al Qaeda is actually responsible for a large part of the funding that is keeping the Taliban itself going; without them, the Taliban's government would be financially unsound. They would no longer be able to pay or supply much of the rest of their army, with all that implies. Morale among the civilians in their area of control is terrible, and at least 20% have decamped and headed for relative safety in refugee camps at or across the border. That has crippled the economy, which was none too healthy anyway. The Taliban are not self sufficient in any important regard: the nation doesn't have an armaments industry and isn't even self-sufficient in food. Prolonged isolation alone represents a deadly danger to their power, but that is far from the most urgent thing they face. So they are reduced now to trying forlorn attempts at diplomacy. They begged bin Laden to leave Afghanistan and take his war with the US somewhere else, and he ignored them. They have been trying everything they can think of to try to engage the US in conversation, which is difficult because the US won't even talk to them. There was their attempt to trade the 8 missionaries for relief from the military pressure, and now their offer to try bin Laden in their own courts under Islamic law. That offer is, of course, a sham; perhaps a tr 
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