I was baffled by the cavalier attitude displayed yesterday by Richard Holbrooke about violence in Afghanistan. Sounding positively Dick-Cheney-ish, Dick Holbrooke waved away concerns about the potential of widespread violence to damage the legitimacy of the upcoming elections. Here he is during an NPR interview, emphasis mine: Q: Wouldn’t the people, though, who can’t vote [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Blackwater’
Holbrooke Gets All Flippant and Cute
Posted: July 28, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Blackwater, casualties, Cheney, elections, Holbrooke
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The Underbelly of the “Civilian Surge”: Blackwater Surge
Posted: July 28, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Blackwater, civilian surge, Department of State, Xe
Much has been made of the so-called “civilian surge” that’s supposed to accompany the military escalation in Afghanistan, but it comes with an ugly caveat: a civilian surge means an escalation in the presence of private military contractors like Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, acting as guards and bodyguards. Nancy Youssef’s McClatchy article last week [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Part 4: Arming the Corrupt Border Police
Posted: March 25, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghan Border Police, Afghanistan, Blackwater, COIN, Congressional Research Service, counterinsurgency, DynCorp
In my first post in this series, I briefly mentioned the idea of a “seal,” i.e. a frontier that blocks the counterinsurgent’s opponents from escaping U.S. firepower and establishing a safe haven. The counterinsurgent wants to trap the opponent in a given geographic area and then convince the local population to expel them into the [...]
The False Choice between the Old and the New, Part II
Posted: January 5, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Ahmadinejad, Arthur Waskow, Blackwater, Boeing, Christian nonviolence, Christianity, defense contractors, Jesus, Lockheed Martin, nonviolence, shomer shalom
As I said in my previous post on this topic, nonviolent and violentist Christians often mistreat the Hebrew scriptures. Violentist Christians assert that violence in the “Old” Testament tradition negates the possibility of nonviolence as a faithful interpretation of scripture. Nonviolent Christians concede the underlying assumption–that the only faithful interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures is [...]
Yesterday I wrote a piece on BraveNewFilms on the U.S. military’s use of outrage-stoking home raids in Afghanistan. (The point: these kinds of raids led directly to the uprising in Fallujah in 2003 that included the bodies of Blackwater contractors being hung over a bridge which then led to U.S. forces decimating Fallujah. That was [...]
