Posted on 12/01/2012 10:40:09 PM PST by nickcarraway
A couple of days ago, speaking in the House of Lords, former British Labour Defence Minister Baron John Gilbert suggested that UK should drop a neutron bomb on the Pak-Afghan border for creating impassable sanitary cordons between the two countries. "Your Lordships may say that this is impractical, but nobody lives up in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan except for a few goats and a handful of people herding them," Baron Gilbert is quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India. "If you told them that some ERRB (Enhanced Radiation/Reduced Blast) warheads were going to be dropped there and that it would be a very unpleasant place to go, they would not go there."
The statement might be disregarded as idle talk of an 85-yer-old former functionary, but several factors prompt to attach a little more importance to it than may come to mind at first glance.
For one, Baron Gilbert, despite being retired from active service, still remains an influential member of the defence and intelligence community in the UK.
But what is more important, the statement reflects the present state of affairs surrounding Afghanistan in view of the expected withdrawal of NATO troops form the country. Britain at the moment has around 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, while the US keeps a much larger contingent which at the moment numbers around 66,000. The numbers are going to be reduced, but at the moment no one can tell for sure to what extent.
Recently, the US and British media reported that while no final decision has been made, the US top military brass is mulling the idea of keeping around 10,000 troops (the options range from 6,000 to 15,000) after the announced withdrawal. To understand the exact figure, one must ask what the troops are going to do there.
Their mission is definitely not going to be "security and assistance" as it has been over the 11 years of their presence in the occupied country. These goals could not be achieved with the 100 plus thousand, and while the number of foreign troops is reducing and the number of "insider attacks" by Afghan troops against the coalition is increasing, the chances of achieving these goals are coming close to zero. And the Taliban are only too eager to wait till the number of foreign troops gets down to the critical point to launch a decisive offensive.
If that is the most probable prospect, then why should the US (and, probably, its allies) want to leave behind any number of soldiers risking their lives like it happened as far back as 1842 when the whole British contingent in Kabul was slaughtered by Afghans?
The answer is simple. Afghanistan plays a specific role in the US strategic plans of imposing its geopolitical pressure on the whole area embracing the Middle East, Central and South Asia. Therefore, it is crucial for the US to maintain at least four or five military bases on its territory for an unlimited and unspecified period of time. Ten to fifteen thousand troops is just the exact number needed for the bases' maintenance.
But this needs at least relative stability. The present Afghan leadership (or whatever leaders are imposed on Afghanistan after the 2014 troops withdrawal and "general elections") are obviously incapable of guaranteeing it.
This leaves only two options. One is trying to establish some dialogue with the Taliban. But neither side seems eager to do this. And recently one of the most vocal instruments of the US "humanitarian" global policy, the Human Rights Watch, unequivocally stated that it is opposed to such dialogue, urging the US administration not to provide immunity to the Taliban fighters in return for peace talks.
But if the negotiation process looks out of question and the West-sponsored leaders lack the capacity to ensure stability in the country, that leaves open only one option – the tactics of the scorched earth.
And in this context, Lord Gilbert's suggestion comes in more than handily.
How about we just irradiate Saudi Arabia and get this fake war on terror over?
Just advertise 'FREE" (whatever).
If you don't understand them, you probably won't understand anybody else.
TWINKIES ~ crates and crates off them.
A Barbra Streisand concert.
Gen. Mc Arthur made a similar suggestion during the Korean war proposing seeding the Chinese border with North Korea with radioactive materials to make it impassable for Chinese troops.
What is even more surprising (but perhaps not...) is that the author of the article didn't bother to fact check to see if a neutron bomb could even be used in this manner, and whether or not this tactic would be feasible or not. This sort of information is readily available in the public domain. You would think that some one in the press would take this opportunity (that was handed to them on a platter) to lambaste and ridicule someone in the government... But, then, as you said: What a bunch of idiots. Libs everywhere are complete bumbling idiots.
LOL. HOw about spraying pig blood everywhere?
Just offer them "free stuff", it worked in the election.
I you want to deny access to an area a neutron bomb is not the way to go; you want something "dirty".
The neutron bomb had nothing to do with depopulation.
It was meant for the European theatre, as a defense against Soviet tank columns. It was a way of having a nuclear weapon with a smaller blast, but a hard radiation burst that would kill the tank crews.
That depopulation BS is a leftist myth, on a par with “war for oil”.
The old boys gone gaga.
I am just reading a book by a young officer dealing with the wars there on that frontier. I take the liberty of a quote about the tribal factions killing each other. Only united in killing the stranger:
Nor are these struggles conducted with the weapons which usually belong to the races of such development. To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer..... At a thousand yards the traveler falls wounded by a well aimed bullet of a breech loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with a ferocity of a South Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of a Stone Age.
The Malakand Field Force.
Winston S. Churchill.
First published 1898.
Now published by Dover Publications.
Mineola, New York.
Nobody has a solution, more is the pity.
!
How about instead, a good old-fashioned thermonuclear device? On both sides of the border!
The Story of the Malakand Field Force.
Winston Churchill.
Dover Publications Inc.
Minneola,New York.
2012.
The whole idea was to empower the steppe peoples -- Turkoman, Kazbek, Uzbek, Tadjiks, whatever -- who were in Gen. Dostum's army and in Ahmad Shah Massoud's mujahedeen army (these were the guys who really threw out the Soviets -- the Taliban came along later) against the Pathans and their international Salafist Al Q'aeda allies.
The Taliban were Pushtu-speaking Pathan and western Pakistani madrassa products from across the mountains, and it was their hosting and providing a nation-state rabat (R&R, training-up, and rear-echelon area) to the international Al Q'aedist terrorists that added up to casus belli between the United States and the Taliban's deemed government of Afghanistan.
Without Taliban/Afghan government support, Al Q'aeda could not have put together the 9/11 attacks in the West, the embassy attacks in Africa, the Bali bombing, and the USS Cole bombing -- or the Khobar Towers attack in 1996 that preceded all these other attacks (20,000 lbs of ANFO in a gasoline tanker, four times the size of the OKC bomb).
That's why we're there -- to extinguish Pathan political and military power and their ability to reinforce across the Khyber Pass. Something that the 'Rats are very busy trying to get the American People to forget, like Svengali hypnotizing one of his subjects, or the NEA maleducating one of theirs.
That's what those deadly "Kabul weather forecast" jokes were about in 2001 -- "partly cloudy to brilliantly sunny with temperatures to 3 million degrees, winds variable to 1800 knots."
Ronnie Barrett has a sure cure for that sh!t.
Arabs are proud of, and famous for, their marksmanship, like the Persians and Assyrian horse-archers before them.
But they never met Alvin York, and they by-God never met Alvin York armed with a Barrett.
So did the Chinese, when Slick Willie helped Wen Ho Lee get it for them.
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