Recently in War Category

David Frum reminds us to keep this image below and these others in mind as we struggle to figure out the meaning of Maj. Nidal Hasan's disgusting mass murder. Frum's right:

Latest report is that the shooters were U.S. soldiers, though no motive is known. The nearby hospital is begging people to come give blood. CNN quoting a soldier based at Fort Hood as having said that the base is so big that a lot of soldiers struggling with PTSD are not getting the help they need. Same soldier said that the Army has lowered its standards in recent years because it needs personnel -- that's true, not just an allegation -- but that that has meant some gang activity has been happening at Fort Hood. Not confirmed, though.

Will update this post as more information becomes available. Please contribute to the thread below.

UPDATE: CNN just reported name of the dead shooter: Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan. He was 39 or 40 years old -- not a kid. And, apparently, not a Swedish Lutheran.

Here we go...

UPDATE.2: ABC News reports that Hasan was an Army psychiatrist. Initial reports were that he was a Muslim convert, but now it's believed he was born a Muslim.
There has been talk on TV that Hasan killed his victims methodically, suggesting that this was premeditated, not a psychotic break.

UPDATE.3: Georgia imam condemns shooting. Good for him.

UPDATE.4: Now this is interesting: the Fort Hood spokesman just said on CNN that there were two shooters. If that's true, that says conspiracy. The second one is now in custody. The commanding general of the fort is going to give a presser momentarily.

UPDATE.5: AnotherBeliever, who served in Iraq and who is an Arabic linguist, posts the following:

Islam may or may not have been THE motivating factor in this attack. It may have well played some role, this is not the first instance of fragging by a Muslim soldier in this war. IF it is a case of enemy infiltration, again, it's not the first, and I doubt it will be the last. This sort of thing was fairly common during the Cold War, back when the Russians were the enemy. I put my money on psychiatric disturbance, exacerbated or fueled by the inability of this officer to square deploying to Iraq with his faith. Ultimately, and I say this as an Army Veteran, it is the U.S. Army which is responsible for letting these attacks happen. Clearly, somebody at some level dropped the ball. Probably more than one somebody. That will be investigated, of course. There are Muslim terrorists and sympathizers in this country. Fact. However, it would be counterproductive in the extreme to somehow wall all Muslims off into police-controlled ghettos, as it seems some people want to do. This would only turn the neutral and supportive portions of the populace into more sympathizers. We must engage with the whole population, identify and isolate the sympathizers, figure out who the sympathizer's leaders and influencers are, throw the book at THEM, and empower Muslim communities to stand up their own INTERNAL home-grown leaders to counter the influence of outsiders who may be backed (and financed) by terrorist groups that wish to subvert U.S. Muslims and attack Americans. This will require law enforcement people who simultaneously have real familiarity and respect for Islam and Muslims AND a commitment to countering terrorists, and a flawless information operation campaign.

Meanwhile, a retired Army officer, a colonel who worked with Hasan at Fort Hood said Hasan had been saying publicly that the U.S. ought to get out of Iraq, that Muslims ought to stand up to the aggressor. The colonel, Terry Lee, said Hasan "stuck strongly to his faith." And: "He made his views well known about how he felt about the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan." Lee said that at the time he retired, he was told that Hasan was being investigated. Further, Lee said Hasan was "sort of a loner" who never associated with other officers out of the office.

UPDATE.6: Holy crap -- now the commanding general of Fort Hood says that Hasan is alive, and in custody! This story gets stranger and stranger.

Seems like old times, tovarishch:

The highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: "There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another," he said. "Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.

"Our soldiers are not to blame. They've fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills." He went on to request extra troops and equipment. "Without them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time," he said.

These sound as if they could be the words of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama in recent days or weeks. In fact, they were spoken by Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, to the Soviet Union's Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.

We've already got 12 international and Afghan soldiers there for every Taliban guerrilla. And they're still winning. We know how this story ends, because we saw it before.

"I'm not some peacenik pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," says Matthew Hoh, a retired Marine Corps captain who has resigned his job as the senior US civilian in an Afghan province. Excerpt from the WaPo story:

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

More:

"There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because "I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.' "

"I realize what I'm getting into . . . what people are going to say about me," he said. "I never thought I would be doing this."

Michael Yon says America either has to be a benign imperial power in Afghanistan, or else:

If Afghanistan is to succeed, we must adopt it. We must adopt an entire country, a troubled child, for many decades to come. We must show the Afghans that together we can severely damage the enemies, or bring them around, and together build a brighter future. The alternative is perpetual war and terrorism radiating from the biggest, possibly richest and most war-prone drug dealers the world has ever seen, and what could eventually reverse and become the swamp that harbors the disease that eventually kills Pakistan, leaving its nuclear weapons on the table.

Adopting this child-nation means more than the relatively simple task of building security forces bankrolled by foreign governments. Afghanistan cannot finance its police and army, much less the education and vast infrastructure needed to fashion and fuel a self-sustaining economy. The Coalition has already adopted the Afghan security forces and this remittance arrangement is perpetual until we squeeze the account and watch it die, or Afghanistan stands. The illiterate people of Afghanistan are multiplying like rabbits, and so thousands of schools, teachers and entire educational infrastructure must be raised up; uncontrolled population growth, among Afghanistan's countless other problems, is born in the bed of ignorance. Only through education and opportunity, and eventual meritorious inclusion into the international community--if meager--can narcotics production, criminality, warlordism and fanaticism be eroded and whittled back. By adopting Afghanistan, bringing peace and creating a nucleus for progress, the many private donors who profoundly help develop countries such as Nepal can operate freely to spread seeds of civilization not just in Afghanistan, but in the region.

Does anybody believe that Yon's hopes are remotely realizable? That any amount of tender loving care by the US could turn Afghanistan into a functional non-rathole? The most compelling part of his analysis is the "...or else," but I am unpersuaded that building this nation is possible.