Obama, Pakistan and you.

I talked earlier about delusions, but I'm going to veer aside for a moment and talk for a moment about some plain old ignorance. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with ignorance. We all have lot's of it. I, for example, am abysmally ignorant of electric circuitry (as was recently demonstrated in my son's science experiment.) However, some things it's very, very bad to be ignorant of. For example, I am a programmer. It's how I make my living and feed my family. If I was ignorant of the C# programming language, I couldn't do my job. More to the point, if I applied for a C# job, and didn't know a damn thing about it, then they should not hire me, right?

Back in August of last year, Barak Obama said this. In particular, he said "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." What he means is if we find some terrorists in Pakistan and the Pakistanis won't do anything about it, we will invade and get them ourselves. I gotta say, I appreciate the sentiment, but that one statement speaks volumes about his ignorance in some very, very crucial areas.

First off is Pakistan itself. Pakistan is much tougher than it looks. We in the west have a very hard time shaking off the notion that brown people just can't be all that dangerous. Unfortunately, that is not true of Pakistan. They are obviously not the strongest military in the world, but they are in the top ten. I think they are actually in the top five or six, ahead of several European countries but I don't have my book here so I can't look it up. Pakistani troops are quite well regarded, and much sought after as peace keepers, for example. They use mostly US equipment, and spend a lot of time cross-training with U.S. troops. A lot of their officers go to the US War College. They are tough, well trained, well equipped, and well led. They are nowhere near being a pushover. Saying we are going to just pop over and invade Pakistan to chase bad guys is like saying we are going to pop over and invade Russia looking for bad guys. We might just be able to do it, but it would take pretty much everything we had, and we'd take a lot (I mean tens of thousands) of casualties.

But wait, it gets worse. Pakistan is like Russia in more ways than one, as Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Let me say that one more time. Pakistan has freaking nuclear weapons! I think pretty much everybody agrees that you don't invade nuclear armed countries, ever. That tells me he either didn't know Pakistan had nukes, or just forgot. Either way, not good.

Next, we come to the questions of Geography, and Logistics. (Don't let your eyes glaze over, I'll make this quick.)
Here is map of Pakistan. (This map isn't labeled very well, but it does a great job of showing the mountains, which is what I want.) Pakistan is the lighter tan country. You can see its states (Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, etc) labeled. Afghanistan is to the north west, across all those mountains. Those mountains are called the Hindu Kush, and they are some of the tallest in the world. Mountains are incredible defensive terrain. That makes attacking the Pakistanis 10 or so times harder than it would be across flat terrain.

Finally, we have logistics. Afghanistan is at the corner of No and Where. It is at the ass end of the world. It has no ports. You can fly stuff in, but it's at least a 10 hour flight, which is horrifically expensive. There aren't many good roads, and those that lead into the country do so over hundreds (or thousands) of miles of bad, mountainous, bandit infested roads. We keep somewhere around 3 brigades of troops plus some air at any one time. The dirty little secret is that that's about all we can keep there, without some heroic efforts. Logistics is hard in this stretch of the world.

So now let's take this hypothetical offensive, and put it into action. We are going to take maybe three divisions of troops, poorly supplied, and attack into those mountains. Oh, no roads means we leave behind most of the tanks and other heavy equipment. We then run into somewhere around thirty Pakistani divisions, who are defending in mountains which means it's more like three hundred divisions, and oh yeah, they have great roads on their side of the mountains, which means they get to keep their tanks and heavy equipment, and, well, you see where this is going.

This article is getting long, so I am going to leave aside the question of Politics inside Pakistan. I think I've made my point anyway. Attacking Pakistan from Afghanistan would lead our young men and women into a slaughter. And it's pretty clear from the cavalier tone that Mr. Obama took when he said this that all of this is news to him. This is the kind of dangerous ignorance I'm talking about. Nothing I have pointed out above is classified, or particularly hard to find.
Senator Obama is applying for the position of commander in chief, but is dangerously ignorant of the conditions that our army is operating in right now! Many, many leaders in history have sent troops off to die because they were too ignorant to know what would happen, so this is not an idle concern. He is already on record as saying that he would override the advice of his military leaders. Just imagine what would happen if this conversation had happened after the elections:

President: General, the CIA tells me they have found Osama bin Laden. I just got off the phone with General Musharef, and he tells me they just can't go get him. I am tired of all these excuses! Now general, I want you to take whatever troops you've got, and go in there and get him. Now!

General: But sir, logistical constraints will prevent me from building up the kind of force it would take to attack into those mountains, to say nothing of the ...

President: General, I don't want to hear your excuses. It's just some Pakistanis and tribesmen in there. How bad could it be? Go Get Him!

General: Yes Sir!