A Second Hand Conjecture

In Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, the Australian army suffers its worst casualties in a single engagement since the Vietnam war, after a Taliban ambush of an SAS patrol.

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Ceasefire be damned,* the Russian army reportedly destroyed the Metekhi-Grakali railway bridge. The bridge was used by Georgian refugees fleeing the mayhem in the Russian occupied zones given that the highway is controlled by the Russian army, which has naturally acquired a rapacious reputation among Georgians. Thus it could expand the humanitarian crisis in Western and Central Georgia.

Oddly, the Russian military has denied it destroyed the bridge, which is perhaps further evidence of factional schizophrenia in Russian policy, given that the bridge is in fact destroyed (photo).

In reaction to this and continued Russian occupation of Georgia, Secretary Rice said that the Russians are “perhaps” just liars. That’s news to no one at this point, but there’s reason to assume command-and-control is fantastically weak within the occupation army (much less within the state).

There’s also an energy oligarch-faction corruption rationale for a Russian action on the bridge, as it was the conduit for Azeri oil export which has now had to cease.

* Edit: Attack was coordinated to occur a couple of hours before Medvedev signed the agreement.

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Iraq is buying 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks, along with wide range of other conventional hardware, as it prepares to shift its focus from internal security to defending the borders in a very hostile neighborhood. Iran, in case you’re wondering, can field approximately 1600 tanks, but mostly of the Soviet iron heap variety that the M1 annihilated in the Gulf War.

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(photo: Charles Roffey - Charles & Fred)

Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.

Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:

Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)

That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.

(more…)

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President Karzai presided over the opening of a new US funded $22 million hanger, for the Afghan military’s growing fleet of aircraft. Of primary focus in acquisitions have been transport helicopters to support army field operations. The plan is for Afghanistan to have 61 aircraft by 2011. But there’s still no word yet on when/how/if the country will be supplied with strike fighters, the ultimate signature of operational independence.

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