Trailing, in other words:

From the English language version of an Italian news outlet:

(ANSA) - Rome, December 11 - Transhumance, the traditional farming practice of seasonal migration of livestock along storied tracks towards better climate conditions, was unanimously inserted Wednesday into UNESCO's list of of intangible cultural heritage.    The successful bid was made by Italy, Austria and Greece.    With this new inclusion, Italy has overtaken Turkey and Belgium into top spot for rural and agri-food citations.

Trailing to the high country, in other words.

The Turkish Spin and a proposal that will be ignored.

According to Turkey, it's invading northern Syria in order to allow 2,500,000 Syrian refugees to return home.

Saladin, the Kurd who conquered the Middle East (and who spent more time fighting fellow Muslims than he did Christians, although he certainly fought Christians too).  He lived in the last era in which things were on the downside for the Kurds, 800 years ago.

Hmmm . . . all for humanitarian reasons you see.

The endless spins that the current situation in Northern Syria creates are mind boggling.  We armed a Syrian rebel group composed of Kurdish militias to take on the Syrian government under the quixotic belief that disparate light infantry bands could take on a modern armored army back by the Russians without direct U.S. involvement.  That was naive in the extreme, and no less of military expert (and I mean that sincerely) as John McCain lobbied for it. 

We should have know that was absurd from the onset. 

Toppling the Syrian Baathist regime was always going to require direct western military involvement to be followed by at least a decade, if not more, of western occupation of the country.

No matter, we ended up committing some troops and, beyond that, we gave moral and material support to the one entity in the war that wasn't either comprised of Islamic extremist or incompetents, the Kurds.

The Kurds can't be blamed for rising up in rebellion on their own ground.  They now have a quasi state in Iraq and they've been where they are on the ground in Syria for eons.  They'd have their own country now if Woodrow Wilson's alterations of the map of Turkey that ended up in the Treaty of Sevres had come into full fruition.  That would have required more American involvement in diplomacy in 1919-20, more military backbone for an already tired France and Britain at the same time (heck, they were both already bogged down in Russia and the British were fighting a war in part of its own "united" kingdom, who can blame them for not getting tied down in Turkey), less greed and blood lust on the part of Greece, and less bizarre territory avarice on the part of Italy.

That would have been asking for a lot.

So, the Ottoman's fell and the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire as they saw fit, splitting the Ottoman Kurdistan into three separate state administered by three different sovereigns, to which we might add that a World War One neutral, Persia, already was another entity they had to deal with.

And so now, one of our NATO allies is invading a region occupied by one of our Syrian rebellion allies, which we armed, with the invading army using military equipment designed by us and our ally, Germany (most Turkish weapons, but not all, are produced in Turkey) because our President decided to stand aside after we'd already made all the inconsistent commitments. Added to this, this means that Turkey is now effectively the military ally of the Syrian government which will come in and occupy northern Syria as soon as the Turks have subdued the Kurds.

What can be done about this now?

Well, maybe not much. 

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trumps most solid supporters, is outwardly outraged and has sponsored a bill to sanction Turkey.  It'll pass. Wyoming's Congressman Liz Cheney, who has been more independent regarding Trump than we might suppose, is also supporting it.

But what will sanctions do now?  It won't force Turkey out of Syria and it won't stop their invasion.  Shoot, by the time any sanctions come into effect, the Turks will be out and the Syrians back in.

Just how successful have our sanctions in the region been anyway?  Iran hasn't collapsed.  Syria's government is going to win its civil war.

No, what the sanctions will likely do is to drive Turkey into the arms of the arch conspirator Vladimir Putin.  And we don't need that.  It'll be a marriage of convenience, but Putin will be just fine with that.

A better proposal, now that we have blood on our hands and have allowed this mess to occur, would be to require the Turks to remain where they are supervised by a United Nations peacekeeping force. That would be a direct UN intervention in the Syrian civil war and it might be hard to bring about. Absent that, as Turkey remains a NATO ally, the next best proposal would be for a joint NATO force to occupy the region until a real peace settlement can be reached. Failing that, we should see about occupying it in place of the Turks, which the Turks probably wouldn't be too keen on now. And failing all of that, the Turks should just stay there in a supervised fashion until Syria joins the 21st Century with it being made clear that should they screw up, they'll have no friends in the west at all.

But none of this will occur.

The third option in Afghanistan

Over the past few days the United States came surprisingly close to obtaining a "sustainable solution" in Afghanistan.

"Sustainable solution" is the phrase used repeatedly by a former government official who was interviewed on NPR on Sunday, when the news broke that the U.S. had called off a meeting with the Taliban that was scheduled to occur at Camp David and which would likely have resulted in that "Sustainable solution".

"Sustainable solution" means a surrender.  More specifically it means that special type of American surrender which allows the public to wholly ignore that the country surrendered and allows an administration in charge to pretend we didn't surrender.  It is, therefore a duplicitous surrender.

Throughout the weekend shows and on to the week the news was fully of analysis about how there were only two options in Afghanistan.  One is surrendering, which isn't what anyone calls it, and the other is keeping on with our low grade commitment. The US has only 5,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at the moment which frankly isn't much, and it isn't enough.  The Trump Administration, in calling off the talks, noted that the U.S. did so as an American soldier had been killed in the days leading up to the Camp David meeting, which was regarded as inappropriate for a negotiating party, while also noting that during the past few days the NATO commitment to the war had killed 1,000 Taliban combatants, which if true would be the equivalent to 1/5th of our own commitment to the war and would also equal about 1/3d of the total number of casualties we've had in the entire 20 year war.

Which brings us to the third option.

We could, and should, actually go ahead and win the war.

First let's state two obvious facts.  One is that if we pull out now, no matter how we term it, Afghanistan will fall back into a brutal Islamic theocracy run by the Taliban.  The second fact is that we've fought the war very badly.

Okay, the first.

We went into Afghanistan in the first place as the country had fallen into the hands of the Taliban and they hosted Al Qaeda.  The attacks on our country that took place on this day in 2001 were planned and stages from Afghanistan.  Afghanistan hosted the Al Qaeda as the Taliban shared the same Islamist view of the world which holds that all opposed to Islam in any fashion are infidels to be conquered by the sword.  It isn't the only view of the world that Muslims hold but it is well grounded in Islamic tradition and theology.  Many Muslims would dispute the last point, but Islam is a religion that is badly fractured into various groups, not all of which hold the same views on certain tenants, including whether there needs to be a Caliph and whether armed expansion of the religion is a central tenant.  The further a person goes, geographically, from the origin of the faith the less likely is it that its adherents hold those views.  But those views are not far removed from those which developed during Mohammed's lifetime or shortly thereafter and while there hasn't been a unified Islam since Muhammad's death, the feature of a violent expansive Islam isn't new to this era, nor has there ever been an era without it since his death.

But there has also often been a different view in which Muslims on a local level didn't pay much attention to those matters and rather focused on others.  Even early on this was the case.  That drama is playing out in Afghanistan now and has been since the Soviet invasion of the country wrecked it.

We easily shoved aside, but that's all we did, the Taliban when we came in with a badly planned and badly lead intervention following the September 11 attacks.  That allowed the tribal elements that opposed the Taliban to fill the vacuum. But we never wiped out the Taliban, even though we largely did Al Qaeda, and its fought on. And fighting on in a country that's in a state of reversed development that's so extensive that it's development has regressed hundreds of years has not been hard for it.  It now controls huge area of the country, although not as much as some American news outlets have reported.

The Taliban controls 14.5% of the country. The Afghan government controls 56.3% of the country. Both sides in the contest now control more of the country than they did in 2018, when the Afghan government controlled about 30% of the country and the Taliban 7% of the country.

So the rest of the country remains in contest, with the Afghan government actually silently pulling ahead, while the Taliban oddly also gains ground.  Right now, if trends continue, the Afghan government can be foreseen to control at least 60% of the country in the foreseeable future and 70% is unimaginable.  On the other had, seeing the Taliban control 20% or 25% isn't either.

Obvious in this is that the war is in fact developing and the Afghan government is winning.  It isn't winning in a George S. Patton advance to the Rhine fashion, but it's winning.

Guerrilla wars, which is sort of what this is, take a long time to win.  The Communist Vietnamese struggled for 30 years to win completely in Vietnam.  The British fought for 12 years in Malaya before declaring the war won, but the actual low grade struggle that followed went on for another 20 years.  The Philippine Insurrection supposedly went on for three years, but only because the U.S. pretended that the war ended then.  So the current war lasting 20 years isn't exactly surprising and shouldn't be.

But the U.S. has no staying power in guerrilla wars and indeed it doesn't in protracted wars at all.  We never have.  That's why we abandoned the Republic of Vietnam to its fate and allowed it to be defeated in 1975.  And that's why we're ready to do the same with Afghanistan.

This has come about in part because we've believed every since World War Two that we can fight a war in which Clausewitz has no part, but of course, we can't, which is the second factor noted above.  And we very much did that in Afghanistan.  Under the inept oversight of Donald Rumsfeld, we committed an economy of troops to the effort in the belief that our opponents were all rude primitives and we were super technical and could win a primitive war with special means. That was stupid.

Part of the reason, indeed much of the reason, we did that is that we were also taking on the Baathist regime in Iraq and had no need whatsoever to do that. That war was our kind of war, an armored advance on an armored enemy.  But it took up most of our effort.  The war in Afghanistan languished with lessor participation and it, over time, has reduced to one in which we really have only a smallish numerical role.  The U.S. may have 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, but the U.S. Army alone has 20,000 in Germany, where the risk of those troops being engaged in combat is quite low.

Not that 5,000 men, in terms of our current force, is small in some ways.  It isn't comparatively.  We have, for example, half that number in Japan and about three times that number in South Korea, where the risk of their becoming involved in combat isn't unsubstantial.  But it isn't a gigantic commitment in terms of men and its not enough to really do anything other than stiffen the Afghan government's will to fight on, which it has been doing.  If we add in non US NATO troops, which Americans routinely forget, those numbers climb to 17,000.

That allows the Afghani government to struggle on to try to control all of its territory.  It isn't enough to really end the war in a decisive way.  That latter fact allows the Taliban to struggle on as well.

So our only alternative is to hang on for eons or get out, right?

No.

The 14% of the country occupied by the Taliban is readily identifiable.  Commitment of an actual combat division, or better yet two, which would be 15,000 to 30,000 men, in combination with Afghani government forces, in a single hard strike would put that 14% to 0% and would cause a massive blood loss to the Taliban.  If it wasn't enough to convince a group of people who are largely willing to die on the basis that they'll go right to Heaven anyway to quit, it'll convince some, and it'll end the existence of many more in a way that would allow the Afghan government to be a presence back on its own territory.

At that point, the maintenance of the peace could logically become a UN, rather than a NATO effort, something that NATO has a lot of experience with. The blue helmets of UN peace keepers could then be a presence.  The United Nations already deploys over 100,000 troops committed by its members around the globe in just such missions, and not all of them are in kind and gentle lands by any means.  And quite a few of those troops are Muslims from Muslim nations that don't have the conquer for a Caliph mindset.  Having those troops, which include female Muslim soldiers from such places as Bangladesh, serve in the region is likely to be less offensive, and indeed perhaps more shocking, than Americans, long term.

That would give Afghanistan a chance to have a future in which the Islamic nation wasn't a base for extremism. Where women were treated as human beings, could vote, and go to school.  And were the type of Islam that most people claim is the real Islam, and which does reflect the view of most Muslims most places, could be restored to its prior place.

The opposite result is grim.  Most of all for women, but for everyone in general.  A victorious Taliban isn't going to be hosting a Summer of Love any time soon, and the kind of forces that will find refuge there aren't the kind that any nation just like it or sharing its views will be able to live comfortably with.

Exercising the 1950 Soviet Option. Democratic blundering just keeps on, keeping on.

Senate Republicans, as we recall, held up, or actually prevented, the vote on Barack Obama's final Supreme Court nominee.

Now some Democrats are taking a similar position in regards to Trumps nominees of all types, and at least the New York Times has declared war on Trump's nomination of Justice Gorsuch.  Consider their editorial of February 1:

So what can Democrats do? 

First, they need to make sure that the stolen Supreme Court seat remains at the top of the public’s consciousness. When people hear the name “Neil Gorsuch,” as qualified as he may be, they should associate him with a constitutionally damaging power grab.

Second, Democrats should not weigh this nomination the same way that they’ve weighed previous ones. This one is different. The presumption should be that Gorsuch does not deserve confirmation, because the process that led to his nomination was illegitimate.

Wow.

So is that the approach the Democrats should take?

Only if they're as dense as a box of rocks.

But, so far, the Democratic leadership has been showing itself to be rather granitic in outlook.

Gorsuch isn't what many feared.  Hes a solid textualist and quite frankly an excellent nominee.  Fans of democracy, which Democrats and Liberals generally, frankly, are not (they prefer a Liberal, Imperial, Court), should rejoice.  Gorsuch himself notes that a good Justice should never like all of his own opinions.  Basically, his view is that the law is to be applied as written, and if people don't like the law, they ought to get in touch with their representatives and change it.

You'd think people in favor of the franchise would think, yeah!, nifty!

Well, the Democrats don't think that, as truth be known, they don't really trust voters to "do the right thing" as they see it. No, they trust the courts to tell people what they ought to think and make it the law.  Right now, they truly believed they were on the verge of an extreme liberal revolution in which the Court would hold there are no genders of any kind, there are no borders, etc., and we were on our way to a genderless, self defined society.

Well, we aren't.

And that's what they think was "stolen" from them.

And now the plan, at least on some nominations, is to sit around and do nothing.

Which was the Soviet Union's plan when the United Nations met to consider the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.

The USSR had a Security Council veto.  But it walked out of the UN in protest of action being considered and more particularly as Red China was not admitted, at that time, to the UN. And, accordingly, the UN adopted a resolution to enter the war on South Korea's side, the one and only time that's ever been done by the UN.

The USSR could have stopped that, by showing up.  It didn't, as having a snit seemed like the thing to do over its view about Chinese admission.

Which is what the Democrats are now doing.

If they don't act, as a minority, the result will be. . . .well the result will be that the Republican Senate will give Trump everything he asks for without any Democratic input.

The Republican, or at least Trumpist, dream.

Why would they do that?

Well, why would they pit two elderly white candidates against each other, one of whom was detested on a wide scale, insult Catholics and Jews, and all that?

Should they make sure that the "stolen" seat remains in the public consciousness?  They should, by showing up. But they also ought to keep in mind that the public isn't that impressed by the Court.  Generally, the public thinks it knows best and the Court doesn't. The public also thinks that a collection of elderly jurists is unlikely to know what people under, oh, . . .let's say 60, think about what they want to the country to look like.  In other words, most people don't think Justice Kennedy is a cool hipster.  Maybe they think that about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. . . . 

So, in a fight over Gorsuch, what the Times implicitly suggests, is that the public ought to be reminded of all the decisions that have taken votes away from legislatures in the name of redefining society.  And that will appeal to the Times' readers, as they fear the American electorate.

But maybe the Democrats ought to consider that it really isn't 1973 anymore.  And maybe they ought to get outside a bit, if only to the zoo or park, where nature is.

The anti democratic court was likely the deciding factor in the 2016 Presidential election.  The Democrats don't seem to realize that.  For the first time since the late 1960s, really, Catholics voted somewhat as a block. Hispanics, most of whom are culturally Catholic, defected from the Democrats in surprising numbers.  45% of women, including vast numbers of young women for whom 1973 doesn't stand out to their demographic any longer like 1776, 1793 or 1917 does to some demographics, did so in larger numbers.  The anti democratic Supreme Court was responsible for a lot of that, and those voters, who want to keep a say and who have a more realistic view of life and nature than the Court, and the Democratic Party, acted accordingly.

The Democrats pointing that out is a good idea. . . . for the Republicans.