Hardly worth commenting - by Richard... Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Hardly worth commenting - by Richard... Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Why is this a victory? What does this individual do for brains?

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Fighting and losing - by Richard...

Slightly ahead of the game today, I already wrote at (sufficient) length about the "renegade" Afghan soldier shooting three of ours – an issue that preoccupies many of today's papers.

I listened to Sky News on this, with growing alarm at the tosh being spoken. This is the sort of garbage that gets people killed.

In particular, we see Sky News' foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall pontificating about the quality of Afghan soldiers and the need for improvement. He says it is vital that efforts are made to establish more "cohesion" between Pasthu Afghan soldiers - from the south where the British are based - and ethnically different troops from the north.

He also says: "The Afghan army is better than it was a few years ago and the training is having an effect, but that concept of discipline is not there. "There is a flaw in the strategy unless they can get more cohesion within the Afghan army and ensure they all think they are Afghans rather than Pashtus."

This is dribble ... utter, vapid dribble. It would actually make more sense to have a two-year-old on telly, and have two minutes of it sucking a dummy. As even the most basic research will show, there is not a hope in Hades of getting the Pashtuns to think of themselves as anything other than Pashtuns, and they are never going to think of the Tajiks and the other northern ethnics as anything other than oppressors.

But more to the point, we have grown adults locked into the dangerous myth that we are going to be able to create an effective Afghan security force, to whom we can hand over responsibility. You might just as well pile a mountain of weapons and ammunition in the High Street in Sangin and piss off for an extended Tiffin. This is stupidity on legs.

The trouble is that we are locked into this myth. No more than Brown does that fool Cameron have the sense to realise that we are going nowhere in Afghanistan – that it is costing us a lot of money and killing a lot of people. It was one of his first tests, that he failed – that he could distance us from Blair's war and start the process of disengagement.

Now the stupid man has adopted the war as his own, and has wrapped his own ego in it, we must lose more men and money for a foregone conclusion – that we will lose more men and money until we get out. That is the only result of our continued presence.

I said some time ago that I would write about Dien Bien Phu and its relevance to modern times. I'm still reading the book, "Hell in a small place" and I hate it – the inevitability of it all, in a very unpleasant battle. But the one thing that stands out is precisely that – the inevitability. Everybody knew it was wrong, everybody knew it was a losing battle, but no one seemed to know how to stop it, how to bring it to an end. So the French kept fighting, and losing.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Afghanistan 2010.

Comment: Demonstrable failure thread

Print ready

French back burka ban - by Richard...

"French back burka ban as only ONE MP votes against move to outlaw Islamic 'walking coffins'," reports The Daily Mail. This is seriously good news, but it will be interesting to see whether the multi-cults try to get it to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and, if they do, whether it sticks.

Of course, it would be better news if the gutless wonders on this side of the Channel got stuck in. I think we've had enough of these little madams and their menfolk over here as well. If they don't like it here, they know what to do.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Day 4 – Battle of Britain - by Richard... Tuesday, July 13, 2010

That we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain from 10 July is the result of a somewhat arbitrary choice by the then head of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowding.

It was he that chose the day, but in fact the German actions that his fighters were then experiencing stemmed from Hitler's War Directive No. 13, dated 24 May 1940. It instructed that "as soon as enough units become available, the Luftwaffe should embark upon its independent mission against the British homeland."

The first deliberately planned attacks against the British homeland were recorded from 3 July. History was made on 8 July at 3.45 pm when the first German fighter was shot down on British soil.

This, according to this superb website was a Messerschmitt Bf 109E-3 from 4 Staffel, Jagdgeschwader (JG) 51, flown by Leutnant Johann Boehm. It was damaged in combat by Sergeant E A (Boy) Mould in a Spitfire of No 74 Squadron and forced to land at Bladbean Hill, Elham, Kent (pictured). The pilot was taken prisoner (pictured below right – note the old-fashioned courtesy).

By today seventy years ago, therefore, active operations had been going on for well over a week. On this, the official Day 4, Kanalkamph was still very much in progress, with shipping attacks off Dover and Portland. During the night, there was airborne minelaying in the Thames Estuary, a tactic which was to damage and destroy more ships than direct attack and, for a time, close down the Port of London, then the biggest port in the Empire.

Weather through the day was fine, with fog in the south of England, hampering operations, although it had cleared by mid-morning. The German bombers were out after shipping, under the command of Kommodore Johannes Fink, designated Kanalkampfürher, operating from an old bus set up near a statue of Louis Blériot on top of the cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez. From the windows of his bus, he could follow the course of the Channel battle.

There were attacks on two convoys off Harwich, and two sharp air engagements off Dover, in which the Germans claimed two Spitfires and six Hurricanes, admitting the loss of five. In fact, the RAF lost one aircraft while the Germans lost seven, including a FW 200 of I/KG40.

An interesting footnote occurred at this time, with pilots reporting being fired upon by "old and dirty" Hurricanes which bore no roundels or lettering and had two-bladed wooden airscrews. No official records exist but it is possible that the Germans were using one or two captured machines, liberated during the fighting in May ... from the Belgians. Nothing much changes, it seems.

Battle of Britain thread

Print ready

Read this - by Richard...

... if you want to learn more about how the EU works. Don't look if you prefer your ignorance (applies to most Tories and almost all MPs - but then they rarely come here, for that very reason).