Death on the Kybher Pass - Afghani Lamb Kabob

Afghanistan; it is not a real country, per se.   Sure there was a king, as all areas of the world seem to have, some better than others.   Fidel Castro is a king, etc, etc.  Democratic countries, peacefully elect kings and transitions only take on "psychic violence".   In Afghanistan it was a shah, and he ruled by custom.  As a general rule dynasty's grow and wane dependent on the by the cleverness of their kings, luxury normally spoils dynasties.   The British are a fine example of a dynasty in decline.

At the beginning of the 19th century, as the European colonial powers eyed new lands, Afghanistan came into view.   It's proximity to India gave Britain first dibs, so to say.  English rule, though generally benign and ruled through the local Rajas, sought evermore control.  The preoccupation with the Latin language and architecture clearly demonstrates Britain's view of themselves as the new Romans.   The British problem came about as the Britons sought to exert their influence by supporting the return of an Afghan shah to the throne. 

Any way, ruling all of Afghanistan is ever difficult.  It has 49 languages, different customs and religions and it would be difficult for these people to share a common culture, vision or anything that "normal" nations say defines their "nation".   There are tribes, where although they say they are Muslim, continued to practice animal sacrifice as their ancestors have done to ages immemorial.  As for boundaries, they are at best:conceptual.  Western conventions for border protocols checkpoints, border crossings and passports or visas in any of the border regions is laughable.

The movie that comes to mind when I think about Afghanistan is "The Man Who Would Be King"  1975 starring the old satyrs Sean Connery and Michael Caine.  Based upon a book by Rudyard Kipling, the pair of failed British soldiers, follow a legend into undiscovered and dangerous territories into what can be non-other than the tribal regions of Afghanistan.  One is crowned king, and  I wouldn't spoil the story, but things don't go as planned.

So what are we up against?  The first Anglo-Afghan war (1839-42) was a disaster for the British.  Their force of twenty thousand (mostly Indian troops led of white officers) was totally destroyed.  Their objective as to secure the border to check the Russian sphere of influence toward India.  Their attempt to place a deposed shah, back on the throne, didn't workout as planned.  The British moved in lot-stock-and barrell, families and all and sought to garrison Kandahar.  The fortress warfare against such a mobile enemy did work. In all the tribesmen skill in guerrilla war, general military ineptitude and ruthless deception by the tribesman destroyed British.  That terrible episode is captured in this painting, to illustrate that there were but few survivors.  

The second war thirty years later, the British and their allies were much better prepared.   By the 1870's weaponery and training were now exact sciences and with planning and strong leadership the British were successful.

This time rather than attempt to garrison units they left the country to the shah their newly installed.  The shah had forces of his own, plus he had military backup next door.


So what do we have now.  In 2002 we invaded, installed a new Shah and hoped to fashion a new modern country.  We haven't succeeded in this longest of American wars.   As we've seen from history, fortress or defensive warfare didn't work, and now we are again fighting with an elusive enemy. 

Let me lay out what the obvious strategies would be for the Taliban: plan to fight against the invaders for generations if necessary.  Such a practice would be very fitting given the existence of the blood feud and honor killing.  The death of a tribal fighter by NATO, would in fact invite a vendetta killing on foreign forces, any target will do.  The second part of the of their strategy is keep the insurgency in the news, just as George Washington in keeping his army intact, symbolized resistance to the British.  Their object would be to sustain periodic attacks or bombings targets which symbolically defile Islamist teachings.  Those targets would be anything Western or is tainted by their influences. 


What do we have against them.  We have essentially two old tactics: "seek and destroy" and  "hearts and minds".  Those tactics coupled with army of underpaid but brave fights soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA) we are attempting to have these serving underneath unskilled and inexperienced commanders take on more of the fight.  What we will find is that paid regular, without the burning desire for combat, will be no match for ideologically and religiously motivated warriors.  In our current operation, where the enemy fades, suddenly to pop-up and then fade again.  We have classic guerrilla war. The enemy slinks into villages, their weapons go down to hidden bunkers and we are none the wiser.

If this sounds like another Vietnam, it's because it is.  Oh by the way, just when we leave, they'll roll back in with tanks.

Afghan Lamb Kebab

• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• 1/2    cup yogurt
• Salt and black or red pepper
• 2 lbs lamb, cut into 3/4 inch cubes
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 12 Pita breads

• 
  
  lemon or lime wedges

  Marinade  & Cooking

  Mix the lemon juice, crushed garlic, yogurt , salt, pepper and cilantro in a bowl. Add the lamb and lamb fat (if used) or oil. Mix well and marinate, covered, in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight.

  Preheat the grill. Thread the meat on to the skewers. (The cubes of meat should be alternated with the fat, if used.) Grill, turning frequently, for about 15 to 20 minutes until brown and cooked.

  Place the lawausha or chapati on a large dish, remove the kebabs from the skewers and place them on the bread. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper, garnish with the tomato, onion and lemon, and fold the chapati or lawausha over to keep the kebabs warm.  

  Serves: 4

  
  

The Diplomatic Corps- Professional Expatriats – Stuffed Pasta

It looks like a crystalline Borg ship, but it's a picture of the proposed $1B US embassy in London.  That  got me  thinking about the our diplomatic corps and the value we get nearly $20B a year.  Really, living in the age of information, do we really need to have these vulnerable outposts spread around the world?  We should be contracting out visa work from FEDEX offices.  Wouldn't an automated kiosk do?  As for London, why do we spend so much money on for a new embassy for in the backyard of poorer cousins.  We're just rubbing it in their faces that they have no exports besides actors and a few aging rock 'n' acts.   Worse, do we need "diplomats, who, quite literally can't even ward off any the animosity directed towards us.  They should all be replaced by Disney Theme Park cast members.  The current cast seem unable to convince anyone including themselves that we are the good guys.

   

Since I'm bashing the diplomatic corps,  what's an appropriate dish? Maybe something stuffed with nice cheeses. So, we choose Cheese Stuffed Pasta Shells with a Marinera, because the diplomatic corps (pronounced "core" not "corpse") in their pomposity are stuffed shirts.  

At this writing, Hillary Clinton is the Secretary of State, she succeeded Condoleeza Rice who succeeded Colin Powell as Secretary of State.  For those who remember who was humilitated by  State Department he headed.  You may recall that  General Powell was a masterful military-political smoozemeister who worked very hard against an institution that finally had him convinced that their worldview was right and that his was wrong.  In the final analysis he was out smoozed.  He started out guns blazing and in the end as a champion of the status quo world order: Europe good, Third World misunderstood and America bad.  Colin Powell was a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome.   Powell’s training as a soldier did not prepare him for the group think that happens at State.  A soldiers training in decision making, involves action and the process always  involves heated debate presentation of facts, argument and then courses of possible action.  All debate stops when the commander makes the decision and then action follows.   The diplomatic process rarely include action, but the debates are endless.  The most severe diplomatic action amounts to telling someone to leave the country, which results in someone having to pack and which contraband to take in their diplomatic satchel.  The worst thing that can happen is to break diplomatic relations, which amounts to leaving a wretched country, where you couldn't do anything any way.  General Powell was ultimately exhausted with the endless chattering, foot-dragging and downright diplomatic insubordination  and his resignation was, I'm sure cheered as a victory of bureaucracy over leadership.  


Under Madame Rice, they tried the same tricks, but failed.  Why did she win, where Powell failed.  She was all ready a master of the byzantine politics of academia.  She knew how weasels worked.  She'd survived the back-stabbings and circumvention tactics for defying authority and the state department did not break her.  Ultimately, she had to face the problem of staffing the Baghdad embassy in that hottest period Iraq war.  There were few volunteers, so she laid down the law.   Serve as you signed up for or face dismissal.  There was a lot of protest, but in the end she won. 

Worse, for the corps, is that the world’s greatest power is not inclined to lavish the diplomatic corps of other nations.  The heartland America, with its simple ways and meat loaf dinners simply does not want to wine and dine the world of bon vivant diplomats with champagne and oysters.  Some administrations accept this fact graciously and use corporate sponsors to supplement their entertainment budgets much like PBS.  This makes our diplomats down right furious.  "Why do we have to look like corporate shills"  American thrift does not please our professional diplomatic corps and they are forever trying to distance themselves from Americana.  The diplomatic corps probably since Jefferson was in Paris, is more French than American, in language and sensibility. The name you need to remember is Tallyrand.  This connoisseur of connoisseurs was a Catholic bishop, lover and high ranking diplomat under Louis XVI, the Reign of Terror and Napoleon.  He lived by his wit and was the master who taught each group of tyrants how to eat well, while the people starved.  He lived to a ripe old age and through it all, ate well. Tallyrand was the master of modern diplomacy.  The diplomatic corps because they choose to work outside of the continental united states cannot help but be foreign.

State Department at times resembles a haven for 1960’s leftists who’ve found a way to travel the world at government expense.  With few exceptions you will find that corps personnel, are of this sort, though of course not out front about it, they are diplomatic. Make up your own test, but they do wear their hearts on their sleeves, when pushed by the regular points of political contention.  This was never truer than when “Madame Secretary” as in Bordello Madame Albright pimped anti-Americanism around the globe during the Clinton years.  


The Clinton years will produce about a much as Ms. Albright, and mark a true deterioration of American diplomatic prestige, as opposed to public relations. 

Cannelone Al Forno

              1 lbs Cannelone or Manicotti shells cooked al dente

              1 lbs riccota

              1 lbs mozzarella cheese

              ¼ cup chopped parsley

              ½ lbs parmesan cheese

              1 quart marinara sauce

Combine cheeses and pasley and  stuff the mixture into shells with a tea spoon lay Lay shells into an ovenproof baking dish and cover shells with marinara sauce. Option:  American love melted cheese and it is appropriate to cover the entire dish with cheeses.

              Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

              Serve immediately.  I like it with a sprinkling of red pepper flakes.

Surgical Strikes, Terrorists and The Stooges Who Love Them- Egg Plant Caviar, Baba Ghannouj

The Art of the Surgical Strike and Selective Outrage of Liberals

 

Whose unhappy when you kill terrorists?  The usual suspects, liberals Hamas Commander Murdered In Dubai.  Really less outrage than when a U.S. bomb kills innocent villagers in Iraq or Afghanistan.  But kill a terrorist hiding a luxury hotel in Dubai (whose families bankroll terrorists), we have a diplomatic incident.  Bull Pucky. 

 

You can't make people who hate you, love you, but you can make them respect you.  Still there are those who believe that love conquers all, which may be true, were it not for human sinfulness.  So what options are left for the moral man?   And so we come to the crucible of our times, Israel, and their quest for survival.   In a hope for peace, some Israelis, said, " let's give Palestinians their own land, it would be where they live and that will give us peace."    So Israel traded land for peace, and didn;t get peace.  Now the are building a wall to keep out terrorist bombers, and they find themselves living behind medieval walls, in a ghetto of their own creation.  Now they must endure the mortar and rocket attacks great and small and it comes from the land they gave up. The land concessions emboldened Hamas, the ruling faction among the Palestinians, and they immediatly attack Isreal.   Hamas, incidentally,  has not rescinded its its pledge to eradicate of the state of Israel.  By the way, they don't hate Jews, only the state of Israel. 

 

So what is a moral man to do?  If war is to be brought, the Israeli employ essentially the medieval doctrines of the Catholic Church, that of proportionality.  This is essentially "an eye for an eye".  So what does Israel do?  It goes after and kills a commander of Hamas terrorists and everybody cries foul.  

I love the Mossad.  Now let's eat.

 

Baba Ghannouj, Egg Plant Caviar.  Delicious and Vegetarian. 

 

large round eggplant 

2 or 3 cloves of garlic

 4 Tbs.tahini- (sesame seed paste)

 4 Tbs lemon juice

salt, red pepper

olive oil

chopped parsley

slices of red bell pepper to garnish

Cook the eggplant in a hot oven or on a fork over the flame of a gas stove. When it is well cooked through and the skin is blackened, douse with cold water, peel and chop into small pieces. Mash two or three cloves of garlic to a paste with about the same volume of salt. Add eggplant, mash to a smooth consistency and blend the tahina and lemon juice to make the Arab version of this dish; omit the tahina for the Turkish version. Serve in a bowl with little olive oil on top and garnish chopped parsley, red pepper slices and a dusting of red pepper. Serve with toasted pita wedges.  Beer or a dry white wine.


 modified from Recipe from "Aramco World" magazine March - April 1988 via http://www.ummah.net/family/recipes.html

Spaniards, Moors and Artichokes with Green Mayonnaise

The Reconquista Revisited,  

Artichokes with Green Mayonnaise 

 

The artichoke  is a truly a great vegetable but yet like most things of consequence require patience in preparation and in its eating.   This delicacy is appropriate to discussing the clash of cultures (Islam, American and European) because it is multicultural and because with patience you can the separate the meat of the artichoke from the nettles.  

Nearly, all fresh artichokes eaten in the United States comes from a small agricultural town, off the dunes of the Monterey Bay, called Castroville.   A vegetable promoter in the fifties proclaimed Castroville as the “Artichoke Center Of The World”, no one challenged it and it stuck.  Much like the Garlic, Prune or Watermelon capitols, I guess.   Castroville, for trivia sake, is a Martha's Vinyard of the West Coast, it a  playground  of the rich and famous; Democrat, Republican, Socialist and Socialite: the Monterey Peninsula generally and Pebble Beach in particular.   Monterey is my hometown and it is on the poor side of on the Peninsula.  Yet just the same, regardless of one’s station, eating well has always been a way of life on the Peninsula.   

The artichoke has roots in Spain and this is our connection to the Reconquista or the Re-conquest.   As a background you may recall that Spain financed and supervised the discovery and conquest of the New World.  Northern Europeans would not have a role on the new continent for another 100 years.  The Reconquista is what made this age of discovery and the planting of California artichokes possible.  But we have to go back to Reconquesta itself. 

The artichoke introduced to Spain by North African Moslems called  Moors.  The Moors were part of that great wave of Islamic conquests in the 7th and 8th centuries and as part of their conquests the came into Europe from the far West coast of Africa.   The high water mark of their conquests was when their soldiers crossed the Pyrrenees into what is nowl France with 500,000 soldiers.    This invading army was stopped at Poitiers/Tours by the Visigoth Franks led by Charles (the Hammer) Martel,  the father of Charlemagne.   The defeat of Moors confined them to the modern day Portugal and Spain.    Here they prospered and Islamic civilization reached its Zenith.   Life was too good, they turned less warlike, and decadent and while art, literature flourished, they fell into squabbling among themselves.   While the Moors enjoyed civilization Christian kingdoms seven hundred years, sharpened their skills in chivalric contests and encroached on the Moorish kingdoms.  Little by little,  Moorish civilization was taken piece meal,, and there was no concerted Jihad to stop it.  This 700 years of “struggle” was the Reconquista, and was capped by unification of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon through the marriage of  King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (the parents of Catherine of Aragon, the wife of Henry 8.).   Their union and the final capture of the last Moorish kingdom, Granada, put Spain on the map as a world power.  The capture of Granada was considered by Christendom as a payback for the loss of Constantinople to Islam 50 years earlier.  

The culture war between Christendom and Islam in general is rarely discussed outside of the crusades. The Reconquista was a far larger slice of history but because of the general prejudices against the historical studies of Catholic nations, the Reconquista is little known.  It was even evoked under Franco's rebellion and civil war.  Part of the problem is that Christendom after the Reconquista disintegrated into Protestant and Catholic states.   Much like today, only those nations directly threatened by Islam seem to care.  The major navel victory at Lepanto (1571) crushed Turkish aspiration as a naval power was conducted almost exclusively by Genoan and Venetian fleets.    Later the unlikely Polish King John Sobieski relieved the Turkish Siege of Vienna (1683) when the German states refused to help.    Sound familiar?   After Vienna the war between the West and Islam faded into myth and legend only to reemerge with airliners crashing into the twin towers. 

This culture war between the post-Christian West and anti-West Islam continues but it takes less press coverage than the trial of a pop star child molester.   Unfortunately, teaching this subject is fraught with hazard, first because the dominant material determinist/Marxist model of history has troubling describing the conflict mostly because  there is a fear of discussing religion as anything other than outdated and irrelevant ideas.  In general the only kind of religion that can be discussed in the public square are religions that don’t talk about right and wrong.   

Our clash of cultures was renewed in media terms events of September 11, 2001, but was foreshadowed in India by the British creation of Muslim Pakistan, Iran’s Ayatollah Komeni, CIA training of the Mujehadeen too fight communism in Afghanistan, World Trade Center Bombings I and Osama bin Laden declaration of War in 1998.  The lesser wars in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo should be noted as well.  As a matter of fact, the Slavic animus against the muslims goes back to the centuries they spent under the Turks.

There are unintended consequences to just about anything anybody does, the United States is clearly not exempt.  Kublai Khan’s failed invasion gave the Japanese the kamikaze and Woodrow Wilson’s kindness to the Germans after WWI gave us WWII.  Regardless of how we think that life and history should be we do from time to time fight wars.  They are never as trivial or as mundane as some would have us think.         Ignoring the fact will not make our enemies go way.   Enjoy your appetizer.

 

3 Large Artichokes

Boil whole artichokes until tender.  Test for tenderness by tearing a off an outer leaf and nibbling the base.  If the base is soft to the bite it is done.  Let cool naturally. 

Parsley Mayonnaise

2 teaspoons lemon juice or 1 tablespoon vinegar (balsamic or wine is fine)

1 egg yolk

1/2-teaspoon salt

1/2-teaspoon mustard

2 pinches sugar

1-cup olive

1-tablespoon fresh parsley

In a bowl, combine lemon juice and vinegar.  In a separate bowl, whisk together egg yolk and dry ingredients.  Add half of the lemon juice mixture to the egg yolk mixture and whip till stiff.   (A food processor may also be used.) 

Begin adding oil, a little at a time, until it emulsifies and soft peaks appear.  The color should lighten once 1/4 of the oil is added.  Add oil in a slowly constant stream, whisking continuously.  After 3/4 of the oil is added, pour the rest of the lemon juice mixture.  Slowly add remaining oil while whisking.  Add parsley when the mayonnaise is beginning to firm. 

Slice artichoke in two length-wise.  Serve with mayonnaise.  Appetizer. 

Serves 6