Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Whacked GWOT Strat PSYOP Asset

A spick-and-spanny narrative has the Pakistanis turning against the Taliban. But what else can we have them say?

The last few months were really hairy in Swat and various other locales, and it was looking touch and go for our prospects in (the now officially obsolete usage -- per Bruce Riedel) Af-Pak

Per digression -- supposedly Baitullah Mehsud is in the crosshairs himself right now. Happy hunting.

A tribal leader who opposed the head of the Taliban in Pakistan has been shot dead in the north-western Pakistani town of Dera Ismail Khan, police said.

Qari Zainuddin, 26, who often criticised Taliban head Baitullah Mehsud, was killed by a gunman in his office early on Tuesday.

(...)

Earlier this month, Zainuddin criticised Mehsud after an attack on a mosque which killed 33 people.

He told Associated Press: "Whatever Baitullah Mehsud and his associates are doing in the name of Islam is not a jihad, and in fact it is rioting and terrorism".

"Islam stands for peace, not for terrorism," he had said.

Zainuddin's killing is being seen in Pakistan as a setback for the government in its efforts to isolate Mehsud as the security forces prepare for the next phase of their anti-Taliban offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, says the BBC's Mike Wooldridge in Islamabad.

Earlier this month a prominent Muslim cleric who was outspoken in his opposition to the Taliban was killed in a suicide blast at his seminary in Lahore.
-BBC News Online

Ohnesorg Revelation

...recently in Berlin--first time back since peri-wallfall times. Commemoration:

The Ohnesorg revelation is really something. The "hidden hand of history" and all.

Even if Kurras had no orders to commit murder, the revelations will prompt Germany to contemplate its recent history once again.

Until now, no one had called into question the notion that Kurras was a "potentially fascist individual" with what German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno called an "authoritarian character."

He remains Ohnesorg's killer, but he can no longer be characterized as a puppet of a potentially fascist state. In fact, he was the puppet of a socialist state imbued with an equally authoritarian character, a realization that highlights yet again the similarities between the two ideologies.

All of this raises an intriguing question: What would have happened if the members of the student protest movement had soon discovered that Kurras was a member of the SED and worked for the Stasi?

Would an important part of German history have fallen by the wayside?

Would there have been no '68 movement, no student rebellion and no terrorist activities committed by the Second of June Movement and the Red Army Faction (RAF)?

Duel of the Spy Chiefs

From our boy. Shocker! [LMAO]:

Duel of the Spy Chiefs: A Turf War Exposes a Botched Reorganization

There are spy wars, and there are turf wars. But watch out when the two are combined, as in the battle over who will appoint America's intelligence chiefs abroad -- Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, or Leon Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

(...)

The bureaucratic battle was unfortunate, but it will serve a useful purpose if it forces the White House, finally, to clarify the intelligence reorganization process that created the DNI structure in 2005.

The right division of labor is to let the CIA run operations, which begins with picking the people who will be America's point of contact with foreign intelligence services. Blair has the authority on paper to challenge that prerogative, but he was wrong to do so in practice. This is CIA turf, not just by tradition but also by common sense. Blair should back off.

Clausewitz on IO - The Taliban is Very Good

The plaintive (and yes, whiny) observation that the enemy is better than us in IO is getting kinda old. Kinda like the "we won all the battles in Vietnam" BS. Maybe someone should break it to them about war as the extension of politics.

U.S. fights an information war in Afghanistan -- L.A. Times

(...)

American public affairs officers previously have been slow in responding. U.S. military officials here complain that Taliban leaders are often better and faster at spreading their versions of deadly events.

(...)

[Public affairs officer Army Lt. Col. Clarence] Counts said U.S. officials understood that they needed to improve their information efforts, but often were constrained by security regulations that keep sensitive information under wraps. Taliban militants release detailed statements almost instantly because they often make up the information, Counts said.

An improved flow of information is seen as a crucial priority for Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the incoming commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, as he overhauls the Afghan war strategy.

Further underscoring the importance, the military has appointed a Navy rear admiral, Greg Smith, to oversee public affairs operations in Afghanistan. McChrystal is said to want more rapid public disclosure of information.

Recently, U.S. commanders here have expressed frustration over the propaganda bonanza provided to insurgents by the deaths of civilians in numerous U.S. airstrikes over the years.

(...)
"We're the superior fighting force, but they [the Taliban] find our weaknesses and go for them," said Air Force Lt. Col. Keith Bryza, who helps plan air support for ground units but is not involved in information efforts. "The Taliban is very good" at information operations.

Comrade Cell & Hurricane Nikita - About a Wall

...figured that the Cold War story might be of some interest. Always assumed that it had been a Sov decision -- as you know, that's not the kind of action that the client state would have wanted to conduct sans instructions or endorsement.

Who Ordered the Construction of the Berlin Wall?

Historians have long argued over whether East German leader Walter Ulbricht or his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev was ultimately responsible for the construction of the Berlin Wall. A newly discovered Russian document from August 1961 provides some answers.

(...)

For years, historians have been trying to clear this contradiction, and now an answer may be in the offing. It appears in a Soviet document that Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute in Moscow has discovered: a previously unknown record of a conversation that took place between the two leaders on Aug. 1, 1961.

By that time, the preparations for building the Wall were well underway, and the initiative apparently came from Khrushchev, as he said himself in the August meeting with his East German counterpart. A short time earlier, according to the document, Khrushchev had sent the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin to Ulbricht in order to "explain to him my idea of taking advantage of the current tensions with the West and laying an iron ring around Berlin." In the conversation, Khrushchev pointed out that "many engineers" had already left East Germany, and that something "had to be done."

(...)

Khrushchev wanted to convince the East German population that the wall being built would protect them from Western spies, and he said that the Germans would understand.

But even Khrushchev didn't appear to totally believe his own propaganda. When Ulbricht told him, during the August meeting, that he wanted to bring his economic experts into the loop, Khrushchev advised him otherwise. "You should not explain anything before the introduction of the new border regime," he said. "It would only strengthen the flow of people leaving."

If word got out about the wall construction, the Kremlin director recognized correctly, there could be "traffic jams" on Berlin's access roads. Such forms of traffic obstruction would constitute "a certain demonstration," he said.

Jacked & Hacked Spiegel Online

The Consumer's Guide to Intel Networks

Here's a copy of a handbook[114-page pdf] that is distributed to intelligence professionals, which, among other things, highlights some top-secret networks that until now have been, well, top secret.

Steven Aftergood, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, who directs the organization's Project on Government Secrecy, said about half the classified networks revealed in the 2009 "National Intelligence: A Consumer's Guide" handbook (really, that's the name) are new to him.

Those include:

-- HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Operational Communications Network (HOCNet), which provides information technology, communications and desktop services for Defense Department HUMINT needs.

-- Capitol Network (CapNet), formerly known as Intelink-P, provides congressional intelligence consumers with connectivity to Intelink-Top Secret and CIA Source. Intelink is the intelligence community's classified intranet.

-- Contractor Wide Area Network (CWAN) is NRO's Top Secret computer network for contractors.

-- The National Geospatial Intellligence Agency's Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information Network.

-- The National Reconnaissance Office Management Information System (NMIS) is NRO's Top Secret network. NMIS is also referred to as GWAN (Government Wide Area Network).

-- Stone Ghost, the top-secret network run by the Defense Intelligence Agency to share information with Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. This capability also may be referred to as a "Q-Lat" or "Quad link."

Stone Ghost does not carry Intelink-Top Secret. It surfaced briefly and obliquely in a comment on an article written about a push by the National Security Agency to open up the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network to Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The Consumers Guide also disclosed the existence of two classified phone/fax networks that Aftergood said were new to him:

-- The National Operations and Intelligence Watch Officer Network (NOIWON) is a dedicated secure telephone system with a conferencing capability for the rapid exchange and sharing of high interest and time-sensitive information between Washington-area operations centers.

-- WashFax, a secure fax system intended for use within the Washington Beltway.

The Consumers Guide also hails Lt. Col. George Custer - famed for his last stand -- as a pioneer in the kind of geo-intelligence practiced by NGA. The handbook said Custer used a balloon to spy on confederate soldiers during the battle of Richmond in 1862, locating enemy encampments from high up, and, "as a result, he became one of the world's first geo-spatial intelligence analysts."

Too bad he did not have a balloon at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, where he and his men were soundly defeated.

Aftergood said Custer, at long last, "is entitled to some credit for a constructive contribution. Good for him."

-Jacked & Hacked NextGov

Chump Change - GWOT Strategic PSYOP

For the attention of the microscopically small brethren and sistren of folks interested, yesterday afternoon GAO released a critique of U.S. Public Diplomacy which touched upon the main GWOT Strategic PSYOP (leaving OGA out of it, as it should be).

U.S. Public Diplomacy: Key Issues for Congressional Oversight. GAO-09-679SP, May 27 [43 page pdf]

The national communications strategy identifies the principal mechanism for the coordination of U.S. government strategic communication activities, namely the Policy Coordinating Committee (PCC) on Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication led by State’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, but does not address which agencies, departments, and offices will implement the strategy and their roles and responsibilities. The lack of guidance on DOD’s and State’s respective roles and responsibilities is of particular concern. Both departments have made marginalizing extremism—one of the three national communication goals—their top communications priority and are undertaking activities in this area. While State has been formally designated as the lead for all U.S. government strategic communications, DOD has more resources than State to apply to the strategic communications goal of marginalizing extremism. In 2006, DOD established the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy to support and coordinate public diplomacy efforts, and serve as the lead for developing policy within DOD on countering ideological support for terrorism. DOD officials said this office was disbanded in early 2009 and it is unclear what existing or new mechanisms, if any, will conduct its functions. Further, despite internal planning initiatives that began in 2006, DOD has not defined the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of its internal military capabilities that support strategic communications, such as public affairs, information operations, and defense support for public diplomacy.

Yankees vs. Cowboys - Effwit Unperturbed

Two Ex-Timesmen Say They Had a Tip on Watergate First

“The fact that he had seen Gray and he had talked to me after his lunch, that I remembered,” Mr. Phelps said. But he said it was not until Mr. Smith jogged his memory that he recalled what revelations had the young reporter so excited.

In the book, he wrote, “We never developed Gray’s tips into publishable stories. Why we failed is a mystery to me.”

“My memory is fuzzy on the crucial point of what I did with the tape,” he wrote.

An Effwit says , "Probably not Wisner's Mighty Wurlitzer (since they had some interest in bringing out the story), but maybe someone else's handiwork.

Yankees vs. Cowboys stuff? Who knows."

Effwit holds his lotus position through small and great quakes.

Unperturbed be a real Effwit.

Tiger Down - Tarry On

The death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in a fire fight with Sri Lankan forces on Monday probably marks the end of the legend of Tamil Tigers he had scripted and directed. Without a Prabhakaran to lead, motivate and discipline them it might be near impossible to build another Tamil Tiger organization in the near future.

Prabhakaran is a product the fifties when a whole generation of Tamils in Sri Lanka turned bitter against the government that proclaimed ‘Sinhala only’ was the national language and hurt the pride of the Jaffna Tamil who was the cock of the walk dominating all walks of life. He showed a violent and revengeful methodology for directionless Tamil youth to settle scores with an insensitive Sinhala chauvinist regime that had let loose violence to control Tamil aspirations for equity.

A man of many moods, Prabhakaran was no great orator, an essential skill to be a Tamil politician on both sides of the Palk Strait. In fact, he was a shy man who spoke in a low monotone. But still Prabhakaran had a charisma that enabled him to attract his followers who swore personal loyalty to him. His credibility as a unique leader was carefully built by his daring operations - be it the raid on the Katunayake air base near Colombo in July 1991 or the assassination of President Premadasa of Sri Lanka. His ruthless killings cost him a lot. It turned him paranoid of his own safety. He was shy of publicity and it built an aura of fear around him. On the other hand the mindless killings managed to get the LTTE banned in 33 countries.

The LTTE of Prabhakaran was one among the over 30 Tamil militant organisations that thrived in the aftermath of the infamous Black July pogrom against Tamils in Colombo in 1983. In spite of their lofty Free Eelam rhetoric, many of them degenerated into undisciplined gang of thugs when Sri Lankan government started losing control of Jaffna by 1985-86. It was in this period Prabhakaran set out to make a distinct reputation for the LTTE as a ruthless, disciplined body of Tamil fighters. It was this ironclad discipline that helped him build his insurgent body into one of the most dreaded terrorist force with land, air and sea capability.

There was a streak of cruelty in the way he enforced his punishments whether using a burning tyre around the neck of the victim or using his pistol gang. Drug traffickers and prostitutes were mercilessly put to death. He plotted and killed rival Tamil militant group leaders and cadres who wanted the very same Tamil Eelam he dreamed of because he believed only he could get it. So he did not suffer from any qualms in killing those who stood in his way. And his victims included the high and the mighty including Rajiv Gandhi, Amirthalingam, and Premadasa.

Yet this man’s iron discipline gave way when he fell in love with Mathivathani. And he breached his own rule that no cadre of LTTE would be allowed to marry. Such was the power of love. This personality contradiction was there in his attitude to the use of child soldiers. He was extremely kind to children orphaned due to military action. Yet he did not hesitate to use them as deadly suicide bombers in his Black Tiger squads. They became the cutting edge of naval operations. They did not mind either to sacrifice their lives: by 2008, 356 Black Tigers including 147 young women commandos perished in operations to fulfill the wish of the 'thalaivar' (leader).

He loved movies of martial arts - gun slinging Clint Eastwood movies were a favorite. These videos were the bill of fare of entertainment for cadres in training. Perhaps this was due to his great faith in the power of the weapon.

Prabhakaran had limited education. Yet he showed a readiness to absorb the latest in technology to improve operational capability. He was always on the look out for the latest developments in communication and weapon technology, enabling him to build up the LTTE’s capability to design rocket weapons and manufacture most of the munitions required for warfare. The air arm of the LTTE showed the innovative use of light aircraft for bombing. His thirst for shock action was facilitated by technology innovations.

Prabhakaran was first among insurgent leaders in realizing the value of psychological warfare techniques as force multiplier. He quickly adapted the reach of the internet to spread confusion in the enemy ranks. He had a natural sense of military strategy which over the years appeared to grow a rather stodgy.

Prabhakaran glorified death and sacrifice as the essence of life. He was never comfortable with intellectuals or political pundits. He had little time for politicians or politics - believing actions spoke better. His loyalty was to his cause and not his words or promises made to politicians. In fact, that was the biggest weakness in his leadership skill set. He failed to see the political opportunities offered by the peace process 2002 and preferred war. The man who decided the life and death of thousands with a gun in his hand, stuck to what he preached:“Saithu Mudi Alladu Seththu Madi” – do or die. And in the end he appears to have done just that.

All the while many an instigating fundamental tarries on.

Jesus Wears MCCUU

Maintaining the coherence and fidelity of the IO matrix can be tricky enough should dissonance emanate from grunts in the fray. When conflicting messages find subsistence in the highest echelons of command then the rallying counter-narratives of foe might be admitted as being reasonably substantive - and all the more pestiferous to quell before they kill.

Some claim the existence of military proselytizers in the field just boils down to a few matrix-muddying rogue Christians. Others, like Jeff Sharlet in his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power - and in his more recent cover story in Harper's - claim "it is in the very particulate of the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is our US military. It’s everywhere. We’re about two inches away, you know, from a fundamentalist Christian America through our US military."

Now these excerpts from a feature article in the recent issue of GQ Magazine:

AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House.

The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

(...)

When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

(Continues)

Swine Before Pearls: A Nastier Ivan Squandered In the Flu

In the nick of time - if but a bit upstaged by that wetback bug brouhaha.


[Russian] Andrei recalled that his men had detained a suspect who had several videos of [Chechnyan] militants torturing Russian hostages. One showed him laughing as his comrades raped a 12-year-old girl and then shot off three of her fingers.

“We all went berserk after watching this,” said Andrei, who had begun to beat the suspect. “He fell to the ground. I ordered him to get up but he couldn’t because of his handcuffs. I ordered the cuffs off but something was wrong with the lock. I became angrier and ordered one of my sergeants to get them off no matter what.

“So he took an axe and chopped his arms off. The prisoner screamed in agony. Clearly it would have been impossible to interrogate him further so I shot him in the head.”

(...)

Vladimir and his men referred to their prey as “zaichik” - a term of endearment used by lovers that means “little hare”.

“Only a very small circle of my men took part in this work. Some of those we abducted were tougher than others but eventually everyone talks when you give them the right treatment.

“We used several methods. We’d beat them to a pulp with our bare hands and with sticks. One very effective method is ‘the grand piano’ - when one by one we’d smash the captive’s fingers with a hammer. It’s dirty and difficult work. You would not be human if you enjoyed it but it was the only way to get this filth to talk.”

A hammer would also be used to smash a captive’s kneecaps and militants would be forced to perform sexual acts. The scenes would occasionally be filmed and circulated among enemy combatants in psychological warfare.

(...)

Andrei added: “What mattered most was to carry out this work professionally, not to leave evidence which could be traced back to us. Our bosses knew about such methods but there was a clear understanding that we should cover our tracks. We knew we'd be hung out to dry if we got caught.

“We are not murderers. We are officers engaged in a war against brutal terrorists who will stop at nothing, not even at killing children. They are animals and the only way to deal with them is to destroy them. There is no room for legal niceties in a war like this. Only those who were there can truly understand. I have no regrets. My conscience is clear.”


(...)


The account is one of a series given to The Sunday Times by two special forces officers who fought the militants in Chechnya over a period of 10 years. Their testimony, the first of its kind to a foreign journalist, provides startling insights into the operation of secret Russian death squads during one of the most brutal conflicts since the second world war

The men, decorated veterans of more than 40 tours of duty in Chechnya, said not only suspected rebels but also people close to them were systematically tracked, abducted, tortured and killed. Intelligence was often extracted by breaking their limbs with a hammer, administering electric shocks and forcing men to perform sexual acts on each other. The bodies were either buried in unmarked pits or pulverised.

Far from being the work of a few ruthless mavericks, such methods were widely used among special forces, the men said. They were backed by their superiors on the understanding that operations were to be carried out covertly and that any officers who were caught risked prosecution: the Russian government publicly condemns torture and extrajudicial killings and denies that its army committed war crimes in Chechnya.

In practice, said Andrei and Vladimir, the second officer, the Kremlin turned a blind eye. “Anyone in power who took the slightest interest in the war knows this was going on,” Andrei said. “Our only aim was to wipe out the terrorists.”

The two officers expressed pride in their contribution to the special forces’ “success” in containing the terrorist threat. But they spoke on condition they would not be named.

A hacked & jacked Sunday Times via TimesOnline.

Mexican Cyber Flu

Three years to say what anyone working in this biz for three days could have told them.

From today's NYT:

The United States has no clear military policy about how the nation might respond to a cyberattack on its communications, financial or power networks, a panel of scientists and policy advisers warned Wednesday, and the country needs to clarify both its offensive capabilities and how it would respond to such attacks.

The report, based on a three-year study by a panel assembled by the National Academy of Sciences, is the first major effort to look at the military use of computer technologies as weapons. The potential use of such technologies offensively has been widely discussed in recent years, and disruptions of communications systems and Web sites have become a standard occurrence in both political and military conflicts since 2000.

The report, titled “Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities,” concludes that the veil of secrecy that has surrounded cyberwar planning is detrimental to the country’s military policy.

The report’s authors include Adm. William A. Owens, a former vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; William O. Studeman, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Walter B. Slocombe, former under secretary of defense for policy. Scientists and cyberspecialists on the panel included Richard L. Garwin, an I.B.M. physicist.

Admiral Owens said at a news conference Wednesday in Washington that the notion of “enduring unilateral dominance in cyberspace” by the United States was not realistic in part because of the low cost of the technologies required to mount attacks. He also said the idea that offensive attacks were “nonrisky” military options was not correct.

In the United States, the offensive use of cyberweapons is a highly classified military secret. There have been reports going back to the 1990s that American intelligence agencies have mounted operations in which electronic gear was systematically modified to disrupt the activities of an opponent or for surveillance purposes. But these activities have not been publicly acknowledged by the government.

...

The authors point to a 2004 Pentagon statement on military doctrine, indicating that the United States might respond to a cyberattack with the military use of nuclear weapons in certain cases. “For example,” the Pentagon National Military Strategy statement says, “cyberattacks on U.S. commercial information systems or attacks against transportation networks may have a greater economic or psychological effect than a relatively small release of a lethal agent.”

Prince of Disco - Afghanistan's Change Candidate

Could we do worse than Karzai? Probably.

THE great-grandson of Afghanistan's legendary Iron Amir – who forced rogue courtiers to eat each other – has joined the race to be the country's next president.

Prince Abdul Ali Seraj, who opened Afghanistan's first nightclub in the 1970s, said it is time to launch "psychological warfare" against the Taleban and reclaim Islamic law from the extremists.

The royal insists Afghanistan needs a "change candidate" because President Hamid Karzai has failed. His great grandfather Abdur Rahman Khan ruled from 1880 to 1901, massacring tens of thousands on the battlefield, while executing and torturing hundreds more whom he suspected of dissent.

He made slaves of an entire province, yet he is fondly remembered inside Afghanistan as one of the few rulers in the last 250 years ever to unite country's various tribes and ethnic groups.

Prince Ali fled Afghanistan in 1978 after a communist coup, disguised as a hippy. He returned in 2002 after the Taleban collapsed, and says Abdur Rahman is his hero. "Afghanistan needs a strong leader," he said. "Afghan people have never rallied around policies; they have rallied around people."

He owes his life to a bunch of stoned Australian hippies who agreed to help smuggle him out of the country in their overland "love bus".

They even gave him a guitar, to disguise him, when secret police boarded the bus close to the Khyber Pass, at the border Pakistan border. "I had no idea how to play a guitar," he said. "But they just told me to strum it whenever they did, so I did."

He left behind a string of businesses including Kabul's first disco, called 25 Hours, a bowling alley and a Chinese restaurant.

Prince Ali describes himself as a child of the Sixties, but insists Afghanistan needs tough love, instead of free love. Echoing his great grandfather's nickname, he said the president needs an iron fist.

"Afghanistan needs a ruler with two heads," he said. "He needs compassion for 95 per cent of the people, and an iron fist for the other 5 per cent – the terrorists, al-Qaeda and corrupt officials."
-Scotsman

Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism

In case you are interested, RAND just published the following:

Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism [182-page pdf]

This report presents the findings of research into the involvement of organized crime and terrorist groups in counterfeiting products ranging from watches to automobile parts, from pharmaceuticals to computer software. It presents detailed case studies from around the globe in one area of counterfeiting, film piracy, to illustrate the broader problem of criminal — and perhaps terrorist — groups finding a new and not-much-discussed way of funding their activities. Piracy is high in payoff and low in risk, often taking place under the radar of law enforcement.

The case studies provide compelling evidence of a broad, geographically dispersed, and continuing connection between film piracy and organized crime, as well as evidence that terrorist groups have used the proceeds of film piracy to finance their activities.

Counterfeiting is a threat not only to the global information economy, but also to public safety and national security. Cooperation among law enforcement and governments around the world is needed in the battle against intellectual-property theft, and meaningful progress will require increased political will, strong legislation, consistent enforcement, deterrent sentencing, and innovative solutions. The report lays out an agenda of measures.

Increased global intelligence-gathering and sharing is needed to further illuminate the scope and nature of the connections between piracy and organized crime, and policymakers and law enforcement worldwide should reexamine the common but erroneous assumption that counterfeiting is a victimless crime.

Ain' t Dat Be Da' Damnedest Of Thangz (Love this sh*t); We're but IO

Pieces of some puzzle fallin' into place.

It is not the family's first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah's cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Res ipsa loquitur.



...and now for ramblings as can only be born of arrogance:

While haphazardly still at it: a generic H/T piled upon trap-shruggin' ZenPundit. He be a Sickago-Boy - but he be not as bad as such creature deservedly's cut out to be.

And lest we forget ( per some peversely recondite way) - SMC was metrosexually hyper-lauded by a major Skankinavian radio station. Station's pubatorial chattering vassals had nothing but solid praise to heap upon our pickled arses - and per transitive property of inequality...your sorry voyeuristic arse too.

Anyways: amidst all this coincidental deification of meatballian wisdom - the local pheasant-gazing and, at that, mongoloidian embassy "economic analyst" reported nothing worse/better in his morning briefing to ambassador retardo de jour than that the skanky radio bandits unequivocably labelled us as..."incredibly cool".

Public diplomacy at its Zenith. (Yuck, goddammit - We're all IO).

Core men up front

(Run MountainRunner run.)

Middle East: Costs of Conflict

The opportunity cost of conflicts in the Middle East since 1991 is 12 trillion dollars, says a new research report [6-page pdf] on the Cost of Conflict in the Middle East by Strategic Foresight Group, a leading Asian think-tank. [related Youtube video. See also agenda for International Workshop on Cost of Conflict in the Middle East - 11-page pdf]

For the first time in 60 years, the report presents a comprehensive assessment of costs of various conflicts in the Middle East on 97 different parameters- from the social to psychological and economic to environmental. Supported by the Governments of Switzerland and Norway, the AK Party of Turkey and Qatar Foundation, the Strategic Foresight Group involved over 50 leading experts and leaders from the region to gather input for the report.

If the conflict in the Middle East had been resolved in 1991 at the time of the Madrid peace process, almost all families in the Arab world as well as Israel would be enjoying double the per capita income they have today. Iraq’s GDP would have been $300 billion instead of $59 that it is expected to be in 2010.

The environmental costs are staggering. The First Gulf War accounts for 10 million barrels of oil spilt into the sea and 45 million barrels spilt in the Kuwait desert. In a future war, if the volume of spilt oil doubles to 100 million barrels per day, it would equal 1 day’s oil supply for the world. Similarly, a future conflict in the Middle East could account for more carbon emissions than of an industrialized country such as the UK.

The Palestinian people have lost over 100 million man hours waiting at the checkpoints between Ramallah and Jerusalem since 2000. At present there are more than 11,000 Palestinians in Israeli Detention Centers. The unemployment in Gaza reached over 50% with the suspension of 95% of the industrial operations even before the December 2008 attack by Israel.

Israel’s costs are also significant in human and psychological terms with the country suffering over than 34000 missile attacks since 2000. Almost 1000 Israeli citizens have lost their lives during the same period and 123 minors have been killed in attacks on cafes, schools and buses. More than 90% of Israelis live in fear.

The report argues that a comprehensive peace agreement would make a number of projects feasible including gas deals, railway lines and the much talked about Red-Dead Sea Canal. It would also provide peace dividends to all the countries in the region, including $4429 per year per Israeli household, $500 per Egyptian household and $1250 per Jordanian family.

The report by Strategic Foresight Group does not suggest solutions for peace. It outlines four scenarios as to what could be the impact of various policy options.

Davos Dustup

NYT

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, vowing never to return to the annual gathering.

Mr. Erdogan apparently became incensed after the moderator curtailed his response to remarks by Mr. Peres on the recent Israeli military campaign.

(...)

In a news conference immediately after the panel discussion, Mr. Erdogan said he was particularly upset with Mr. Ignatius, who he said had failed to direct a balanced and impartial panel. ;)

Amuse bouche AQ: GWOT Strategic PSYOP

An offering from the main GWOT Strategic PSYOP can be detected from this piece in the new Economist:

Al-Qaeda's failure to fight for Palestine comes up repeatedly in jihadist internet forums. It also forms part of the latest ideological counter-attack against al-Qaeda by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, one of its founders in 1998 and a leading jihadist ideologue under the pen-name "Dr Fadl". He has since fallen out with its leaders, particularly Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded him as head of Egypt's Islamic Jihad group. Al-Qaeda, he now says, "did not offer Palestine anything except words".

Dr Fadl was arrested in Yemen in 2001 and extradited to Egypt. His first assault on al-Qaeda for its profligate killing of Muslims, at the end of 2007, prompted Mr Zawahiri to write a rebuttal of nearly 200 pages. The rejoinder to that, issued in November, was serialised in an Egyptian newspaper. His latest critique ranges from personal attacks on Mr Zawahiri to accusations that al-Qaeda has distorted Islamic law on jihad and inflicted a series of disasters on Muslims.

Dr Fadl accuses Mr Zawahiri of being an agent of the Sudanese intelligence services who agreed to carry out ten attacks in Egypt in the 1990s in exchange for $100,000. He denounces him as a liar and a coward who incites others to die in jihad while not taking part in the fighting. Egyptian prisons and graveyards were filled with jihadists, but Mr Zawahiri fled abroad, he says.

Al-Qaeda blames America for all the woes of the Muslim world. But Dr Fadl says the problem is Muslims' own failings. He accuses al-Qaeda of declaring entire populations, even in Muslim countries, to be apostates, and of establishing a "criminal doctrine" of wholesale slaughter. This defies traditional injunctions in Islamic law against indiscriminate killing. Even the killing of non-believers in war is restricted, he avers, pointing to the bans on killing women, boys, the demented and hired hands such as labourers and peasants.

The attacks on America in 2001, says Dr Fadl, prompted foreign invasions and the destruction of the "Islamic state" set up by the Taliban. It led to the death of more Muslims than have been killed in all of Israel's wars. "Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers," he writes. Their talk of Palestine is "just for propaganda"; they cannot find allies among Palestinians.

Do the ideological revisions of Dr Fadl, facilitated by the Egyptian security services, matter when the assault in Gaza may have won al-Qaeda new supporters? Some officials argue that the emotional fury will pass; they say Dr Fadl's first attack hurt al-Qaeda even though it followed Israel's equally brutal war in Lebanon in 2006. But pundits such as Bruce Hoffman, of Georgetown University in Washington, think the impact will be marginal. "Dr Fadl discomfits al-Qaeda," he says. "Young hotheads are not going to listen to some geriatric sitting in an Egyptian prison. But al-Qaeda worries he might have an impact on its finances."

Gaming Chavez

CARACAS (Reuters) - A video game depicting mercenaries storming Venezuela, which has been criticized in the oil-rich South American country as a blueprint for an invasion, will be released by a U.S. company this weekend.

(...)

The game, "Mercenaries 2: World in Flames," will be released on Sunday by a division of Electronic Arts Inc and is set in a "fully destructible Venezuela," the company said in a news release.

"A power hungry tyrant uses Venezuela's oil supply to overthrow the government and turns the country into a war zone," the company says of the game on its Web site.

In 2006, when the game was first announced, lawmakers from Chavez's coalition called it an example of a U.S. government-inspired propaganda campaign against Chavez that could even help lay the psychological groundwork for an actual invasion.

"All the controversy around this is kind of comical," Electronic Arts spokesman Jeff Brown said. "At the end of the day you have to remind yourself it's a damned video game."

The government on Friday said it could not immediately comment on the game's release.

(...)

A trailer for the game, set in 2010, features mercenaries with American accents storming oil installations during a bloody coup by a tyrant called Ramon Solano.

"It is time the Venezuelan people stop paying for the greed of foreign interests, we will make them pay dearly for our oil. From this day forward everybody pays," the character says before shots of helicopter gunships and tanks attacking familiar Venezuelan landscapes.

Chavez has nationalized oil projects owned by U.S. companies like Exxon and ConocoPhillips.
-hacked&jacked Reuters

O'Radio Shack'd; Retronymized, Euphemized - Bettered

The oath redux wasn't acknowledged to have been visualized for offspring: grainy and 70'ish Radio Shack'd audio recordings do not perennially demand YouTubedization.

Redux; well heck, just knocking on wood. So that first, and most banal at that, challenge to a promise of reasonable transparency was surgically managed t'ward the more epic and Lincolnesque narrative. Picturesque. Love it. So 2.0 savvy. Day 1.

More below the fold on euphemization from some latter-day Christian Scientists:

No doubt about it, Mr. Obama's to-do list is suddenly a lot longer this week. As he struggles to restart the economy and save the environment, he'll also have to stay on top of all the wars the country is involved in or at the edge of.

And he'll have to take note of which wars are kinetic, and which ones aren't.

Come again? It's not exactly everywhere, but it's a term I've seen and heard often enough to pay attention: kinetic operations, aka "shooting wars."

Kinetic – it rhymes with frenetic – comes from a Greek word, kinein, meaning to move. Kinetic energy is energy of motion: a snowball flying through the air, for instance. Educational theorists speak of different people as having audio, visual, or kinetic (or kinesthetic) learning styles, depending on whether they learn best by hearing, seeing, or hands-on experience. Kinetic sculptures are those that move.

Kinetic has a cousin in the movie business, too – cinema. In the 1890s, the aptly named Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, borrowed another Greek word, kinema, meaning "movement," to coin the term cinématographe for the motion-picture camera they developed.

(While I'm digressing: The Online Etymology Dictionary reports, "When 3-D films seemed destined to be the next wave and the biggest thing to hit cinema since 'talkies,' they were known as deepies (1953). The gods have spared us.")

Meanwhile, kinetic is moving in other directions, too. "Afghanistan's kinetic action" was the somewhat cryptic headline on a piece the other day in Stars and Stripes, the independent news source for the US military community.

The lead was a little more enlightening, if not heartening: "Taliban fighters have turned increasingly to roadside bombs and other deadly tactics to combat U.S. soldiers and other NATO-led troops in southern Afghanistan, military officials say."

With such a grim story, no wonder there was a resort to euphemism.

By contrast, a "nonkinetic" operation is one with no shooting or bombing.

Thus the Navy Times quoted Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, on efforts to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia: "The most effective measures we've seen ... are non-kinetic and defensive in nature."

Max Boot and Richard Bennet, writing last month in The Weekly Standard about "low-intensity counterinsurgency" against Islamist rebels in the Philippines, noted, "Traditional 'kinetic' operations in which bullets are fired and bombs dropped are still part of the Philippine strategy against their numerous guerrilla foes, but they have become less important over the years, thanks partly to the advice Philippine forces have received from the US Special Forces."

Kinetic operations are in contrast with "psy ops," psychological warfare, or civil affairs operations, such as building schools or setting up health clinics.

So is this use of kinetic largely a euphemism? Euphemism is part of it, surely, in the Afghan story.

But it's a retronym, too, as the American Heritage Dictionary defines it: "a word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development, as acoustic guitar in contrast to electric guitar or analog watch in contrast to digital watch."

In other words – the armed forces need this new usage because they are doing so many other things than firing weapons. And that is not a bad thing.

Mindjacking Down Gaza Way

Hijacking the airwaves, spreading false news and sowing doubt: Israel and Hamas are pulling out all the stops when it comes to psychological warfare. Lies and deceit are the weapons of choice in the effort to destroy enemy morale.

Roughly once every hour, Israel hijacks the airwaves: The voice of radio host Kamal Abdu Nasser cuts out for a few minutes and is replaced by that of an Arabic-speaking Israeli. Listeners in the Gaza Strip are convinced that, in those moments, Israel's military is speaking.

Hamas is responsible for the war and Gaza's misery, says the apparent imposter.

The Hamas television station Al-Aqsa is also periodically interrupted, viewers say. One example, they report, is that of a cartoon depicting a sniper shooting at pictures of Hamas leaders. An Arabic voiceover warns: "This time you will pay."

It was three years ago that Israel's army launched its department of psychological warfare. But its debut was less than stunning. During the Lebanon war in 2006, Israelis dropped poorly-made leaflets down on Shiite civilians in southern Lebanon. The pamphlets included a simplistic drawing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah cowering behind a cedar tree, Lebanon's national symbol. The clumsily-delivered message was apparently that Lebanon's Schiite militia was hiding behind the country's civilians.

These flyers did not have the desired effect. Instead, the Lebanese showed them to visitors for months on end to show the Israeli army's naiveté. Many wondered whether Israel had honestly thought their pamphlets would change Lebanese minds.

But in the last two and a half years, Israel's army has learned a thing or two about psychological warfare. For one, they've captured the airways -- but for another, they've also improved their flyers. Pamphlets dropped on the Gaza Strip refrain from relying on simplistic propaganda images. Instead, they provide telephone numbers and e-mail addresses -- Palestinians can use them should they want to report the whereabouts of Hamas leaders or weapons caches.

One can assume the contact information isn't used often -- but the flyers are effective: "Pamphlets like these sow seeds of doubt among Hamas leaders and the civilian population," says Ephraim Kam, deputy head of the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. They create a general atmosphere of uncertainty because everyone suddenly holds the tools to betray the leaders of Hamas, he says.

Israeli reports about massive problems facing Hamas have a similar effect, according to Kam. Israeli military speakers have for days been reporting that their generals in the field have observed scores of demoralized Hamas fighters deserting. The claim can't be confirmed -- but it definitely affects morale. It strengthens the Israeli population's will to continue; and in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli media is the main source of information, this message raises questions about whether Hamas may, in fact, be on its last legs.

"Messages like these may or may not be true, but they definitely achieve one desired result," says Kam. "They undermine the confidence and certitude of Hamas."


The Islamists in the Gaza Strip have likewise employed the power of suggestion during this war, now almost three weeks old. Hamas has repeatedly released messages claiming that they have captured or killed Israeli soldiers. Translated into Hebrew, these announcements, are then inserted into the radio traffic in the Israeli-controlled parts of the Gaza Strip. Even if the messages are later disproved, they initially undermine the morale of soldiers in the field, according to Kam.

Hamas has instrumentalized the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in a similar manner. Shalit has been in capitivity in the Gaza Strip for more than two and a half years -- his fate is of interest to the entire nation. Indeed, one of the goals of the current offensive is that of bringing Shalit home -- an it is one which the majority of the population supports wholeheartedly.

At the start of the Israeli offensive, Hamas claimed that Shalit had been wounded by Israeli fire. The message was clear: If Israel wanted to see Shalit return alive, it should stop the war. Then, last Sunday, the Gaza Islamists claimed that Schalit's health was no longer important. "He may be wounded or he may be fine. This question is no longer of any interest to us," said Hamas politburo member Mussa Abu Marsuk, thereby raising frenzied concern throughout Israel about the young man's wellbeing.

Even Hamas threats fired off at Israel over the past months seem to have been well-considered. "Shortly before the end of the cease-fire, Hamas started boasting that it had countless surprises awaiting Israeli troops, should they advance," says Kam. Threats that no soldier would ever leave the Gaza Strip alive were supposed to keep Israel at bay.

The threats, of course, were not ultimately successful in preventing an Israeli ground incursion. Still, says Kam, they raised fears of booby-traps, fighters hidden inside tunnel systems and further Hamas attempts to capture Israeli soldiers. "The IDF would certainly have been careful anyway, but Hamas's pre-war propaganda caused them to be doubly careful," says Kam.

Still, the most effective propaganda campaign in this war has certainly been waged by Israel.

On Dec. 26, when war between Israel and Hamas already seemed unavoidable, Jerusalem called for a 48-hour cease-fire. The government claimed it wanted to consider all possible political solutions. In order to give Hamas a sense of security, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak even appeared in a satirical broadcast on Dec. 26 -- by which point the decision to attack on the morning of Dec. 27 was 24-hours old. An unsuspecting Hamas considered itself safe. On the morning of Dec. 27, men met in offices and barracks and dozens of policemen gathered at a defense ceremony. At that point, nearly 60 Israeli fighter jets were already in the air, headed for battle.
-Hacked and jacked Spiegel Online

Jack B Back (Cheap Start): Rejectng COIN Wisdom

Given - it's way cheap but it B our lead-in:

Some yesterday's WaPo finds our boy prezenting the institutional viewpoint as per usual.

Spotted a gem from another yesterday, Rejecting COIN Wisdom (There's a Marc Lynch in here somewhere):

Maybe that's just the way these rightwing sociopaths want it. I'm at a loss to think of any other reason they continually deny accepted counter-insurgency expertise to bang the gong for more bloodshed.

Fellow Aspbergers: Dig the "rightwing sociopath" in question. LMAO

(Jack B Back.)

Foothills: Promises From a Chicken Ranch

Special schedules of long late had the better of our capacity to post & porntificate as intensely as we most oft love to do. Next week we're back again in more regular manner.

Thanks for this past year's visits and comments - and for the thoughtful posts written by intrepid & rigorous minds at the blogs/online journals we undeservedly (ie, unabashedly) link to: we're always reading you - especially when we're scrambling like frenzied chickens far from here, you, & saner realities.

Semper Fi, FOB brothers and sisters; keep the barbarian in us and other at bay for yet another night.

Black & White - All-American Manchurians

Pick the true Manchurian. One can't go further awry than granny did on her 401(k).

O(b/s)ama

As if being Kenyan weren't bad enough, John Ray at Stop the ACLU reports that Obama is also Indonesian according to another birth certificate and that he traveled to Pakistan in 1981 on an Indonesian passport where he no doubt met with members of Al Qaeda.

...or

McShame (and this supplementary)

...but John McCain—there has always been talk, and there’s evidence to suggest that there is truth in this, but it’s in his head, and only he and his psychiatrist, if he has one, know, that he—his reasons are that if the North—if the Vietnamese were to release all the information they have on him, the full text of his confessions, how he lived the details, because there have been stories, again, just rumors, that he was provided with a woman companion, and all kinds of things like that, which are—can’t be considered as fact, because they’ve never been confirmed, and very, very difficult, if not impossible, to confirm.

PS (We wish we knew as much about the AQ mindset that we do of the commy ditto - ergo this lopsided post scriptum. (We're really really old school gals)):

We have had doubts about the story of McCain's "heroism" in "refusing early release" from the North Vietnamese.

AFAWK, when Commies run detention facilities, THEY make the rules. If they thought that giving McCon's early release would have gained them propaganda points, they would have sent him back to daddy CINCPAC. He wouldn't have had any say in the decision, wethinks.

Fear and Loathing in Iraq

Slipstreaming behind our previous post Holding Pattern - The Iraq Stack, WaPo's Ignatius brings us this incidental:

Iraq hasn't gotten much attention recently in the American presidential campaign, thanks to the reduction in violence there, but U.S. policymakers are increasingly worried about what's ahead.

The negotiations to complete a new status-of-forces agreement for U.S. troops are deadlocked. With a Dec. 31 deadline approaching, Baghdad and Washington seem to be running out of bargaining room. The Iraqis are determined to assert their sovereignty through legal jurisdiction over U.S. forces, while American officials are demanding broad protections from Iraqi law until U.S. troops are gone in 2011.

U.S. officials are warning that if the talks remain stalled, there isn't an easy Plan B, such as a new U.N. Security Council resolution to replace the one that expires at year's end and now provides the legal mandate for American troops.

"I've tried to make clear the consequences of not getting a SOFA agreement," Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told me in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Iraqis should be under no illusion that a rollover of the U.N. resolution would be an easy option." He said the United States would refuse anything but a clean, one-year extension of the current U.N. mandate -- meaning that the Iraqis would lose the gains they have won in the new status-of-forces agreement.

Crocker said he has advised the Iraqis that without some formal mandate, U.S. troops will return to their bases Jan. 1. "Without legal authority to operate, we do not operate," he said. "That means no security operations, no logistics, no training, no support for Iraqis on the borders, no nothing."

Iraq has been regarded as such a success story in recent months that many have forgotten that all the old cleavages still exist -- Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, regional autonomy vs. central government. With growing uncertainty about the future of U.S. forces in the country, these tensions are returning with a vengeance.

Mistrust between Kurds and Arabs almost led to a military confrontation in the Khanaqin area northeast of Baghdad in August. The Kurds had moved their pesh merga militia into the mixed Kurdish-Arab area, prompting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to deploy Iraqi army troops and order the Kurdish forces to leave. Crocker admonished both sides not to make stupid miscalculations, and U.S. commanders warned that they wouldn't come to Maliki's rescue. The overmatched Iraqi army retreated, but the crisis left bitter feelings on all sides.

"The Kurds still see things as a zero-sum game, as does everyone else," grumbles another senior U.S. official who has been deeply involved in the negotiations. Jockeying among the Shiite parties has been especially intense, he says, with none of the Shiite leaders wanting the potential stigma of supporting the SOFA deal.

Iran is waging an aggressive covert-action campaign to derail the agreement, U.S. officials say. The new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, highlighted Tehran's push last week when he said Iranian operatives had been seeking to bribe Iraqi members of parliament to reject the pact when it comes up for a vote.

This public allegation of Iranian meddling drew a rebuke from Maliki, but U.S. officials say they have recently intercepted Iranian couriers carrying suitcases of money to pay bribes and political subsidies to pro-Iranian parties. It isn't clear whether the United States is mounting a covert effort of its own to counter the Iranian campaign.

The Iranians obviously want to limit U.S. influence in the new Iraq by defeating the status-of-forces agreement and in the process hand America a strategic defeat. But some top U.S. officials think the Iranians have a more fundamental goal in pushing U.S. forces out before the Iraqis are ready to take over -- namely, bringing a final, decisive resolution to the Iraq-Iran war that ended in a 1988 truce. "Now, 20 years later, they have an opportunity to win that war," the official argued.

"My one-word definition of Iraq is 'fear,' " says Crocker. "Everybody is afraid of everybody. They're afraid of the past, present and future. They're afraid of the consequences of signing an agreement. But they should be even more afraid of the consequences of not signing."

Straight to the Heart - Tête-à-Tête Cyberattacks

Today many hit the internet's WWW for its plethora of social networks, browsing from a distance through server-side catalogs aggregating and organizing the personal profiles of millions.

Tomorrow we will be able to surf and process the profiles of people as we encounter them irl and on the fly: adjacent soccer dads and fellow pedestrians work bound - the bounty will be plenty and immediate. This brown eyed Denny's cashier - I wonder if my dating profile and credit score matches his secret longings for a suave one night stand? (Heck, I even think some of the SMC crew have patents pending for such technology).

Already scenarios are in play that consider the hazards of tête-à-tête cyberhits. A nifty vector of opportunity for assassins and deformed love seekers?

Excerpts below from the report, Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses [14-page pdf]:

Wirelessly reprogrammable implantable medical devices(IMDs) such as pacemakers, implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), neurostimulators, and implantable drug pumps use embedded computers and radios to monitor chronic disorders and treat patients with automatic therapies.

For instance, an ICD that senses a rapid heartbeat can administer an electrical shock to restore a normal heart rhythm, then later report this event to a health care practitioner who uses a commercial device programmer1 with wireless capabilities to extract data from the ICD or modify its settings without surgery.

Between 1990 and 2002, over 2.6 million pacemakers and ICDs were implanted in patients in the United States; clinical trials have shown that these devices significantly improve survival rates in certain populations. Other research has discussed potential security and privacy risks of IMDs, but we are unaware of any rigorous public investigation into the observable characteristics of a real commercial device. Without such a study, it is impossible for the research community to assess or address the security and privacy properties of past, current, and future devices. We address that gap in this paper and, based on our findings, propose and implement several prototype attack-mitigation techniques.

We assess the security and privacy properties of a common ICD and present attacks on privacy, integrity, and availability. We show that the ICD discloses sensitive information in the clear (unencrypted); we demonstrate a reprogramming attack that changes the operation of (and the information contained in) the ICD; and we give evidence that a battery-powered ICD can be made to communicate indefinitely with an unauthenticated device, thereby posing a potential denial-of-service risk. All of our attacks can be mounted by an unauthorized party equipped with a specially configured radio communicator within range of the ICD.

Attack scenarios. Since health care is a very sensitive and personal subject for many people, we explicitly choose to deviate from standard practice in the academic security research community and do not describe specific scenarios in which an attacker might compromise the privacy or health of a victim. We also do not discuss the potential impact on patients if an adversary were to carry out an attack in vivo. Rather, when discussing attacks we focus solely on the technical properties of those attacks. In addition, in each case where we identify a vulnerability, we propose a solution or technical direction to mitigate it.

Further resources available through the Medical Device Security Center.

Shift To Shape

Two fine posts (FabMax & Kent's) about smothered writings of deserved heed upon shabby and beckoning ol' walls got us mulling over the divides & gangways between intelligence analysts, prophets, and your regular old soothsaying hacks.

Alerting graffiti (that simultaneously dire and decorative kind) conjectured by all manner a premonitory scribbler abounds: Alien invasion fleets lurking to pounce upon our welfare states from behind the innocent moon. Decadently chateau'd and beak-nosed Rothchildians colluding with coffin-masturbating and creaky old Anglo-satanists for nation-killing and Jesus-ushering global hegemony. Or exploitative street urchins the likes of a Soros or a Lahde publicly accenting Bubble. What the heck is actionable enough to cling to?

Save our souls, Brother - and do tell us before we're all, excuse our French, glass'd, "Which of the millennial incomers is the MIRV and what be the swarm of Siberian-mined aluminum chaff?"

The good analyst but strives to describe a sliver of a moment - now or then.

Prophets haphazardly foresee an amalgamated potpourri of such interconnected moments and invariably get viciously bled and quartered for such un-summoned community service, well rudely ante their utterances are sufficiently Youtube'd for fair chance at corralling abidance.

Soothsayers. Well hey, they're those commonsensical sounding folks with scary pluperfect hair resolutely appearing on CGI'd cable news - and who are almost always wrong in, alas, non-existent retrospect.

Prediction is but for the shaper. Such sculpting animal takes, or leaves, the goodies of the varyingly vying Trinitians under its driven behest and proceeds unflinchingly onwards as myopic molder. Futures made are oft born of steamrolling sows, obliterating difference in fidelity between the considered input of indentured drudge and freelancing druid.

Caught in a cacophony of determined advice, admonition, and analysis, perhaps it's fair to turn deaf ears to courting lips and rear pasty asses t'wards our strong sun and meekly ask, "Who's the shaper now?"

Now a wee diddy`bout oil pricing.

Oil prices seem to be in free-fall. After averaging a staggering $137 a barrel over the first week of July, they were down to $109 a barrel over the final week of August.

Where are prices going next? Who knows? Bearish talk about bubbles bursting and bullish talk about peak oil disguise the fact that the future direction of oil prices is unknown and unknowable. Neither investors nor politicians ought to be betting the economic house on any particular vision of "our energy future."

The fundamental reason for the difficulty associated with forecasting future oil prices is the fact that both demand and supply are relatively inelastic over the short term. That means rather small changes in either can have very large price effects. Hence, those who wish to forecast oil prices are forced to forecast weather patterns, labor relations, gross domestic product (GDP) reports, demographic trends, civil unrest and technological change in all sorts of disparate economic sectors.

Long-run forecasts are no easier to execute. Professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba has cataloged the vast record of energy forecasts offered by academics, corporations, consultants, trade associations, government agencies, "blue ribbon" commissions, policy activists and "futurists" of all stripes over the past 100 years and finds a "a manifest record of failure." There is simply no reason to believe that mere mortals can foretell oil prices or petroleum market shares in the future, absent some sort of time machine. (Read more)

Cross-Border Tweaks And Twitters

Though certainly not frantically akin to the complexities inherent U.S. military cross-border excursions into Pakistan, the Turkish situation does perhaps remind us of the interplay such junkets can bring to bear on the complex matrix of perception shaping - for better or worse.

Turkey's AKP government has been engaged in hitherto secretive talks with Iraqi Kurdistan's autonomous regional government (KRG) as part of a new play to come to terms with the PKK's escalating attacks into Turkey from bases inside Iraq - and perhaps more importantly/ realistically as a means of capping Turkish domestic dissatisfaction with how the AKP government is seemingly failing to come to resolving terms with Kurd-related strife.

Simultaneous to the talks, Turkey is conducting cross-border aerial bombardment sorties against PKK bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan and has done so ever since October 3 when a PKK commando unit launched an attack from within Iraq against the border posting of Aktutun, smoking 17 Turkish soldiers.

Ankara seems somewhat set on reaching a cooperation agreement (i.e. a commitment by the KRG to deploy military assets against the PKK, though Kurds aren't exactly known for whacking other Kurds en masse - especially when such internecine action risks coming off as running errands for foreign meddlers) - or at the very least, and perhaps foremost so - Ankara appears adamant in shaping a perception among its domestic audience of evolving a new predisposition towards fielding a wider spectrum of approaches vis-à-vis the pesky Kurd.

By opening up an official dialogue with the Kurds - albeit with Iraqi Kurds - the AKP government hopes to sufficiently quell escalating domestic voices pressuring Ankara to take a more political and culturally accommodating approach to some of the not entirely unreasonable aspirations of their own Kurds - if only to erode the PKK's popular base. The KRG's prime minister Nechirvan Barzani is soon bound for Ankara so perhaps some modicum of sly win-win gambit is gaining traction.

From previously making due with boomeranging out blame across the fence at the Iraqi Kurds for tolerating and supporting the PKK, the AKP government's new maneuver to appease domestic audiences by publicly announcing that dialogue with the Kurds is no longer taboo seems not all that mute . Almost as to underscore quelling intentions, Turkish President Gül is pretty much already on his way to Emerald City to liaise with President Jalal Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari - both conveniently Kurds. If nothing deployably pointy comes out of the karsilamas then at least the top level posturing will perhaps work the AKP's way as a placating gesture to shore up the rustling domestic flank.

Iraqi Kurdistan's KRG has also been voicing a change in tone towards the PKK with the likes of a "Hey PKK, `nuff with those riling cross border excursions into Turkey or you'll have to move on elsewhere" or a "Yo Gül, we're always open for a constructive discussion on mutual problems". So far however, it's been all smoke and no neighbourly Ka-boom from the KRG.

Come end of day, one of our less skewed guesses would be that it will take a not so minor doctrinal revolution among the shadow-casters of the deep state establishment before any decisively empowered lurking Turk seriously considers deploying approaches beyond the capacity of what the Neo-Ottoman's old kinetic toolbox has to offer. Public sentiment inside Turkey still has a funny knack of often cascading a little short of what many might feel is far enough.

And now to an article in another day's Today's Zaman

A Turkish delegation headed by Turkey's special envoy to Iraq, Murat Özçelik, had talks with Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in Baghdad on Tuesday, in a landmark meeting to discuss cooperation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which launches attacks on Turkey from its northern Iraqi bases.

Speaking after the talks, Turkey's first official contact with the Kurdish leader in recent years, Özçelik declined to make specific comments on the content of the discussions but said he had outlined what could be done in the fight against terrorism, adding that Barzani responded "positively" to Turkey's demands.

The Iraqi Kurds, for their part, said they are ready to work with Turkey to find a solution. "The two sides agreed to turn a new page and continue talks," said Faisal Dabbagh, a spokesman for Barzani. He stated that the Kurdish leader said the terror problem should be resolved through politics and dialogue and that the Kurdish administration was ready to give support in every way.

"This was the first meeting in a long time. The meeting was positive. It was a good step to develop ties," senior Kurdish official Fouad Hussein told the private Cihan news agency.

Turkey notes that there has been a change in the Kurdish administration's rhetoric on Turkey's anti-PKK efforts recently, but complains no visible progress has been achieved in meeting a set of concrete expectations. Ankara expects the Iraqi Kurds to arrest and extradite PKK chieftains, to designate the group a terrorist organization and to close down PKK-linked organizations operating in northern Iraq.

Ankara had refused to talk to the Iraqi Kurds, accusing them of supporting the PKK. Özçelik and the chief foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, Ahmet Davuto?lu, met with Kurdish official Nechirvan Barzani in May, launching an era of dialogue with the Kurdish administration.

Yesterday's talks with Massoud Barzani are a test proving whether dialogue with the Iraqi Kurds could pave the way for cooperation against the PKK, according to Turkish officials.

The Turkish delegation also met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The meeting in Baghdad underscores the pressure facing the Turkish government to respond forcefully to attacks launched by the PKK from its mountain camps in Kurdish-run northern Iraq. Maliki expressed regret over an Oct. 3 attack that killed 17 Turkish soldiers and said the Iraqi people were "ashamed" that the PKK is using the Iraqi territory to launch attacks on Turkey. He also said this "trouble" should be removed.

The talks in Baghdad come as President Abdullah Gül prepares to visit Iraq. The presidency has denied recent reports in the Turkish media that he has been also invited to Arbil during his stay. Speaking yesterday before traveling to Germany to inaugurate an international book fair, Gül said he is planning to go to Baghdad but declined to comment on details, saying no date has yet been set. "I earlier announced my intention to travel to Baghdad, but work to set a date and a schedule for this visit has not yet started," Gül said.

The level and intensity of future talks are likely to be determined based on the results from yesterday's talks with Massoud Barzani. The government, cautious about the possible failure of talks with Barzani, had avoided top-level meetings with the Iraqi Kurdish leader, expecting him to take more steps to prove his commitment to supporting Turkey's anti-terror efforts. Nechirvan Barzani raised hopes about cooperation against the PKK, calling for dialogue with Ankara to discuss possible cooperation.

Pass It On - Love Grind Part One

Let us not be such cynics so as to titulate this post Cross-branding Selves. Instead...

Time has long prior to now drawn nigh to near to giving this long pre-meditated post hierurgical wings - only to find us so often as always procrastinating out of true blue fear of doing injustice to the worthy yet woefully bypassed (per way of banal martini-omissionism).

But to heck with such introspective Lutheran incontinence - it gets so fuzzy. Here instead goes a skanky SMC Sally loose with an achingly pregnant and amorous tirade. So batton down and buckle up, Lassie. We think you suspect by now that we're going for the big ugly. Some call it love.

Effwit (and its politically skullduggerous harlot) An outstanding counter-shaded slacker. But hey, hermaphrodite buddy - reign in your compulsive Writ large-isms and you could stumble far beyond yo' anti-oxidatin' green tea-quaffing Embassy Row townhouse commy-subsistence.)

Imperatating Kent's- Possibly the best esoteric blog in the Die Wilde Jagd. If only the imperatators could rid themselves of their own occasional, albeit only sub-textual, writ large-isms.

MountainRunner's Matt - There's an eclectic and weird cluster of blogs about Matt that has cornered the market of clean & elegantly detached graphic design. Unfortunately Matt rather recently chose to cross brand his SoCal mug with his otherwise aesthetically pleasing journal - how unfortunate for all but most kind He.

We like to tell ourselves we found Matt before he learned to crawl - and now the clever cat trail-blazes. Pan for gold with us and be richer.

Follow Matt if you're serious 'bout tax-subsidized mindbending - he keeps tabs on the (r)evolving bureaucracy of IO and PD like certainly no other and gasping runner up. At such task, he's both reasonably brave and charitably looking to enhance the regular mediocrity with his absolutely other-enhancing employment. We refuse to punt our dear and massive pool of Eurodollars on the side of any U.S.-led adventurism lest brilliant and willing MountainRunner man is made decisive shotgunner within DoD or State. Wise up, GS'ers.

John Brown's PD Review Thanks - and thanks Tri-pawed.

Hafty - Finally a thinly veiled unromantic - and incomparably qualified iconoclast at that. If you don't get nobody's bitch's cryptics then nobody's bitch's cryptics ain't for you to feed off. Tough luck, Citizen Al-Dorito.

As with all of the above journals, Haft's shack of due irreverence is where a decisive slice of it be at. Don't take our word on that.

Secrecy News What can an inebriated stutterer mutter but: hated by some but always a tenaciously exploitable and delving other. Steve Aftergood can buy us yet another drink any ol' or comin' time. This time though, it's on us - not.

Pass It On - Love Grind Part Two next up.

Love Me

Under a most quaint plan being considered by the British Government, Afghans would be given handsets and access to the internet to help them gain their own voice.

It follows a growing realization in Washington and Whitehall that the allies are being outflanked by the Taliban in the battle to reach ordinary Afghans.

Sharing video clips is popular in Afghanistan where there are an estimated 6 million mobiles and around half a million internet users.

However, most of the footage is anti-Western propaganda created by the Taliban. It often includes footage of civilians apparently killed in US raids and is widely circulated in the country by phone and internet.

The allies' reputation was particularly damaged by film [YouTube-CNN] of around 90 civilians - many of them children - killed in a US-led bombing raid in August.

The British government's proposal would involve non-governmental organizations distributing mobile phones to Afghans to encourage them to make video diaries.

Devised by an outside consultant, the plan is said by the Foreign Office to "have merit". The BBC reported that the plan, part of a British Government-commissioned report by an outside consultant, would be used to record up to 100 video diaries for a film festival next year.

A spokesman for the UKs Department for International Development (DfID) said: "An external consultant has proposed a scheme but absolutely no decision has been made and it would be wrong to suggest that DfID will fund it."

Whitehall officials (Whitehall officials sounds so logarithmically better than Whitehall Turkeys) have said the aim is to deprive the Taliban of its virtual monopoly on propaganda using new media.

The once media-shy Taliban have gone hi-tech with DVDs, mobile phone messages, ring-tones, emails and a website to publicize their exploits and lambast their Afghan and Western enemies, a think-tank said on Thursday.

The Taliban hanged televisions and music tapes from trees in an effort to stamp out corrupting Western influences during their hardline Islamist rule of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Their leaders had only one computer, Afghanistan experts say.

But after U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the austere movement following the September 11, 2001, attacks, the militants regrouped and relaunched their insurgency in 2005, copying the tactics of roadside and suicide bombs from Iraq.

Now the Taliban have also created a "sophisticated communications apparatus" using the full range of media allowing them to project an "increasingly confident movement", the International Crisis Group (ICG) said in last summer's report Taliban Propaganda: Winning the War of Words?[47-page pdf].

With their own website, magazines, DVDs, audio cassettes, pamphlets and mobile phones, the ICG says, the Taliban are able to capitalize on mistakes made by the government and its allies and reveal their own "inflated tales of battlefield exploits".

Taliban statements emailed to the media talk of killing "puppet terrorists", meaning Afghan security forces, and destroying "occupation tanks" and seizing their arms.

So-called night-letters are delivered to homes warning Afghans against cooperating with the government and international troops, while DVDs, text and video messages are aimed at the more tech savvy.

The ICG said the Afghan government and its allies must try harder to combat weakening public support and alienation caused by arbitrary detentions and civilian casualties which the Taliban are able to exploit through their media.

"Whatever the military benefits of arbitrary detentions, they are far outweighed by the alienation they cause," the ICG said.

A series of air strikes by international forces in Afghanistan in the last month, Afghan officials say, have killed more than 60 civilians.

"The effectiveness of aerial bombardment, even if strictly exercised within the bounds of international law, must be considered against the damage to popular support," the ICG said.

The Taliban, it said, are not going to be defeated militarily and are resistant to outside criticism.

"Rather the legitimacy of its ideas and actions must be challenged more forcefully by the Afghan government and citizens," the ICG said.

Militants should be held to public account for killing civilians and targeting community leaders through open trials, and the Afghan government and its international allies should similarly be bound by the rule of law, the ICG said.

Ultimately, winning popular support is not about telling local communities that they are better off today. It is about proving it.

If Afghan civilians continue to perceive civilian deaths as being directly attributable to our presence & activities within their country and tribal regions then those - per proposed plan - distributed handsets could come back to bite us with a fresh swarm of pesky video snippets. It all sounds rather risky, if not downright desperate, given the present state of affairs in injun country. We assume there is buried within the report a suggestion to track the freebie phones - though such easily unveiled intention in itself could very well be grounds for seeing our phones, and the subcontracty plan, smashed to bits.

Minding Malfeasant Minds - GWOT IO-Contracts

Propaganda aimed at foreign audiences has at times meandered its way back home to shape a soft domestic mind or two. If we stick to producing a Baquba Idol or a Dancing With The SOI then the chances of such brainwashing blowback should be considered sufficiently negligible so as to be quite forgiveable.

The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government.

The new contracts -- awarded last week to four companies -- will expand and consolidate what the U.S. military calls "information/psychological operations" in Iraq far into the future, even as violence appears to be abating and U.S. troops have begun drawing down.

The four companies that will share in the new contract are SOSi, the Washington-based Lincoln Group, Alexandria-based MPRI and Leonie Industries, a Los Angeles contractor. All specialize in strategic communications and have done previous defense work.

The military's role in the war of ideas has been fundamentally transformed in recent years, the result of both the Pentagon's outsourced resources and a counterinsurgency doctrine in which information control is considered key to success. Uniformed communications specialists and contractors are now an integral part of U.S. military operations from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan and beyond.

Iraq, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on such contracts, has been the proving ground for the transformation. "The tools they're using, the means, the robustness of this activity has just skyrocketed since 2003. In the past, a lot of this stuff was just some guy's dreams," said a senior U.S. military official, one of several who discussed the sensitive defense program on the condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon still sometimes feels it is playing catch-up in a propaganda market dominated by al-Qaeda, whose media operations include sophisticated Web sites and professionally produced videos and audios featuring Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. "We're being out-communicated by a guy in a cave," Secretary Robert M. Gates often remarks.

But Defense Department officials think their own products have become increasingly imaginative and competitive. Military and contractor-produced media campaigns, spotlighting killings by insurgents, "helped in developing attitudes" that led Iraqis to reject al-Qaeda in Iraq over the past two years, an official said. Now that the insurgency is in disarray, he said, the same tools "could potentially be helpful" in diminishing the influence of neighboring Iran.

U.S.-produced public service broadcasts and billboards have touted improvements in government services, promoted political reconciliation, praised the Iraqi military and encouraged Iraqi citizens to report criminal activity. When national euphoria broke out last year after an Iraqi singer won a talent contest in Lebanon, the U.S. military considered producing an Iraqi version of "American Idol" to help build nonsectarian nationalism. The idea was shelved as too expensive, an official said, but "we're trying to think out of the box on" reconciliation.

One official described how part of the program works: "There's a video piece produced by a contractor . . . showing a family being attacked by a group of bad guys, and their daughter being taken off. The message is: You've got to stand up against the enemy." The professionally produced vignette, he said, "is offered for airing on various [television] stations in Iraq. . . . They don't know that the originator of the content is the U.S. government. If they did, they would never run anything."

"If you asked most Iraqis," he said, "they would say, 'It came from the government, our own government.' "

The Pentagon's solicitation for bids on the contracts noted that media items produced "may or may not be non-attributable to coalition forces." "If they thought we were doing it, it would not be as effective," another official said of the Iraqis. "In the Middle East, they are so afraid they're going to be Westernized . . . that you have to be careful when you're trying to provide information to the population."

The Army's counterinsurgency manual, which Gen. David H. Petraeus co-wrote in 2006, describes information operations in detail, citing them among the "critical" military activities "that do not involve killing insurgents." Petraeus, who became the top U.S. commander in Iraq early last year, led a "surge" in combat troops and information warfare.

Some of the new doctrine emerged from Petraeus's own early experience in Iraq. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division in northern Nineveh province in 2003, he ensured that war-ravaged radio and television stations were brought rapidly back on line. At his urging, the first TV programs included "Nineveh Talent Search" and a radio call-in show hosted by his Arabic interpreter, Sadi Othman, a Palestinian American.

Othman, a former New York cabdriver employed by Reston-based SOS International, remained at Petraeus's side during the general's subsequent Iraq deployments; the company refers to him as a senior adviser to Petraeus.

SOSi has been one of the most prominent communications contractors working in Iraq, winning a two-year $200 million contract in 2006 to "assist in gathering information, conducting analysis and providing timely solutions and advice regarding cultural, religious, political, economic and public perceptions."

"We definitely believe this is a growth area in the DOD," said Julian Setian, SOSi's chief operating officer. "We are seeing more and more requests for professional assistance in media-related strategic communications efforts, specifically in gauging of perceptions in foreign media with regard to U.S. operations."

Defense officials maintained that strict rules are enforced against disseminating false information. "Our enemies have the luxury of not having to tell the truth," Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman told a congressional hearing last month. "We pay an extremely high price if we ever even make a slight error in putting out the facts."

Contractors require security clearances, and proof that their teams possess sufficient linguistic abilities and knowledge of Iraqi culture. The Iraqi government has little input on U.S. operations, although U.S. officials say they have encouraged Iraqis to be more aggressive in molding public support.

The Pentagon is sensitive to criticism that it has sometimes blurred the lines between public-affairs activities and unattributed propaganda. As information operations in Iraq expanded, some senior officers warned that they risked a return to psychological and deception operations discredited during the Vietnam War.

In 2006, the Pentagon's inspector general found that media work that the Lincoln Group did in Iraq was improperly supervised but legal. The contractor had prepared news items considered favorable to the U.S. military and paid to place them in the Iraqi media without attribution. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters that his initial reaction to the anonymous pay-to-publish program was "Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing."

On Aug. 21, the day before bids on the new contract were closed, the solicitation was reissued to replace repeated references to information and psychological operations with the term "media services."

Senior military officials said that current media placement is done through Iraqi middlemen and that broadcast time is usually paid. But they said they knew of no recent instance of payment to place unattributed newspaper articles. The officials maintained that news items are now a minor part of the operation, which they said is focused on public service promotions and media monitoring.

But a lengthy list of "deliverables" under the new contract proposal includes "print columns, press statements, press releases, response-to-query, speeches and . . . opinion editorials"; radio broadcasts "in excess of 300 news stories" monthly and 150 each on sports and economic themes; and 30- and 60-minute broadcast documentary and entertainment series.

Contractors will also develop and maintain Web sites; assess news articles in the Iraqi, U.S. and international media; and determine ways to counter coverage deemed negative, according to the contract solicitation the government posted in May. Polls and focus groups will be used to monitor Iraqi attitudes under a separate three-year contract totaling up to $45 million.

While U.S. law prohibits the use of government money to direct propaganda at U.S. audiences, the "statement of work" included in the proposal, written by the U.S. Joint Contracting Command in Iraq, notes the need to "communicate effectively with our strategic audiences (i.e. Iraqi, pan-Arabic, International, and U.S. audiences) to gain widespread acceptance of [U.S. and Iraqi government] core themes and messages."

Lawmakers have often challenged the propriety of the military's information operations, even when they take place outside the United States. The Pentagon itself has frequently lamented the need to undertake duties beyond combat and peacekeeping, and Gates has publicly questioned the "creeping militarization" of tasks civilians traditionally perform.

In 2006, President Bush put the State Department in charge of the administration's worldwide "strategic communications," but the size of the military's efforts dwarf those of the diplomats. State estimates it will spend $5.6 million on public diplomacy in Iraq in fiscal 2008. A provision in the fiscal 2009 Defense Authorization Bill has called for a "close examination" of the State and defense communications programs "to better formulate a comprehensive strategy."

Some inside the military itself have questioned the effectiveness of the defense program. "I'm not a huge fan" of information operations, one military official said, adding that Iraqi opinions -- as for most people -- are formed more by what they experience than by what they read in a newspaper, hear on the radio or see on billboards.

"A lot of money is being thrown around," he said, "and I'm not sure it's all paying off as much as we think it is."
-Hacked & Jacked WaPo

New Army Field Manual for Operations, FM 3-0 - Stability Operations

The Army on Monday will unveil an unprecedented doctrine that declares nation-building missions will probably become more important than conventional warfare and defines "fragile states" that breed crime, terrorism and religious and ethnic strife as the greatest threat to U.S. national security

The Army's new field manual for operations, FM 3-0 [220-page pdf], brings the first major update of Army capstone doctrine since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

"Today's Army is about half the size it was in 1970, but the U.S. military's involvement around the world has tripled since the collapse of the former Soviet Union," notes the foreword to the TRADOC information pamphlet for FM 3-0 [12-pagepdf]. "The next several decades, according to many security experts, will be an era of persistent conflict that will generate continuing deployments for our Army."

"We must emphasize doctrine as the driver for change," said Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. "You can't cement change in the organization until you adapt the institutions. That change begins with doctrine."

There are several changes in the new operations manual:

• The operational concept and the operational environment

• The stability operations construct

• The information-operations construct

• Warfighting functions

• The spectrum of conflict

• Defeat and stability mechanisms

• Joint interdependence and modular forces

FM 3-0 institutionalizes simultaneous offensive, defensive, and stability or civil-support operations as the core of the Army's doctrine. The concept of full-spectrum operations, first introduced in the 2001 manual, still represents a major shift in Army doctrine - forces must be able to address the civil situation at all times, combining tactical tasks affecting noncombatants with tactical tasks directed against the enemy.

According to some, the FM 3-0 is revolutionary as pertains to the following four specific points in the manual:

• The importance of stability operations is elevated to co-equal with combat (offensive and defensive operations).

• The critical nature and influence of information on operations.

• An operational concept that drives initiative embraces risk and focuses on creating opportunities to achieve decisive results.

• The critical role of the commander in full-spectrum operations, bridging battle command and operational art in leveraging the experience, knowledge and intuition of the commander.

Stability operations are viewed as important - if not more so - than offensive and defensive operations in the new operations manual.

Winning battles and engagements is important but not decisive by itself; shaping the civil situation in concert with other government agencies, international organizations, civil authorities and multinational forces will be just as important to campaign success, according to the new FM.

The new operations manual institutionalizes the need for cultural awareness, which is critical to understanding populations and their perceptions to reduce friction, and prevent misunderstanding, thereby improving a force's ability to accomplish its mission.

Soldiers and leaders must master information. To the people, perception is reality. Altering perceptions requires accurate, truthful information presented in a way that accounts for how people absorb and interpret information with messages that have broad appeal and acceptance. This is the essence of information engagement in the new FM.

But as the Army struggles to define its long-term future beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, some critics within the military warn that the new emphasis on nation-building is a dangerous distraction from what they believe should be the Army's focus: strengthening its core war-fighting skills to prepare for large-scale ground combat.

Critics challenge the assumption that major wars are unlikely in the future, pointing to the risk of high-intensity conflict that could require sizable Army deployments to North Korea, Iran, Pakistan or elsewhere.

Civilian officials and nongovernmental groups voice a different concern: that the military's push to expand its exercise of "soft power," while perhaps inevitable, given the dearth of civilian resources, marks a growing militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

Some nongovernmental organizations raised concerns about the potential blurring of roles when the military carries out relief operations, saying it could compromise their independence and impartiality in the eyes of local citizens, and make relief workers targets of attack.

The organizations also objected to early drafts of the manual that suggested the military had an obligation or right to intervene in fragile states. They referred to humanitarian NGOs as partners of the military. Many NGOs might understandably object to be described as such.

Bureaucratic unrest surrounded the writing of the Army stability manual. Disputes over whether the document should enshrine "democracy" as a goal of stability operations led to that target ultimately being axed.

Jacked & Hacked WaPo & Army.Mil

Ivan The Slicker

Though we'd be reluctant to call this kind of herding Information Warfare (admittedly, it does ring sexier than a plodding public diplomacy initiative), it is definitely an improvement over the running dog hind leg lackey of American imperialism pontifications by indignant people's spokesmen of old.

TSKHINVALI -- Under the standards of information warfare, it was an easy job by all accounts.

The Kremlin only had to charter a plane, take about 60 foreign and Russian reporters to Beslan, bus them through the nearby Roksky Tunnel to South Ossetia, and stand back.

The journalists did the rest. They were free to speak to whomever they wanted and ask any questions.

The comments that they heard on all sides -- from South Ossetia leader Eduard Kokoity, local officials and ordinary residents -- matched the Kremlin's official line perfectly. Everyone said they had waited for years for Russia to recognize the breakaway Georgian republic of 70,000 people as independent and hoped for a future together.

"We've been waiting for this for 18 years," said Tsiala Gergaulova, a Tskhinvali resident whose 24-year-old son was injured in the Russian-Georgian war last month. "I would like for us to be part of Russia. I believe everybody wants this."

Boris Bagayev, an 85-year-old artist and official with the local administration, said he was more than happy that Moscow had recognized his republic last week. "It gives meaning to my life," he said.

Two weeks after the short but intense war, life in the South Ossetian capital appears to be coming back together. On Monday, damaged government buildings, ruined neighborhoods and a statue with a missing head in a central square stood as grim reminders of the fighting. But the streets were being patched up, reconstruction was being planned, and most children attended their first day of the school year -- just like their peers in Russia.

For the situation to improve further, Kokoity said, the world should recognize South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, as independent.

"The recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will stabilize the situation in the Caucasus," the South Ossetian leader told reporters, standing in front of green netting covering the remains of the local parliament building. Russia so far has been the only country to recognize the breakaway republics, although Belarus and Venezuela have expressed support. Western powers have denounced the decision.

Kokoity said the immediate task for his government was to strengthen South Ossetia's independence and then to officially become part of Russia. He urged foreign reporters to ignore criticism from their governments and "listen to the voice of people and common sense."

A Kremlin official supervising the journalists on the trip, Vladislav Petrushin, said the main purpose of the visit was to give the foreign reporters access to the administration led by Kokoity. "We've provided an opportunity to talk. It's not like we've given him a cheat sheet. He said the truth," Petrushin said.

The trip also indicates how far the Kremlin has evolved in communicating with the outside world. When the fighting broke out Aug. 8, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and other senior officials made their case in interviews with major Western media outlets. Top Russian officials, meanwhile, were shown on state television holding meetings. As international sentiment grew in Tbilisi's favor, the Kremlin mounted its own campaign of informational warfare. President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have offered a series of interviews in recent days.

"They've understood they can't neglect communications," said Anthony Orliange, a television reporter with Capa, a production company, on the Kremlin trip to South Ossetia.

"The whole point of me being here is that the Kremlin wants to communicate," said Orliange, who came with a colleague from Paris after receiving their Russian visas in record time. "I didn't have a visa three days ago," he said.

During the war, access to the conflict zone was tightly controlled for foreign reporters. While Monday's visit was vastly different from seeing the war itself, it was still helpful, Orliange said. "I am getting the vibe of this place," he said. "It will change my perspective."

A hacked & jacked The Moscow Times via Johnson's Russia List

Human Terrain Exploit: Idle Chatting Muslims ;)

[Thailand] Village teashops will no longer be just places for refreshments, as they have now been asked to double as public relations centres for the government.

This move is aimed at disseminating accurate information to the public in the government's drive to promote peace in the deep South.

Pranai Suwannarat, director of the Southern Border Provinces Administration Centre (SBPAC), said a network of village teashops has been established by the state in all the 1,320 villages of the three southernmost provinces to bring about an understanding on state efforts to restore peace in the region and keep southerners from being misled by insurgent groups.

Village teashops will also be promoted as communal forums to discuss and exchange information on how to deal with the southern issues.

"Muslim people always like to involve themselves in idle chat at village teashops or coffee shops. Undoubtedly, these shops are seen as a key strategy in the psychological warfare and public relations campaign of the state to try to win over the people," Mr Pranai said.
-Bangkok Post

Holding Pattern - The Iraq Stack

Caught a BBC interview with General Petraeus on the locker room TV a few weeks ago after swimming a few lazy laps.

To paraphrase what I heard the go-to man for COINy IO say (and also what he somberly didn't say) when I was drying off, the general rather bluntly insinuated that any perceptions of durable surge-precipitated stability in Iraq were but perceptions. Iraq has been but placed in a holding pattern - a state of growling suspended animation, and the present spell of attenuated calamity is better perceived as tenuous, with a half-life demanding nothing less than near immediate efforts of significant strategic resolve and action as decisive misfortunes yet murmur and snarl just beyond the gate.

General Petraeus has certainly bought invaluable time & life for a many with his dexterous application of artful tricks of an esoteric trade and so at least one question perhaps begs asking - for the entry of just what resolving initiative is this time bought? Somewhat apropo, The Christian Science Monitor just dropped this off:

Fresh concern is washing over Iraq of a new wave of insurgent violence as the bands of mainly Sunni Muslim Iraqis trained, armed, and paid by the US military to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq are now coming under the control of a skeptical Shiite-led government.

While the group called the Sons of Iraq (SOI) has been critically important in improving security, the US military and many leaders within the SOI worry that their foot soldiers – many of them ex-insurgents – will simply return to their old ways if they are not paid or brought into Iraq's official security forces.

"If the government doesn't accept them, most will join [insurgent] groups, and they will restart their activities stronger than before," says Khalid Jamal, an SOI leader in Baghdad. "That will make Iraq return to zero."

Keeping the insurgency and sectarian killing at bay is crucial in Iraq's fragile security, where the SOI (known also as the Awakening, or Sahwa in Arabic) are but one reason for the sharp fall in violence. Official figures point to 440 Iraqis killed in September, down from peaks of more than 3,000 a month in 2006.

A spike in attacks in recent days coincides with the end of Ramadan. Two suicide bombs struck Shiite mosques early Thursday, killing at least 24 of the 30 Iraqis who died in attacks.

Recent days have also witnessed an increase in the number of bodies being found in Baghdad, a dozen of which were killed execution-style.

Other pillars of improved security are a standing down of the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr – widely seen as a result of Iranian pressure on the Shiite firebrand – and the surge of US forces last year that helped enable the ever-growing Iraqi security forces to take control.

The government "affirms its commitment to integrate the members into public life so that they take part in building Iraq," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement Wednesday, the day US forces nominally handed over control of the 54,000 Sunni fighters in the Baghdad region. Others of the 98,000 Sunnis now on the US payroll, are to gradually come under Iraqi control.

But US officers are nervous that the government will not keep its word when the first salaries are due early November. Some US units have reportedly set aside cash to pay the SOI for a few months, just in case. Many plan to be on hand as Iraqi officials pay the $300 monthly salaries – a bill that comes to more than $16 million for Baghdad.

It's money well spent, US commanders argue, if it limits suicide bombs and other insurgent attacks.

"The commitment the Coalition and government of Iraq has made to the Sons of Iraq is one that we have to honor," says Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. "It's part of the reason the security situation is where it is today."

That conclusion is echoed in a Pentagon report released Tuesday, which notes a 77 percent drop of violence compared with last year and describes careful handling of the SOI as "critical to providing stable security."

"While security has improved dramatically, the fundamental character of the conflict in Iraq remains unchanged – a communal struggle for power and resources," the Pentagon said in the quarterly report to Congress. Progress remains "fragile, reversible, and uneven."

To reassure the SOI, US officials have extracted promises from the Iraqi government not to arrest members without a warrant nor to issue warrants for crimes that may have occurred more than six months ago.

"We want 100 percent to join the security forces, like the [Kurdish] peshmerga and [Shiite] militias backed by political parties," says Mr. Jamal, the SOI leader. "We are the third power in Iraq after the Americans and Iraqi troops and police. Sahwa created security, and if anything hurts Iraq, we will raise weapons against it."

SOI fighters have often violent histories as insurgents that were overlooked by US forces desperate to bring them on board. The armed groups arose from a 2006 movement of Sunni sheikhs in Anbar Province who turned against the violent tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Top government officials say privately they recognize the need to continue paying the SOI, or risk reinvigorated conflict, even if the guards can't be integrated into the security forces and remain unemployed.

Jamal finds that promise hard to believe.

"The sectarian [Shiite] government is afraid of giving any source of power to the Sunnis," he says. "The Americans were very honest with the Sons of Iraq and help us fight Al Qaeda. They do their real duty and we thank them, but they are in too much of a hurry to transfer the Sahwa file to the government."

A Bite Into A Void

Not quite our most immediate of bags, but if we stretch the envelope of what domestic insurgency can be about - and its triggers...

A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?

It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 -- after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom -- that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.

But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing cheques. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government. That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well. "If I go into a bank," said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden's finance minister at the time, "I'd rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer." Sweden spent four per cent of its gross domestic product, or 65 billion kronor (RM33.7 billion) , the equivalent of US$11.7 billion at the time, or US$18.3 billion in today's dollars, to rescue ailing banks. That is slightly less, proportionate to the national economy, than the US$700 billion, or roughly five per cent of gross domestic product, that the Bush administration estimates its own move will cost in the United States.

But the final cost to Sweden ended up being less than two per cent of its GDP. Some officials say they believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated.
The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.

A few American commentators have proposed that the US government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.

The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.

Putting taxpayers on the hook without anything in return could be a mistake, said Urban Backstrom, a senior Swedish finance ministry official at the time. "The public will not support a plan if you leave the former shareholders with anything,"

The Swedish crisis had strikingly similar origins to the American one, and its neighbors, Norway and Finland, were hobbled to the point of needing a government bailout to escape the morass as well.

Financial deregulation in the 1980s fed a frenzy of real estate lending by Sweden's banks, which did not worry enough about whether the value of their collateral might evaporate in tougher times.

Property prices imploded. The bubble deflated fast in 1991 and 1992. A vain effort to defend Sweden's currency, the krona, caused overnight interest rates to spike at one point to 500 per cent. The Swedish economy contracted for two consecutive years after a long expansion, and unemployment, at three per cent in 1990, quadrupled in three years.

After a series of bank failures and ad hoc solutions, the moment of truth arrived in September 1992, when the government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt decided it was time to clear the decks.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the opposition centre-left, Bildt's conservative government announced that the Swedish state would guarantee all bank deposits and creditors of the nation's 114 banks. Sweden formed a new agency to supervise institutions that needed recapitalisation, and another that sold off the assets, mainly real estate, that the banks held as collateral.

Sweden told its banks to write down their losses promptly before coming to the state for recapitalization. Facing its own problem later in the decade, Japan made the mistake of dragging this process out, delaying a solution for years.

Then came the imperative to bleed shareholders first. Lundgren recalls a conversation with Peter Wallenberg, at the time chairman of SEB, Sweden's largest bank. Wallenberg, the scion of the country's most famous family and steward of large chunks of its economy, heard that there would be no sacred cows.

The Wallenbergs turned around and arranged a recapitalization on their own, obviating the need for a bailout. SEB turned a profit the following year, 1993.

"For every krona we put into the bank, we wanted the same influence," Lundgren said. "That ensured that we did not have to go into certain banks at all."

By the end of the crisis, the Swedish government had seized a vast portion of the banking sector, and the agency had mostly fulfilled its hard-nosed mandate to drain share capital before injecting cash. When markets stabilized, the Swedish state then reaped the benefits by taking the banks public again.

More money may yet come into official coffers. The government still owns 19.9 per cent of Nordea, a Stockholm bank that was fully nationalized and is now a highly regarded giant in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region.

The politics of Sweden's crisis management were similarly tough-minded, though much quieter.

Soon after the plan was announced, the Swedish government found that international confidence returned more quickly than expected, easing pressure on its currency and bringing money back into the country. The centre-left opposition, while wary that the government might yet let the banks off the hook, made its points about penalising shareholders privately.

"The only thing that held back an avalanche was the hope that the system was holding," said Leif Pagrotzky, a senior member of the opposition at the time. "In public we stuck together 100 per cent, but we fought behind the scenes."

-- NYT

Follow up:

A recent IMF study [80-page pdf] of 42 systemic banking crises across the world provides evidence on how different crises were resolved.

Revolutions In Revolutions

Indeed, posting has been tardy despite dubious ambitions of saturation flaunting. No apologies, to be sure - we've been aggressing on other time-devouring and invoice-able fronts, as well as hermetically delving into arising revolutions within significant ongoing revolutions; much creeping decisiveness is in motion and much of this tip-toeing choreography has been afforded our selfish attention afore hacked 'n jacked scribblings in this our admitted forum of narcissistic relief.

Pegging of the dollar - to what now?

Iran so more now than ever.

A perfect and kinetically laced IO aimed at Western Europe. Thanks Georgia's Poor Villy: God save a NATO embedded amidst an aspiringly recalcitrant EU.

IO Meister Petraeus to CENTCOM.

Pakistan - graft up for grabs. (Are we the best of bidders?)

Things are coalescing out there in the night - radiation from countless stars with the radar emissions of FAA regulated flight control towers. All the while everything important relentlessly expands.

That Surge - Closing A Stable Door

By tracking the amount of light emitted by Baghdad neighborhoods at night, a team of UCLA geographers has uncovered fresh evidence that last year's U.S. troop surge in Iraq may not have been as effective at improving security as some U.S. officials have maintained.

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left."

The team reports its findings in the October issue of Environment and Planning A, a leading peer-reviewed academic journal that specializes in urban and environmental planning issues.

The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.

Baghdad's decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period.

By contrast, the night-light signature in the notoriously impoverished, Shiite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as it did in the American-dominated Green Zone. Light actually increased in Shiite-dominated New Baghdad, the researchers found.

Until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall, they report in "Baghdad Nights: Evaluating the U.S. Military 'Surge' Using Night Light Signatures." [11-page pdf]

"If the surge had truly 'worked,' we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods," said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. "Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing."

The effectiveness of the February 2007 deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops has been a subject of debate. In a report to Congress in September of that year, Gen. David Petraeus claimed "the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met." However, a report the same month by an independent military commission headed by retired U.S. Gen. James Jones attributed the decrease in violence to areas being overrun by either Shiites or Sunnis.

Reasoning that an increase in power usage would represent an objective measure of stability in the city, Agnew and Gillespie led a team of UCLA undergraduate and graduate students in political science and geography that pored over publicly available night imagery captured by a weather satellite flown by the U.S. Air Force for the Department of Defense.

Orbiting 516 miles above the Earth, Satellite F16 of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) contains infrared sensors that calculate, among other things, the amount of light given off in 1.75-square-mile areas. Using geo-referenced coordinates, the team overlaid the infrared reading on a preexisting satellite map of daytime Iraq created by NASA's Landsat mapping program. The researchers then looked at the sectarian makeup in the 10 security districts for which the DMSP satellite took readings on four exceptionally clear nights between March 20, 2006, when the surge had not yet begun, and Dec. 16, 2007, when the surge had ended.

Lights dimmed in those neighborhoods that Gen. Jones pointed to as having experienced ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing in his "Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq." [153-page pdf]

Long-term obstacles to meeting Baghdad's power needs may have contributed to the decrease in night lights in the city's southwestern parts, the researchers acknowledge. But Baghdad's shaky power supply does not fully account for the effect, they contend, citing independent research showing that decaying and poorly maintained power plants and infrastructure were meeting less than 10 hours of Baghdad's power needs prior to the fall of Saddam Hussein.

"This was the part of the city that had the best sources of connection and the most affluent population, so they could actually generate power themselves, and they were in the habit of doing so well before the U.S. invasion," said Agnew, the president of the American Association of Geographers, the field's leading professional organization. "But we saw no evidence of a widespread continuation of this practice."

In addition to casting doubt on the efficacy of the surge in general, the study calls into question the success of a specific strategy of the surge, namely separating neighborhoods of rival sectarian groups by erecting concrete blast walls between them. The differences in light signatures had already started to appear by the time American troops began erecting the walls under Gen. Petraeus's direction, the researchers found.

"The U.S. military was sealing off neighborhoods that were no longer really active ribbons of violence, largely because the Shiites were victorious in killing large numbers of Sunnis or driving them out of the city all together," Agnew said. "The large portion of the refugees from Iraq who went during this period to Jordan and Syria are from these neighborhoods."

Previous research has used satellite imagery of night-light saturation to measure changes in the distribution of populations in a given area, but the UCLA project is believed to be the first to study population losses and migration due to sectarian violence. The outgrowth of an undergraduate course in the use of remote sensing technologies in the environment, the UCLA project was inspired by a desire to bring empirical evidence to a long-running debate.

Jacked & Hacked article from PhysOrg.com

Effwitty Friday

Agent Says Israelis Let a Nazi Escape

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli agents who kidnapped the Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 found the notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele but let him get away, one of the operatives said Tuesday.


I remember being told years ago that the head of Mossad, Isser Harel, was running the Eichmann operation from the safe house in Buenos Aires. So the decision not to grab Mengele was clearly made from on high.

I kinda doubt that the head of OGA would be part of a U.S. action team.

Brewskies For A Georgia Downed

Anti-Georgian Cyber war - a twinge of the oxymoronic for sure given a Georgian internet penetration per capita rivaling that continent of promesse de la Chine (Ahfrika, of course) for last place in the Paralympic bathtubs per capita square off. Whatever that doesn't mean, some interesting points from the strong and free of the True Boring North; a modicum of heed, perhaps - and near certainly seed for rigorous Molsonic brainstorming.

As Russian troops stormed into Georgia this month, they had some novel help from cyber-savvy countrymen who unleashed an assault of their own - hacking into government and commercial websites.

NATO calls it iWar, and it has the potential to disrupt lives and wreck economies, particularly in Internet-dependent countries like Canada.

The Russian hackers were spectacularly successful to the point that some experts are now predicting that Internet-based attacks could be just as innovative to warfare as the advent of gunpowder.

(...)

Russia denies its military was behind last week's three-stage cyber attacks, claiming that "patriotic" civilian hackers were simply joining the fray unprompted in taking down Georgian websites.

The denial of service attacks on Georgian government Web sites started just before Russian troops started to move Aug. 8 and were quickly followed much bigger assaults on commercial institutions, including media outlets, using zombie servers. The final stage involved hacking into government Web sites, tampering with them and redirecting traffic to other some times nefarious sites.

An expert in information warfare says it's the first time cyber attacks have been sewn so tightly into a military campaign and used with such overwhelming effect.

"The question that remains is: was it planned or was it something that happened by coincidence - or was it a bit of both?" asked Rafal Rohozinski, of the Information Warfare Monitor, a Canadian group that studies iWars.

The patriotic hacker explanation is the most troubling because it represents a "riot in cyberspace" - a kind of chaos governments and militaries would have a tough time anticipating, said Rohozinski. [The meat that caught our eye]

But the timing of the cyber assaults makes him suspicious. [Party poopin' Canucks]

That the Russians would not admit it was part of their Georgian battle plan isn't surprising because attacks across cyberspace travel through servers in a number of countries, exposing Moscow to possible retaliation, principally from NATO, Rohozinski said.

[Warning - Yawn & Sigh section follows.]

Chris Corrigan, a retired colonel Canadian tank commander, said Western militaries have faced this kind of threat since the days of radar jamming.

"What makes this different is that the targets are no longer strictly military communications infrastructure and we're now talking about destroying civilian (Internet) sites," said Corrigan, who watched the attack on Georgia while training officers in the nearby Ukraine.

Rohozinski describes it as a rapidly evolving field, where even definitions are being refined.

Cyber war refers specifically to assaults on virtual military targets and communications, while iWar is the 21st Century equivalent to the concept of total war, where nothing is off-limits.

The flattening of heavy industries was a key pillar of the Allied strategy to defeat Germany and Japan during the Second World War.

The same kind of economic devastation may no longer require waves of heavy bombers. It might be wrought through targeted virtual attacks on a country's financial system, media and government institutions.

Such attacks are cheap and relatively easy to mount.

Developed nations, especially Canada, face the greatest risk because so much business is conducted and information exchanged online, said Appathurai.

Corrigan, who was the Canadian Forces point man on the Y2K glitch, said militaries and businesses have a lot of "built-in redundancy" to withstand attacks, but added the threat is real and geography cannot isolate a nation the way it did in past wars.

Western commanders, who once trained almost exclusively to turn back tanks, troops and bombers, have added repelling Internet assaults to their training regimes.

NATO recently created its own real-world crisis response team to handle calamities in the virtual world.

And not a moment too soon.

Estonia and Lithuania - two former Soviet republics - suffered through repeated hacker attacks, which may or may not have been state-sponsored. The latest blitz took place just a few weeks ago and shut down the Lithuanian tax registry office.

The centrepiece of the North Atlantic Alliance is the common defence clause of the NATO charter - known as Article 5.

It stipulates that an attack on one member is an attack on all members and alliance countries are obligated to respond.

Does that extend to cyber attacks? [We hope not]

Appathurai conceded that Article 5 is "vaguely worded" and future interpretations could encompass Internet warfare. [Mon Dieu, non!]

Last word here heard on matters of worthy & classic bear-probing pokes & jabs of diagnostic intent...and prankish electioneering gambits.

Last word, kinda'.

Cyber War: Eminent Domaining

Far be it ignoble for a meatball of One to cut 'n paste sweet ramblings of smarter mates and Effwits:

The Cyber Command Power Play?

Last week I reported the Air Force has put formation of its Cyber Command on hold, pending top level review.

At the time, some sources speculated that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put the kibosh on the Air Force's efforts because he wanted to see a larger role for the Navy in cyberspace.

But a well-placed Air Force insider told me that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was behind the abrupt halt. The intelligence community, this source told me, "wants all the cyber money, all the cyber toys and the cyber mission."

There would be one serious problem with the intelligence folks taking over the cyber mission, this source told me. ODNI does not have a warfighting mission, "they only want to milk the cow," the source said. "They don't ever want to kill the cow."

I don't know for sure whether the Navy, JCS, ODNI or little green men are behind the Air Force's decision to put Cyber Command on hold. But I do know the Air Force is really paranoid right now -- and sometimes there is a good reason for paranoia.

---

-Yep, that was pretty much inevitable.

---

The DoD (USAF specifically) is WAY overcomplicating their approach to a cyber warfare strategy IMO. Russia and China's model much better.

---

-Part of it is the AF fumbling nukes and a call to get their s*** together there first before they start f'ing around online.

Part of it is standard internal AF maneuvering. Even as the TV ads were running the move was afoot to make it a numbered AF, not a stand-alone entity, and put it under one of the standing commands.

There isn't much to the intel aspect here; the money is already largely allocated to different entities and there is plenty to go around. If the ODNI is involved its to control and coord the IC money; that's different money than what would go to the services.

---

Now, speaking of the USAF, there is a new paper from the Air War College (now called "Air University") COMMUNICATING FOR EFFECT -- OPERATIONALIZING AND ANALYZING WEAPONS OF MASS INFLUENCE. [141-page pdf]

Beautiful Little War

Such a sweet little war as substrate for introductory level IO study.; a set piece battle garnished with IO condiments.

Today - a few tenuous observations teetering on speculative commentary followed up with a background briefing by a friend (friend as in; we pitched in a few PayPal bucks to help stave off the demise of a rag he oft wrote for - itself victim of brutish public diplomacy of sorts.)

Vladimir Putin nomenclatured Georgia's artillery strikes on Tschinvali as downright genocidal, Russian sources claiming some 2K South Ossetians being killed. (Human Rights Watch -among others- proposed the Russians were exaggerating the numbers of killed and displaced.) Micheil Saakasjvili shot back with claims that Ivan was up to ethnic cleansing. Yet not even the International Red Cross seems to know if the number of injured and displaced on each side of the skirmish is 15K or 30K. "We're seeing different numbers and they're changing all the time", according to a spokeswoman we caught a chatting with the BBC.

On reporting own successes and enemy losses, the differences between each side's claims has Baghdad Bob looking not quite so goofy. The other day Saakasjivilli claimed Georgian forces had killed hundreds of Russian troops and shot down over 80 Russian birds. Russian General Staffer Anatolij Nogovitsyn admitted only to 18 KIA and 4 lost planes. Of course it's militarily impossible for Georgia to shoot down 80 planes.

At best, the skirmishing parties' media aren't always the most reliable sources of actionable information in calmer times but it would appear that Russian media now have had the edge on truthiness over the state run Georgian media outlets in the heat of battle. Nontheless, reports have been surfacing recently that the Russian English language television channel Russia Today has been tweaking reports from the field not lining up neatly with what government officials prefer reported.

Cyberattacks have been perpetrated against both Russian media and Georgian authorities who themselves in turn have shut down Russian television channels at home in Georgia.

Journalists are coming under fire and it would appear that somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen journalists have been killed in clashes. For the journalists left standing it remains problematic keeping wits and getting things close enough to right.

Gavin Hewitt of the BBC reported the other day how his crew was attacked by a Russian jet [Youtube video] on the outskirts of Gori. Footage shows the plane attempting to attack the crew's car and Hewitt recapitulates, "...although Georgian troops have pulled back, Russian planes are still conducting bombing raids - flying in very low, and on that occasion directly targeting our vehicle".

Now it just so happens that the plane in question was a Frogfoot (Sukhoi 25), a plane deployed by both Russia and the Georgia. In the video it appears that the jet flew alone and fired rather mundane munitions - hardly the typical behavioral profile of such Russian birds. At that, there seem to be some lingering suspicions from UN folks that the Georgians are not completely adverse to, if only occasionally, putting their own citizens in harms way to score points in the propaganda game. Was it a Georgian Su-25 strafing the Brits and their own? Who knows. Hey, last fall the Russians denied a missile attack against Georgia yet international experts concluded that such was indeed the case. Deception abounds.

Before I break to promised jacked & hacked other, here's a link to a package of great tips for tracking Russian language news from South Ossetia without reading Russian. Now to the beef:

This is the war of my dreams—both sides using air forces! How often do you see that these days?—so I’ll skip the history. Just remember that South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian “peacekeepers” for the last few years. The Georgians didn’t like that. You don’t give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one-on-one, but you don’t want to mess with them and you especially don’t want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked, Corleone style. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what’s the ending to this story? As in: how do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they’ll react?

Saakashvili just didn’t think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. This is a place smaller than some incorporated Central Valley towns, but it declared itself an “autonomous” republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they’d die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they’re never going to change. The Ajarans aren’t even ethnically different from Georgians; they’re Georgian too. But they’re Muslims, which means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that Victorian crap, and their leader, a whack job named Abashidze (Goddamn Georgian names!) volunteered them to fight to the death for their worthless independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little “country” was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colussus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I’ve said before, there’s nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region—like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting—like the fact that South Ossetia isn’t Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force—and it’s a good one by all accounts—didn’t have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn’t react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock’n’awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then…uh, they’d be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he’d help.

[T]he more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naïve because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians’ old enemy, the US, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect obedient little ally. Then we’d let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and ipods.

Their part of the deal was simple: they sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then a surprisingly huge 2000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than five million, that’s a lot of troops. In fact, Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the “Coalition of the Willing,” after the US and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that’s true and it goes for a lot of countries—like us, for instance—but at least we’re not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they’re sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give’em a lift?

We’ll probably give them a ride, but that’s about all we can do. We’ve already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline’s staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, “Georgia Train and Equip” project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the US Army’s learned recently.

Now here’s the joke—and military history is just one long series of mean jokes. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in NE Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green-Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in DC, that they thought they could take on anybody. What they’re in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry CI force like the one we gave them isn’t much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military’s response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokes-thingy called Russia’s response “disproportionate.” What the Hell are they talking about? They’ve been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of “minimum necessary force,” not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it’s a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you’ve got it, you use it. Thank God we never fought “proportionately” in Viet Nam. The French tried that, because they never had much of an air force, and got wiped out. By the time the French withdrew from Indochina, their Lefty Prime Minister, Mendes-France, made a big show of promising peace withing 30 days of taking office—and his commanders in Indochina said privately, “I don’t think we can hold out that long.” That’s what fighting “proportionately” gets you: Dien Bien Phu.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what “disproportionate” means is—well, imagine that you’re watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ass whipped by a bully, and you say, “That’s inappropriate!” I mean, instead of actually helping him. That’s what “disproportionate” means from the Pentagon: “We’re not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we’re with you in spirit, little buddy!”

The quickest way to see who’s winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, “To fight Russia by ourselves is insane.” Which means they thought Russia wouldn’t back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies—but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi just ten years earlier without helping. That’s the thing: the bastards are unpredictable. You can’t even count on them to betray their friends (though it’s the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the US is all tied up in that crap Iraq war and can’t do shit; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It’s tit for tat time, with Kosovo as the tit and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naïve idiotic allies like Georgia.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn’t matter that much. I’m just being honest here. In a year nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What’s more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

What’s happening to Georgia here is like the teeny-tiny version of Germany in the twentieth century: overplay your hand and you lose everything. So if you’re a Georgian nationalist, this war is a tragedy; if you’re a Russian or Ossetian nationalist, it’s a triumph, a victory for justice, whatever. To the rest of us, it’s just kind of fun to watch. And damn, this one has been a LOT of fun! The videos that came out of it! You know, DVD is the best thing to happen to war in a long time. All the fun, none of the screaming agony—it’s war as Diet Coke.

See, this is the war that I used to see in the paintings commissioned by Defense contractors in Aviation Week and AFJ: a war between two conventional armies, both using air forces and armored columns, in pine-forested terrain. That was what those pictures showed every time, with a highlighted closeup of the weapon they were selling homing in on a Warsaw Pact convoy coming through a German pine forest. Of course, a real NATO/Warsaw Pact war would never, ever have happened that way. It would have gone nuclear in an hour or less, which both sides knew, which is why it never happened. So all that beautiful weaponry was kind of a farce, if it was only going to be used in the Fulda Gap. But damn, God is good, because here it all is, in the same kind of terrain, all your favorite old images: Russian-made tanks burning, a Soviet-model fighter-bomber falling from the sky in pieces, troops in Russian camo fighting other troops, also in Russian camo, in a skirmish by some dilapidated country shack.

No racial overtones to get bummed out by—everybody on both sides is white! And white from places you don’t know or care about!

The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

What will last is those beautiful videos, like some NATO-era dream, like God giving me one last chance to see the weapons I spent my twenties dreaming about in action. Even the wounded-civilian videos are interesting because a lot of the wounded are fat and old, which you didn’t see much in classic Korean or Normandy or Nam footage.

We’re the new normal, but damn, we sure are ugly casualties. Skinny people just look better sitting in rubble with bloody faces, I can’t lie.

As the war fades out—and it will; countries don’t fight to the death these days—there’ll be time to see how the various weapons systems played. I’m especially interested to see how well the Georgian air defense missiles, some very good recent Russian models, worked. But there’s plenty of time to debrief later. For now, just go to LiveLeak or YouTube (LiveLeak has better stuff right now) and enjoy yourself. This is when us war nerds get all the free porn we can handle. Call in sick, take your comp time, whatever—just don’t miss those videos.

Effwits Outta' da' Forest

The "Global War on Terror" has conjured the image of terrorists behind every bush, the bushes themselves burning and an angry god inciting its faithful to religious war. We have been called to arms, built fences, and compromised our laws and the practices that define us as a nation. The administration has focused on pursuing terrorists and countering an imminent and terrifying threat.

The inclination to trust our leaders when they warn of danger is compelling, particularly when the specters of mushroom clouds and jihadists haunt every debate.

We rightly honor as heroes those, who serve our nation and offer their lives to protect ours. We all "support the troops." Yet the first step for any commander is to understand the enemy. The next commander in chief should base his counterterrorism policies on the following realities:

We do not face a global jihadist "movement" but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature and almost all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears. Al-Qaeda is the only global jihadist organization and is the only Islamic terrorist organization that targets the U.S. homeland. Al-Qaeda remains capable of striking here and is plotting from its redoubt in Waziristan, Pakistan. The organization, however, has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation. Al-Qaeda threatens to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, but its capabilities are far inferior to its desires. Even the "loose nuke" threat, whose consequences would be horrific, has a very low probability. For the medium term, any attack is overwhelmingly likely to consist of creative uses of conventional explosives

No other Islamic-based terrorist organization, from Mindanao to the Bekaa Valley to the Sahel, targets the U.S. homeland, is part of a "global jihadist movement" or has more than passing contact with al-Qaeda. These groups do and will, however, identify themselves with global jihadist rhetoric and may bandy the bogey-phrase of "al-Qaeda." They are motivated by hostility toward the West and fear of the irresistible changes that education, trade, and economic and social development are causing in their cultures. These regional terrorist organizations may target U.S. interests or persons in the groups' historic areas of interest and operations. None of these groups is likely to succeed in seizing power or in destabilizing the societies they attack, though they may succeed in killing numerous people through sporadic attacks such as the Madrid train bombings.

There are and will continue to be small numbers of Muslims in certain Western countries -- in the dozens, perhaps -- who seek to commit terrorist acts, along the lines of the British citizens behind the 2005 London bus bombings. Some may have irregular contact with al-Qaeda central in Waziristan; more will act as free agents for their imagined cause. They represent an Islamic-tinged version of the anarchists of the late 19th century: dupes of "true belief," the flotsam of revolutionary cultural change and destruction in Islam, and of personal anomie. We need to catch and neutralize these people. But they do not represent a global movement or a global threat.

The threat from Islamic terrorism is no larger now than it was before Sept. 11, 2001. Islamic societies the world over are in turmoil and will continue for years to produce small numbers of dedicated killers, whom we must stop. U.S. and allied intelligence do a good job at that; these efforts, however, will never succeed in neutralizing every terrorist, everywhere.

Why are these views so starkly at odds with what the Bush administration has said since the beginning of the "Global War on Terror"? This administration has heard what it has wished to hear, pressured the intelligence community to verify preconceptions, undermined or sidetracked opposing voices, and both instituted and been victim of procedures that guaranteed that the slightest terrorist threat reporting would receive disproportionate weight -- thereby comforting the administration's preconceptions and policy inclinations.

We must not delude ourselves about the nature of the terrorist threat to our country. We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have exaggerated. In fact, we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are.

(I gotta stop bloggin' when sloshed)

Struggle For Cognetic Dominion

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II's monograph Wars of Ideas and the War of Ideas [63-page pdf] analyzes how the United States and its allies and strategic partners might proceed in the current "war of ideas" with al-Qaeda and other groups. Two diverging schools are proposed to exist. The first treats the conflict as a matter of public diplomacy, and calls for revitalizing the U.S. State Department and reestablishing many traditional tools of statecraft. The second advocates waging the war of ideas as a "real war," destroying the influence and credibility of the opposing ideology. It calls for continuing the transformation of the U.S. Defense Department so that it can better leverage information-age weapons. Excerpts:

Simply put, a war of ideas is a clash of visions, concepts, and images, and—especially—the interpretation of them; for the images themselves matter much less than the way they are perceived. They are, indeed, genuine wars because they serve a purpose, usually political, social, or economic in nature, and they involve hostile intentions or hostile acts, though they are not always physically violent.12 History suggests wars of ideas fall into four general categories: (a) intellectual debates, (b) ideological wars, (c) wars over religious dogma, and (d) advertising campaigns. All of them are essentially about power and influence, just as with wars over territory and material resources, and their stakes can run quite high. In fact, many wars of ideas occur as part of larger physical conflicts. One of the principal motives for a war of ideas is fear that others will gain access to, or control of, some form of physical power or material wealth. In some cases, ideas are the most effective weapons for countering such threats.

(...)

The U.S. military must consider revising its corpus of doctrine pertaining to information operations. Joint doctrine is reasonably comprehensive in terms of addressing information operations, to include sub- and related categories such as psychological operations and military deception.84 However, the chief assumption underpinning each of these documents is that information operations support (kinetic) military operations. That is true in many types of conflicts. However, in other cases, particularly the current war of ideas, this relationship is reversed: military operations need to support information operations. Al- Qaeda and other jihadi organizations are not fighting a new kind of war, but instead are subordinating their military operations to a well-crafted information campaign designed to exploit certain cultural and religious values. All Joint and service publications pertaining to information operations should be revised to incorporate those wars where military operations are conducted in support of a larger information campaign. Put differently, U.S. military doctrine must broaden its view of the relationship between kinetic and information operations.

(...)

[...and pertaining to IO supporting deep intelligence]

Furthermore, doctrine concerning information operations must be revised to reflect the reality that the “information environment” is neither neutral nor static. Disparate cultural and social influences almost ensure that diverse audiences will interpret the same information differently. Even within that variegated landscape, the meanings of images, concepts, and visions are often bitterly contested. It is almost impossible to interpret information objectively because the very tools needed for interpretation in the first place are derived from subjective experiences and structures of meaning. In many cases, enough commonalities exist to allow at least a baseline of communication to take place. Yet, an important assumption underpinning U.S. doctrine on information operations is that all audiences will essentially draw the desirable conclusion, if given enough of the “right” information. This assumption overlooks how various cultures assess information depending on the sources. Simply put, “right” appears differently to diverse audiences. While we would expect our opponents to spin information to their advantage, even so-called neutral populations are not necessarily impartial when it comes to interpreting information offered by either side.

IO/IW Bibliography

We're unrepentant pdf'avores at SMC and here's a doozy sure to single- handedly tide a Kodiak through a long winter's hibernation: Library liaison Greta Marrlat over at the Naval Post Graduate School's Dudley Knox Library has compiled this whopper of a 340-page IO/IW bibliography . Nice.

Injun Country Gruntings

A May 2008 NDU piece on winning hearts and minds via health care sector help in Indian Country: The Role of Medical Diplomacy in Stabilizing Afghanistan [8-page pdf]. Voilá - excerpts not entirely unrelated to one of our previous postings:

Comprehensive stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan are not possible given the current fragmentation of responsibilities, narrow lines of authorities, and archaic funding mechanisms.

Afghans are supportive of U.S. and international efforts, and there are occasional signs of progress, but the insurgent threat grows as U.S. military and civilian agencies and the international community struggle to bring stability to this volatile region. Integrated security, stabilization, and reconstruction activities must be implemented quickly and efficiently if failure is to be averted. Much more than a course correction is needed to provide tangible benefits to the population, develop effective leadership capacity in the government, and invest wisely in reconstruction that leads to sustainable economic growth. A proactive, comprehensive reconstruction and stabilization plan for Afghanistan is crucial to counter the regional terrorist insurgency, much as the Marshall Plan was necessary to combat the communist threat from the Soviet Union. This paper examines the health sector as a microcosm of the larger problems facing the United States and its allies in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.

(...)

An effective counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban requires a combination of offensive, defensive, and stability operations, where stability operations include civil security, civil control, essential services, good governance, economic development, and infrastructure development. Essential services include water, electricity, health care, and education—all of which support economic growth and progress toward self-sufficiency. These services are unavailable to most Afghans, adding to discontent and societal tension and fueling the insurgency. Providing access to these services is the crucial counterinsurgency step that goes hand in hand with security. Strategic civil-military partnerships must be developed that create unity of effort where offensive military operations, defensive security operations, and the correct aspects of stabilization are applied across the spectrum from conflict to peace.

(...)

New DOD policy elevates stability operations to a core competency akin to combat operations and states that while actions may best be performed by indigenous, foreign, or U.S. civilian personnel, U.S. military forces shall be prepared to perform all tasks necessary to maintain order when civilians cannot do so. The Government Accountability Office notes that DOD lacks interagency coordination mechanisms for planning and information-sharing and has not identified the full range of capabilities needed for stability operations or the measures of effectiveness essential to evaluate progress. Performance measures must consider the crucial societal elements of civil security, civil control, essential services, governance, economic development, and infrastructure development, and are doubly important when taking on a new mission —stabilization and reconstruction—in a new environment—postconflict—against a new enemy—an extremist insurgency.

Opportunities Lost, Lessons Not Learned

Nowhere is this disorganization more apparent, nor have more opportunities been lost, than in the areas of health and medical care in Afghanistan. Too much effort is wasted on poorly coordinated Medical Civic Action Programs (MEDCAPs), where U.S. and NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) military medical personnel deliver health care directly to Afghan civilians, undercutting the confidence of the local population in their own government’s ability to provide essential services. While reasonable people may disagree about the effectiveness of MEDCAPs in nations where there is no functioning government to provide this health care, MEDCAPs in Afghanistan are largely inappropriate because they fail to contribute to long-term capacity-building. These teams are more appropriately used as tactical implementers of reconstruction

Makes an Eagle Scout kinda' guy wanna cry, non? Off for a swim in an ocean.

CATCH-All Shadows

Cross-border communications intercepts are all the rage these days, both in terms of the publicity and public debate generated - and by measure of the flurry of international legislative activities in motion to retroactively cloak in legalese the amassing activities that have already been well in place for considerable time among our duteous SIGINT allies - and that as integral piecemeal part of that ol´ jig-saw puzzle we've oft & melodramatically referred to as our Catch-All program.

Of perhaps fleeting interest to some of our readers comes a feebly related judgment handed down by the European Court of Human Rights earlier this week in a case brought by Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and British Irish Rights Watch against the United Kingdom. The judgment found that UK surveillance laws had lacked the necessary clarity and accountability to prevent abuses of power when used to intercept cross-border communications.

According to the EHCR,

[it]does not consider that the domestic law at the relevant time indicated with sufficient clarity, so as to provide adequate protection against abuse of power, the scope or manner of exercise of the very wide discretion conferred on the State to intercept and examine external communications. In particular, it did not, as required by the Court’s case-law, set out in a form accessible to the public any indication of the procedure to be followed for selecting for examination, sharing, storing and destroying intercepted material. The interference with the applicants’ rights under Article 8 (the right to privacy) was not, therefore, “in accordance with the law.”

A puniest of victories for privacy advocates - a pebbly bump in the road for CATCH-ALL.

Combat Studies Institute: On Point II

Yesterday morning Effwit saw in the print edition of the WaPo that the Army's Combat Studies Institute was going to release a nifty new report on the history of the Iraq War dealing with the crucial period from the "Mission Accomplished" milestone up to the Iraqi elections in January 2005.

He got online and scouted around the Combined Arms Center website and saw an announcement of the report. The page said that it would be available June 30 -- but lo and behold -- the link to the pdf was live. It is a 720 page monster -- but is full of good stuff. A veritable catalog of fuck-ups on our side while the insurgency was getting rolling.

A sample:

The problems created by lack of staff and other resources should have surprised no one. When the CFLCC staff redeployed out of Iraq in May and June 2003, it took with it the Army's main IO assets, including the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force (JPOTF) that had been created for the initial invasion. Thus, once DOD and CENTCOM established CJTF-7, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez and his staff had no theater-strategic and operational-level PSYOP resources and had to rely on support from the IO units within the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC) located at Fort Bragg. This delayed and complicated the provision of high-level technical support, making it almost impos­sible to quickly or effectively react to insurgent IO. According to the SAMS study, "What this meant in practical terms for the CJTF-7 was that it could not produce its own operational-level PSYOP products locally and tactical units had to rely upon their assigned tactical PSYOP orga­nizations for more and more support."

Also, yesterday brought the release of Seymour Hersh's new piece on the covert war against Iran. Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

Effwit hasn't gotten to the Hersh piece yet , but he figured that you might want to know about it.

Peloponnesian Blowback

To a meme.

Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you'd like.


Rule 1: Selil Blog. Thanks, resurrecting & tenured One(s?). Honored We are.

Rule 2: 7 things 'bout pickled Selves. Caution to the wind...

1. Was once an eagle scout spanked by a Marxist-Leninist Mormon Melchizedek. Joseph Smith, Joseph Stalin - what the diff. A scout leader once bore down on me for eating hot dogs directly out of the package - 'twas an unchristian abomination as munching on uncooked hot dogs was an act of cannibalism.

2. Once stood within 4 unobstructed feet of Arafat, within 5 obstructed feet of George Clooney (he was surrounded by an obstructing firewall of 6 foot tall Russian prostitutes shuttled in to Les Caves des Roy in Saint Tropez from Cannes' La Chunga Bar so to better cover their heady Cote d'Azur overheads of gimpy Russian pimps and exorbitant room rates at the Hotel Martinez (where they co-dwelled with mothers, grandmothers and toddling children) )- and to boot, once stood in a suddenly de-constructing situation, caught weirdly aware of the fact that I was wearing Björn Borg boxer shorts while drinking with Börje Salming (who also hawks a line of trés chère metrosexual men's underwear).

3. Father of daughters. Not father to any sons as far as made aware. Never spanked anything but a chest poking drunk but that mighty butt-smack silenced a sticky-floored beer hall for a full 5 seconds and brought tears to a grown man's Tuborg'd eyes.

5. Eat plain oatmeal (uncooked) with cold milk every morning and have done so for over 20 years. During such time, have never eaten a hotel breakfast even though well over a thousand hotel nights have been notched up - once asleep sleep is jealously relished.

6. Enjoy lifting weights and swimming in oceans but am far from being as strong, fast, or enduring as invested efforts in such activities should have reasonably left one endowed.

7. Been told repeatedly I make the world's best dry martini. Sometimes it's true - as when I give them away for free.

Rule 3: Tagging: Been regularly following a slurry of blogs via RSS on our latest mobile gizmo during the SMC hiatus; all of the blogs listed on That Shortbus and many of those crowded under Rhizomatic Graffiti.

So who to tag? Howz'boutz:

• Self-professed neocon and pro-victory Donald Douglas over at American Power 'cause he deplorably deplores ad hominems.
• Ex-NASA wizkid Ken Andersson over at Shockfront (formerly of Anything They Say) 'cause he's a heck of a stargazer and such an effing bleeding heart of a savant at that.
• Exploring the Heart of Asia, formerly Afghanistanica, 'cause we declared him as having written our favorite post of the year (we were quaffing M1's world's best silver bullets at the time of coronation)
• An available staffer over at Alternate Brain.
• Antoine Fafard. He knows how to pace his posting.
• Roguely Stated for their occasional drive-bys .
• Kings of War. Something about 'em.
  

Rule 4: Inform tagged - doing & near done

Rule 5: Post image of martial discord - Lysistrate; Blowback (see pic above)

Awoke

No doubt - We have been tagged. In this deadly game of tag, We are most sure of the rules, but We will nonetheless arrogantly slack for I am meatball of one and oft effwit at that.

If it doesn´t immediately endanger Us We will ignore it - or at least We will silently sidestep it.*

We be meatball.

*mt

Meatball Meaning

Moonlight Sonata - Entertaining Notions of LIHOP

On the night of November 14, 1940, German bombers dropped 500 tons of explosives, 33,000 incendiary bombs and dozens of parachute mines on Coventry. A new play at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, One Night In November, claims that Winston Churchill knew of the attack several days in advance but held back the information [Let It Happen On Purpose - LIHOP ] to protect the most important secret of the war: the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park. Churchill's biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, reveals his truth about the events of that day:

On November 12, 1940, Enigma decrypts made it clear that a major German bombing raid was imminent. Its code name, Moonlight Sonata, had been read in the decrypts. The Air Intelligence report Churchill received on November 12 gave, on the basis of the latest intelligence, the following possible targets: central London, Greater London, the Thames Valley, Kent or the Essex Coast. A German pilot who had been shot down on November 9 had, under interrogation, suggested that Coventry and Birmingham would both be attacked in a “colossal raid” between November 15 and 20; but the senior Air Intelligence Liaison officer at Bletchley noted that there was “pretty definite information that the attack is to be against London and the Home Counties”.

Bletchley considered the German pilot's information “doubtful”. Churchill was sent a summary of these reports on the morning of November 14; he read them just after midday. Whatever the target, he was told, the usual counter-measures had been prepared since early that morning, and would be activated as soon as the precise target was known. The target area would be “probably in the vicinity of London”, Churchill read. If, however, “further information were to indicate Coventry, Birmingham or elsewhere”, it was hoped that the standard “Cold Water” instructions for counter-measures could be got out in time.

That afternoon, Churchill prepared to leave Downing Street by car to spend the weekend at Ditchley Park, one of his weekend retreats. As his car prepared to leave, John Martin, his Principal Private Secretary, handed him a top-secret message in a locked box. As the car reached the Albert Memorial, Churchill read the message. It was the latest intelligence: a heavy raid on London. He immediately told his driver to return to Downing Street, explaining to Martin that he was not going to spend the night peacefully in the country while the capital was “under heavy attack”. Early that evening Churchill waited at Downing Street for the expected attack on London, sending his two duty private secretaries, John Colville and John Peck, to the underground shelter at the disused Down Street station on the Piccadilly Line, telling them: “You are too young to die.” He also gave instructions for the “Garden Room Girls” - the typists - to be sent home. Churchill went on to the Air Ministry roof to await the bombing.

The moment German radio beams identified Coventry as the target, the Air Ministry ordered British planes to bomb the aerodromes from which the attackers were expected to take off. A continuous fighter patrol had been maintained over Coventry itself, and the “Cold Water” defence preparations were activated. As a result of an earlier raid on Coventry, Churchill had given instructions on November 7 to strengthen Coventry's anti-aircraft defences. These instructions had been carried out.

On November 12, Enigma had revealed a raid in prospect, but not the target. At the last moment on November 14, the beams revealed the target, and were acted on without delay.

Securing the Silk Road - The Path of the Torch

We've been meaning to post the following Balkananalysis excerpts for a tardy week now, if only really to highlight the brotherly antics of Greece's butt-jabbing neighbour (Every year Turkey honors Greece's Day of Independence by violating Greek airspace.) The lighting ceremony now passed, this post is already somewhat dated. Perhaps though, somewhat dated can be considered somewhat tested.

With security for the Olympics, which start in Beijing on August 8 at an all-time-high, China’s concerns have reverberated as far as southeastern Europe, where on March 24 the Greek government will conduct the traditional lighting of the Olympic flame. Greece’s security precautions for the event involve new techniques and technology in practice since Athens hosted the last Olympics, in 2004, and are being executed with an eye to possible threats from political opponents of the Chinese regime, including left-wing terrorist groups, the Uyghur Diaspora, Tibet activists and other potential troublemakers.

The most visible dissidents to China’s political program, which are seeking to use the world spotlight cast on the world’s most populous country that the Games provide, are now the Tibetans. Following recent riots and continuing protests against Chinese rule in Tibet, and an outcry from Tibet activist groups outside the country, China is taking a great interest in identifying those involved. This interest has spread as far as the Peloponnesian home of the original Olympics, where on March 10 Chinese Embassy officials in Olympia filmed a group of Tibet activists concluding their own “Olympic flame” relay, a counter-action meant as a symbolic protest. This data will most certainly be shared with the Greek police, busy executing their final preparations for the March 24^th event.

Greek-Chinese Relations: Smooth Sailing

Bilateral relations between the two countries have greatly expanded over the past few years, facilitated by the expanding role of China in world markets and by the role of the Greek merchant marine, which now transfers the bulk of China’s energy needs, especially its oil.

Diplomatic relations were formally established in 1972, during the time when Western policy formally opened up to Beijing as a counterweight to the then-Soviet Empire. According to information relayed by the Greek Foreign Ministry, “Greek-Chinese relations are excellent… China has a positive stance on the Cyprus issue and Greece supports the principle of One China.”

In the economic sphere, there is strong bilateral collaboration as well, especially in the shipping sector. The COSCO Group is willing to invest in Greek ports by buying controlling stakes, while the shipyards of China are filled with hundreds of orders from Greek ship owners rushing to take advantage of low-cost Chinese labor. In the tourism sector, Greece expects to accommodate some 300,000 Chinese visitors, a market recently making its entrance in Greece but with high potential due to explosive annual growth and high spending per capita.

Chinese Security Concerns

The Olympic Games 2008 will provide a unique opportunity for China to present its heightened role on the world stage. The security concerns of Beijing are mainly concentrated in the existence of minority groups, as now seen in Tibet, with communities scattered across the world that along with political demonstrations may attempt sabotage and even terrorist attacks on the Games themselves. Bloomberg reports that China is spending approximately $300 million on Olympic security (whereas the Greek government spent $1.5 billion to safeguard the 2004 Olympics). According to security expert and an official advisor to the Olympic Games, Dr. Darko Trifunovic, “China is paying considerable attention to terrorism assessment for the Olympic Games. It does not want the event to be associated with anything that can damage its reputation as a safe destination.”

Among the Chinese counter-terrorist efforts is the participation of America nuclear experts in removing radioactive materials from the vicinity of Olympic sites, “part of a security sweep focusing on highly radioactive devices in hospitals and research labs” reported The Canadian Press. “The fear is they could be detonated using conventional explosives - effectively becoming a ‘dirty bomb’ that would spew radiation and sow panic at the global sporting spectacle set for August.” Charles Ferguson of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations described for the Canadian media the security operation as being “precautionary,” adding that “if terrorists were able to take explosives, let’s say, and target a radioactive source that’s located at or near an Olympic site venue and blow up that facility… then that could be a huge international event.”

Chinese Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang has stated that “we face the challenges of terrorism, separatism and extremism.” Attesting to this concern, Beijing recently announced that it had foiled a plot devised by terrorists seeking to take over a passenger plane and crash it in a major city. According to Wang Lequan, the top Communist Party official in the western region of Xinjiang, there were plans “to sabotage the staging of the Beijing Olympics.” CNN reported that “two people were killed and 15 captured in the raid, along with weapons and extremist religious literature.”

Xinjiang province is home to the Uyghurs (also spelled Uighurs), a Turkic minority that has often clashed with the Chinese minority, motivated by dreams of independence, for a region it calls East Turkistan. During the 1990’s it collaborated with Islamic networks and Al Qaeda, and even with the Turkish state, which at the time was trying to expand its influence among the Turkic countries of Central Asia. Should the allegations prove to be correct, an initial serious security threat may have now been found. However, Western observers have also expressed skepticism over the veracity of the allegations, suspecting that China would like to voice security concerns to intimidate its restive minorities.

However, there are demonstrated links between a small number of Chinese Turks and international terrorist outfits. Dr. Trifunovic points out that “Uyghur trainers of Al Qaeda ended up in Guantanamo Bay [prison] in 2001. Six of them were released and they are presently in Albania.” The small Balkan country was the only one that would do the US a favor by accepting the men. A significant Uyghur community also resides in Munich, Germany, which would mean relatively easy access for any troublemakers looking to disrupt the Olympic flame lighting ceremony in Greece.

Another Chinese security concern which has implications for events in Greece next week is the Falun Gong religious sect, which has been in conflict with the Chinese government for years. Via its European representation, the group has made numerous connections in Greece, and developed a network of local supporters and collaborators, materializing in the past in the form of demonstrations in Athens. This activity has occasionally created slight strains in Athens-Beijing bilateral relations.

It is possible that the cult groups may try to hold demonstrations just before the lighting ceremony, in order to voice their public disapproval for the Chinese Olympic Games. It is notable to mention that in 2004 three members of that sect sued the Chinese government in a Greek court, claiming that it practices “genocide and torture” against minority members. Even though it cannot be estimated how many members of the sect reside in Greece, unofficial tallies suggest a community of approximately 1,000 members.

Lastly the ever-pressing issue of Tibet, one which has received much more popular support from Westerners, means another headache for Greek security tasked with safeguarding the lighting ceremony. On the 10th of March, a group of 10 Tibetans tried to enter the archaeological site of Olympia in order to symbolically light up their own fire, using benzine, but were prohibited by the police, though no arrests were made. The arrival of a wave of tourists from China and various European countries for the ceremony has kept local authorities on alert, as they fear similar incidents might be attempted.

Greek Security Preparations for the Olympic Lighting Ceremony

The lighting ceremony will begin at noon on Monday, the 24th of March, at the home of the original Games, Olympia in the Peloponnese. As before every modern Olympics, the torch will then travel throughout Greece – some 1,528 km in all – passing through 43 cities and finally arriving at Panatheneum Stadium in central Athens on the 30th of March at 3PM. On the following day it will be flown to China. During the week-long ceremony, 605 people in all will be involved in handling the torch.

Other concerns for the Greek government which do not involve China-related troublemakers regarding the high-visibility torch ceremony include the existence of certain radical leftist groups, such as the Revolutionary Struggle. The latter was reportedly involved with staging an attack against the American Embassy in January 2007, and is considered to have a considerable arsenal of illegal weaponry, as well as relations with the contraband arms trade in the Balkans, and possibly even with organized crime networks operating in Kosovo; in 2007, Kathimerini reported that the missile launched against the American Embassy had been imported from Albania via the largely Albanian-populated secessionist province of Serbia.

Finally, the generally fragile situation in the Balkans may now be affected as the Greek police are forced to temporarily expend their efforts on the lighting ceremony, rather than on other regional security issues.

Controlling the Path of the Torch, and the Holiday

The path upon which the Olympic flame will pass is considered generally safe. It will follow national roads, which are easily monitored and secured. Nevertheless, the country will be on a heightened state of alert for other reasons as well. The 25th of March is also the national Day of Independence in Greece, traditionally marked by a military parade in Athens. This simultaneous event also means the activation of Greek military units, as Turkey by tradition honors the holiday by violating Greek airspace, as a form of minor psychological warfare. Thus the Greek air force, and the army and navy as well, will have to be on standby.

Route and Itinerary of the Olympic Torch, March 24-30, 2008

1. March 24: Ancient Olympia-Patra-Messologi (Stay overnight)
2. March 25: Agrinio-Arta-Ioannina (Stay overnight)
3. March 26: Metsovo-Grevena-Kozani-Veroia (Stay overnight)
4. March 27: Naoussa-Edessa-Ginniatsa-Ancient Pella-Thessaloniki (Stay overnight)
5. March 28: Larissa-Volos-Lamia (Stay overnight)
6. March 29: Kalamos-Marathonas-Rafina- Panellinios Stadium (2 km from the final destination) in central Athens (Stay overnight)
7. March 30: Delivery of the torch to Chinese Olympic officials at 3PM in Panatheneum stadium (close to the presidential palace, and the most secure area of Athens). The torch will be flown the same night or early the next morning for China.

Whoops, We Did It Again

We managed to vaporize a whole module of pleasing blurbs (Yahoo cache) from the right-hand column while tweaking our template. Though probably a major relief for all those quoted, their un-shaming is only temporary - the smorgasboard of jacked loose-tongued flattery will be back in place asap.
-Update Friday, March 21: Alas blurbers, blurbage restored.

Friend to Foe: Switch-Hit Pak

Last week, as Lt Gen Mushtaq Baig, chief of army medical services, was blown to bits by a teenaged suicide bomber in the heart of the Rawalpindi cantonment, Pakistan’s worst fears were confirmed once again: the militants were determined to attack the core of the Pakistani army.

And the Army is not ready for this deadly game with the people it has patronised, nurtured and guided in the past. Though it has been involved in a high-voltage battle of nerves with militants in the NWFP, it has gained little ground against them.

The militants are elusive and deeply motivated, and there have even been incidents of some army units willingly surrendering to the heavily armed militia rather than fight them.

The reason for this debacle is quite simple. Trained to fight conventional war with the Indian army in the mountains of Kashmir, the plains of Punjab and the desert of Rajasthan, the Pakistani army struggles and fumbles as it takes on battle-hardened guerrillas in the treacherous terrain of the Pashtun belt.

There’s another reason: Since 1947, generations of Pakistani army have been trained, motivated and indoctrinated to fight India. Just like in jingoistic Bollywood flicks, the word enemy always had only one meaning in the barracks of the Pakistani army. Explaining the Pakistani establishment’s perception of India in a recent interview, Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy , said: "India is an enemy, it is about to eat us up. We have to challenge it."

It’s probably this mindset that explains the ‘misuse’ of more than $5 billion given by the US to the Pakistani military to fight the Al-Qaida and Taliban in its restive border areas with Afghanistan. In a report published last year, US military officials said they believed that much of the American money had been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India.

The American accusation led to a war of words between Islamabad and Washington, with the Pakistanis accusing the Americans of ingratitude and the Americans in turn charging them with not doing enough to counter the Al-Qaida "which was expanding its influence from the remote border regions into the more populated parts of Pakistan".

"The Pakistanis are damn good fighters," says a retired Indian Army officer who saw action on the western front in 1971. "But unlike us, counter-insurgency is not their strength. It’s a different ballgame altogether. They have to shift their focus from India if they want to defeat the militants in the mountains."

This is precisely what the Americans have been telling Islamabad. In recent weeks as the country voted in the general elections and President Pervez Musharraf stood defeated and isolated, some top US officials - CIA director Michael Hayden, deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen - flew down to Islamabad, offering to train Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in anti-guerrilla operations and trying to persuade army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani to switch from training in conventional warfare to counter-insurgency operations. The general reportedly agreed with the Americans’ viewpoint.

But even if Gen Kayani manages to shift the focus of his army’s training, it’s not going to be easy to win this battle, for an entirely different reason. Because of the heavy dose of religion during training and the army’s symbiotic relationship with religious extremists in the past, the soldier on the front is not convinced he is fighting the right battle. Trained to fight the ‘big enemy’, the soldiers are getting a bit confused as they take on the people who once fought alongside them.

"Even before the Taliban, we engaged with non-state actors and militants," says Siddiqa. "Who fought the war in 1947-48? We got those tribal warriors from Waziristan primarily to fight. In 1965 again, we used jihadis." In addition, the army also used religious extremists to defeat its political opponents. Now they are in a Catch-22 situation. Though Pakistan joined the US war on terror after the threat of being "bombed back to the Stone Age", its army is not ready - militarily and mentally - to fight the enemy’s enemy which has turned its guns on its former patron.
-Excerpts from The Times Of India

SOS - Subprime Olympics Securitization

It's not as if there aren't exploitable vectors a plenty to keep negotiating positions vis-á-vis a PR-prickly PRC in bettered balance, particularly during the peri-Olympic interval.

Heck, with competent opportunity managers at our helm it would perhaps not be considered holding hopes too high if one entertained notions of a reasonably coerced Chi-subsidy quietly directed at lessening the blow of the $200 Billion Bernanke-bail-outs scooped from the treasury and handed over to a Wall Street suddenly in love with Keynes. Chi-games and their stash of our treasury securities in some kind of sufficiently stabilized order in exchange for the lessening of indignation and wrath surely felt by the many friends of Friedman now gnashing their principled teeth at the actions of a hyper-interventionist Fed.

Enough of conspiratorial silliness. While considerable Chinese focus in securing the Beijing Olympics will be on terrorism-related scenarios likely to arise from foreign terrorists, likely scenarios from domestic disgruntled elements might deserve attention. Among these one could mention the Uighur jihadi terrorists who have close links with Al Qaeda and the International Islamic Front (IIF), the Tibetan activists, the members of the Falun Gong and irrational Chinese individuals. On the basis of the evidence presently available, it is assessed that the Uighur terrorists have a capability for diversionary attacks in Xinjiang and against Chinese nationals, interests, diplomatic missions and offices in Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics. The Tibetans have motivated activists, who might indulge in political acts such as shouting slogans, demonstrations, self-immolation etc. The Falun Gong could also indulge in such political acts. In the case of irrational elements, one cannot rule out acts of copy-cat terrorism similar to what happened at Atlanta.

From a paper by Director B. Raman, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai:

After a long interval of inactivity in the Xinjiang region of China, Uighur extremist elements have again been involved in two incidents reported by the Chinese authorities from that region.

The first incident took place at Urumqi, the capital of the province, on January 27,2008. There was reportedly an exchange of fire between the police and some Uighur extremists when the police raided a hide-out of a suspected sleeper cell of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an associate of Al Qaeda with close links to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) or Group, another Uzbek group. While the objectives of the IMU are regional and confined to Uzbekistan and other Central Asian Republics and Xinjiang, those of the IJU are global. The IJU projects itself as a global jihadi organisation with no specific ethnic identity.

According to the official version of the raid, two Uighur extremists were killed and 15 others arrested by the Police. Five police officers were injured. Chinese officials refrained from giving publicity to this incident for nearly a month. They officially gave out the details only after the regional media in China started reporting about it, presumably on the basis of briefings from officials at the lower levels.

The Chinese authorities have assessed this incident as an indicator of a revival of the ETIM's activities as a prelude to a possible terrorist strike to be staged just before or during the Beijing Olympics of August,2008. While there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the facts as reported by Chinese officials, their linking it to the Olympics seems to be based more on precautionary speculation than on concrete evidence.

The second incident was reported to have taken place on board a Chinese commercial plane flying from Urumqi to Beijing on March 7,2008. Security guards travelling on board the plane overpowered two suspected Uighur extremists, who tried to create an incident. The Chinese media has characterised the incident as an attempted terrorist strike. The plane made an emergency landing in the northwestern city of Lanzhou. The two persons overpowered by the security guards were handed over to the local police for interrogation. The other passengers were also questioned. The police claim to have found some inflammable liquid in one of the toilets on board the aircraft. Further details are not yet available.

It is to be expected that anti-Beijing elements in the Uighur community in China as well as abroad would try to embarass the Chinese authorities and draw attention to their demands in the period before and during the Olympics. These elements fall into two groups. The first group consists of those inspired by the pan-Islamic ideology of Al Qaeda and acting in co-operation with it. In one of his messages of 2006, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No.2 of Al Qaeda, had included Xinjiang in the list of lands historically belonging to the Muslims now under the control of non-Muslims. He wanted all these lands to be "liberated" from the control of non-Muslims. The pro-Al Qaeda Uighurs mainly operate from the camps of the IMU and the IJU in the North Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. It has been difficult to quantify their number. Different reports estimate their number differently----ranging between 30 and 100.

The second group consists of pro-Western Uighurs, who mostly operate from Albania, Kosovo and Turkey. This group includes three or four Uighurs, who were handed over by the Pakistani authorities to the US for being interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba. They were released subsequently since no evidence could be found against them that they posed a threat to US nationals and interests. They settled down in Albania and keep moving between there and Kosovo.

For the last two years, two anti-China video films purported to have been produced by unidentified Uighurs have been disseminated through the Internet. They do not appear to have been produced by As-Sahab, the Psywar and propaganda division of Al Qaeda.

While there is so far no specific evidence that these two groups are planning to stage Olympics-related incidents, the possibility of such incidents has to be factored into in any security plan for the Olympics. The possibilities are incidents not involving the use of violence by the pro-Western Uighurs and incidents amounting to acts of terrorism by pro-Al Qaeda Uighurs.

Hunter-Killers: Getting Native Against All Fears

A rather unique and recent Washington Post special report on PKK guerrillas in Iraq's Zap valley reminded me of an article stumbled upon last month in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Excerpts from each below.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Trying to become predators instead of prey, Marines headed to Iraq will go through training built on advice from big-game hunters, soldiers of fortune and troops who grew up around firearms in the woods or the inner city.

Combat Hunter, a program begun at Camp Pendleton and now being rolled out nationwide, is designed to help Marines stalk and kill insurgents by using their senses and instincts. It emphasizes keen observation of Marines' surroundings and meticulous knowledge of their foes' habits.

“This is the most comprehensive training of its kind in our history,” said Col. Clarke Lethin, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton.

“These are primal skills that we all have but that we evolved out of,” he added. “We are going back in time. The Marines who go through this program will never be the same. They'll never look at the world the same again.”

The Marine Corps had not paid much attention to this low-tech combat approach since the Vietnam War. Like the other service branches, the Corps has generally gone high-tech by creating increasingly advanced weapons and developing virtual reality training.

Combat Hunter grew out of a concept by Gen. James Mattis, who has spearheaded the formation of various training programs for the Marine Corps. He saw the need for greater focus on hunting-related skills while overseeing combat forces at Camp Pendleton in 2006.

(...)

“One of the things that Gen. Mattis said is that he wanted a quick turnaround for this project. There was a sense of urgency,” said Maj. James Martin, the project officer for Combat Hunter.

Lethin recalled the reason for that urgency: Too many troops felt fear when they left their bases in Anbar province, the vast western region of Iraq where Marines hold the lead combat role for the U.S. military. “Fear is a terrible thing. The Marines felt they were being hunted. They felt they were bait for the insurgents,” Lethin said.

“How do we teach our Marines to be the hunters? How do we bring the confidence back?” Lethin said. “Sometimes technology is not the answer. We think we have the answer in Combat Hunter.”

The unorthodox program draws on the expertise of an eclectic mix of consultants. There are the tracking abilities of David Scott-Donelan, a former officer in the South African Special Forces and a veteran of civil wars in Africa. Then there's African guide Ivan Carter, as well as others who would rather not be identified by the Marine Corps.

Training drills also reflect the hunting skills of Marines from rural areas and, as an unclassified Marine briefing said, the life experiences of those “who have lived in disadvantaged areas of large cities.”

“What we are learning in Iraq is that the demands of warfare in the new century are so widely different from anything for which we were planning. We have to look in unexpected places for the skills that will serve us best”.

Washington Post

After President Bush met with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in November to discuss the PKK problem, the guerrillas rushed to make arrangements for battle. They stashed ammunition, weapons, food and water in caves and crags throughout the mountains, for quick resupply. Inside one such cave, they installed a cylindrical, metal wood-burning stove and chimney to heat a room constructed of army green cloth and plastic tarp.

"The mountain is a school for us," said Elif, a 32-year-old commander who dropped out of interior design school in Turkey 10 years ago to join the PKK. "The mountain teaches us how to walk, it taught us how to live in cold weather, how to go without eating for a long time," she said. "The Turkish soldiers have huge bodies, but they can't stay in the snow for more than a couple hours."

The guerrillas are not a people's army or ad hoc insurgency, but a trained paramilitary force that requires every new recruit to attend a three-month camp to study military tactics and become indoctrinated in the ideology of the imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

In the PKK enclave in northern Iraq, Ocalan's chubby, mustachioed face is emblazoned on hillsides, flags and small pins the fighters wear on their vests. The reverence they exhibit toward Ocalan, captured in 1999 in Nairobi and now in a Turkish prison, borders on cultish. After assassination attempts against Ocalan in the 1990s, guerrillas immolated themselves and some became suicide bombers. To the governments of Turkey, Iraq and the United States, those tactics solidified the PKK's reputation as a terrorist organization.

Woes of GWOT: Wailing and Wishes

Soon to retire Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, commander of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor, at Fort Riley, Kansas and co-author of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual weighs in on the woes of GWOT at WaPo. The Lt. Col. fields a wish list of tweaks & remedies for GWOT. One, maybe two, of his suggestions might come to be enacted upon. The rest will in all likelihood remain the unheeded wisdom & wailing of weathered elder. Our skewing excerpts below:

The hard lesson of this tragedy is clear: Foreign forces cannot win a counterinsurgency campaign on their own.

(...)

[L]ast year's military successes in Iraq came at a very high price. The "surge" of five brigades and the extension of Army combat tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months has strained the Army to the breaking point. Neither the Army nor the Marine Corps has a reserve of ground troops to handle other crises. Meanwhile, the Taliban is regaining strength in Afghanistan and the lawless border regions of Pakistan, and the opium production that funds their insurgency hit record highs last year.

(...)

For starters, we must shore up Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently committed 3,000 more desperately needed Marines to Afghanistan, beginning next month. But it would take an increase of more than 100,000 soldiers and Marines to give NATO commanders in Afghanistan the force ratios that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has enjoyed. We don't have the troops.

The best short-term solution is rapidly expanding the Iraqi and Afghan security forces to hold towns cleared by U.S. forces. Local forces, stiffened by foreign advisers, have historically been the keys to success in counterinsurgency warfare. As such, I've been among the serving officers and veterans who've urged the U.S. Army to create a standing Adviser Corps.

But even greatly expanding and institutionalizing the role of advisers cannot win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insurgencies are ultimately inspired by ideas, and defeating the Iraqi insurgency will require a counter-narrative -- backed up by robust economic development, a solid and committed government in Baghdad, and providing the Iraqi people with basic services such as water, electricity and (above all) security. As such, the single most important step the United States could take toward victory is re-creating an information agency to discredit our enemies' narratives and amplify those of our allies. For starters, we should let the Muslim world know about atrocities committed by our foes[.]

(...)

The Army and Marine Corps are exhausted and desperately need time and money to rebuild. That's not likely; keeping up the security the United States purchased at such a high price in Iraq last year will require committing tens of thousands of U.S. ground forces for several more years at least -- and maintaining a significant presence in Iraq for a decade or more. Achieving a similar success in Afghanistan will mean deploying tens of thousands more troops (and not just from our NATO allies) for similarly long hauls.

(...)

[T]he United States is engaged in a war on many fronts for which it is not properly mobilized. Iraq and Afghanistan don't just need more advisers from the Army and the Marine Corps; they need more help from the State Department and the Justice Department, too.

Above all, we soldiers need the American people to understand that counterinsurgency is slow, painstaking work that requires serious patience. (...) These will be long wars.

Meatball Proverb: Crowded Elevator Smell Different to Midget

China will tighten its restrictions on foreign performers following an appearance last Sunday in Shanghai by the Icelandic singer Bjork, who shouted “Tibet, Tibet” after performing her song “Declare Independence.” China’s Ministry of Culture responded to Bjork’s action on Friday by posting a statement on its Web site, saying that she “broke Chinese law and hurt Chinese people’s feelings”.

Iffy Stiffy - Pending NIE Iraq

To fathom a guess: an NIE of this sort will be more of an analytical document than a summary of secret intel. Any real secrets - particularly substantive references to sources and methods - will always be redacted. Given the history of leaks around these products, expect to see a preempting public version. Anything else could be construed as somewhat crackbrained.

Hacked excerpts from today's WaPo:

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public.

The classified estimate on Iraq is intended as an update of last summer's assessment, which predicted modest security improvements but an increasingly precarious political situation. It is meant to be delivered to Congress before testimony in early April by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. In his letter to [Senator R-Va.] Warner, [Director of National Intelligence] McConnell said that separate estimates are also being prepared on the "terrorist threat to the homeland" -- focusing on al-Qaeda and Pakistan -- and on "the tactical and longer-term security and political outlook for Afghanistan." Both are scheduled for publication by early fall.

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

In internal guidance he issued in October, McConnell said that his policy was that they "should not be declassified." One month later, however, the intelligence board decided to publicly release key judgments from an NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program, saying that it had weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security against the necessity to protect classified information."

"Overall, professional life is less complicated if nothing becomes public, and one doesn't have to organize classified assessments always having in the back of one's mind, 'If this is ever leaked, how would it read' " in the news media, a former intelligence analyst said.

STAREX - Exploitation of the Occult

While the following story has received considerable attention in the broadsheets of her former colonies, few accounts found worthy of mention a particular tidbit of black public diplomacy involving the cigar flourishing man our cousin's counter-intelligence and security agency once had in their employ as court astrologer.

A silk gown dressing Jewish refugee from Hungary, deployed by MI5 to second guess a Hitler believed to be swayed by the stars (recent research portrays a Hitler unimpressed by the Mumbo Jumbo of astrology - in fact one of his old secretaries recently revealed that he apparently had good laughs entertaining the notion that the Allies might believe he harbored the occult inclinations of our own Reagans ), was sent to neutral America to persuade the general populace and the President of the good fortunes lying in wait should the country go kinetic and weigh in with boots and metal against Hitler's pesky Reich.

Below is an unholy amalgam of jacked & hacked excerpts from a pirate's clutch of online sources:

Desperate for a glimpse into Adolf Hitler's unpredictable mind, British spies hired an astrologer during World War II to match the forecasts of the Nazi leader's personal astrologers, documents declassified Tuesday show.

[ Not entirely correct - actually William Stevenson's 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid somewhat describes the astrologer's work in the USA on behalf of British Security Co-ordination. Enough of that -M1 ]

They soon regretted it.

The file released to Britain's National Archives catalogs the frustrations of MI5 handlers as they try to prevent the astrologer, Louis de Wohl, from publicly embarrassing high-ranking intelligence and military officers over whom he briefly held sway.

De Wohl was born in Berlin in 1903, where he worked as a bank clerk, a novelist and a screenwriter before fleeing to Britain in 1935 to avoid Nazi persecution for being part Jewish. His wife, Alexandra, fled to Santiago, Chile, where she claimed to be a Romanian princess and was known as La Baronessa. Their relationship was closer to mother and son than man and wife, his file said.

In London, he claimed variously to be a Hungarian nobleman, the nephew of an Austrian conductor, the grandson of a British banking magnate and a relative of the Lord Mayor of London. His books told of traveling the Far East in Arab disguise and hanging out in Berlin cafes in women's clothing.

De Wohl laid out his astrological credentials in a 1937 autobiography, I Follow My Stars. A year later in Secret Service of the Sky, he argued stars were like spies that could obtain secret information.

His break came, he wrote in a later book, during a dinner at the Spanish Embassy in London, when a Spanish duchess asked de Wohl to reveal Hitler's horoscope to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax.

Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain's Special Operations Executive, soon hired him as part of his network of agents across Europe.

The government rented an apartment for de Wohl in a hotel in London's exclusive Park Lane. On paper headed Psychological Research Bureau, he
reported on clients and wrote horoscopes for Allied and Nazi leaders.

But de Wohl's predictions were often so vague it is impossible to see any military use. Take his December 1942 prediction for seven months later: "The German astrologers must pray that enemy action does not force the Fuehrer into making important decisions within the first eight days of the month (of July), as this would lead to great disaster."

Agents complained de Wohl's flamboyantly gay demeanor was destroying their carefully constructed cover story that his hotel apartment was paid for by a wealthy female patron and that his special operations liaison officer was a mistress. Agents also complained of his boasting about connections to the War Office and Naval Command.

What everyone in Britain wanted most was to get the Americans to enter the war. Prime Minister Winston Churchill didn't believe in astrology, but in mid-1941 he sent de Wohl to the U.S. to persuade Americans that the Nazis would lose within months if they entered the war.

de Wohl went round radio stations and newspapers casting Hitler's horoscope and predicting things were all going to go very badly and that the Nazis would lose within months if they entered the war.

A U.S. convention of pro-German astrologers had predicted Hitler would win the war, giving the U.S. more reason to stay out. Billing himself as The Modern Nostradamus, de Wohl proclaimed the same stars showed the opposite.

Ultimately it was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that brought the U.S. into the war - not de Wohl's assurances that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's horoscope was stunning.

His services no longer needed, he was called back to London in February 1942. He told an MI5 officer that he was astonished when he returned to find his hotel apartment stripped bare and his department disbanded.

His handlers did not contact him. He knocked on doors looking for Hambro - wearing the uniform of a British Army captain. The rank was assigned to him temporarily for his U.S. mission and withdrawn afterward. But to MI5's dismay, that wasn't explained to de Wohl.

Behind the scenes, MI5 correspondence shows his handlers at a loss. Senior officers offer a number of proposals on how to dispose of de Wohl, including interning him in a camp or moving him to a remote corner of the country. Two other options are blanked out in the file.

Deciding that de Wohl was potentially dangerous because he could damage the reputation of his clientele and the War Office, MI5 decided to keep him happy and continue to employ him.

The war ground on and the Allies won without consulting the stars.

But as it drew to an end, de Wohl wrote one last autobiographical book, The Stars of War and Peace, in which he revealed he was Britain's state seer and had fought Hitler from his luxury hotel using star warfare.

Third Wave Jihad - Hodgepodge of Wannabees

You may wish to see David I's recent column in the Washington Post. Like us, our boy manages to shine only when reporting other folks' ideas. Slightly hacked excerpts below:

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head and helps one see the topic in a different light.

Sageman has a résumé that would suit a postmodern John le Carré. He was a case officer running spies in Pakistan and then became a forensic psychiatrist. What distinguishes his new book, "Leaderless Jihad," is that it peels away the emotional, reflexive responses to terrorism that have grown up since Sept. 11, 2001, and looks instead at scientific data Sageman has collected on more than 500 Islamic terrorists -- to understand who they are, why they attack and how to stop them.

The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the current administration, echoed increasingly by certain presidential candidates that, as one particular Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank here. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's sample) have attended radical madrassas. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids -- closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics.

Sageman's harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. "Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear," he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

The third wave of terrorism is inherently self-limiting, Sageman continues. As soon as the amorphous groups gather and train, they make themselves vulnerable to arrest. "As the threat from al-Qaeda is self-limiting, so is its appeal, and global Islamist terrorism will probably disappear for internal reasons -- if the United States has the sense to allow it to continue on its course and fade away."

Sageman's policy advice is to "take the glory and thrill out of terrorism." Jettison the rhetoric about Muslim extremism -- these leaderless jihadists are barely Muslims. Stop holding news conferences to announce the latest triumphs in the "global war on terror," which only glamorize the struggle. And reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq, which fuels the Muslim world's sense of moral outrage.

If Sageman's data are right, we are not facing what a President called "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation," but something that is more limited and manageable -- if we make good decisions.

Tasseography - Fistfull of Polls

40 years ago, the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was being bombed at triple the level of the bombing of the north and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina. Still, the war would not go well, so the hawks were shifting towards doubts, among them the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger. He and Kennedy -other Kennedy liberals had already begun - reluctantly began to shift from a dedication to victory to a more dovish position.

Schlesinger explained the reasons. I’ll quote him now:

“Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won’t work, at an acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.”

Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And it is a land of wreck and ruin. The British polling agency, Opinion Research Business, has recently updated its estimate of deaths. Their new estimate is 1.3 million, excluding two of the most violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar. On the side, it’s kind of intriguing to observe the ferocity of the debate over the actual number of deaths. There’s an assumption on the part of hawks that if we only killed a couple hundred thousand people, it might not be so bad, so we shouldn’t accept the higher estimates. You can go along with that if you like.

Uncontroversially, there are over two million displaced within Iraq. Thanks to Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees who have fled the wreckage of Iraq aren’t totally wiped out. That includes most of the professional classes. But that welcome is fading, because Jordan and Syria receive no support from Washington and London, and therefore they cannot accept that huge burden for very long. It’s going to leave those two-and-a-half million refugees who fled in even more desperate straits.

The post-invasion sectarian warfare has devastated the country, as you know. Much of the country has been subjected to rather brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias. That’s the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy that’s developed by Petraeus. He won considerable fame pacifying Mosul a couple of years ago. It’s now, perhaps only coincidentally so, the scene of some of the most extreme violence in the country.

A bleeding-heart journalist immersed in the ongoing messiness, Nir Rosen, recently wrote an epitaph entitled “The Death of Iraq” [5-page pdf]in the somewhat mainstream-ish journal Current History . He writes that “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century,” which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as well. “Only fools talk of ‘solutions’ now,” he went on. “There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.” This is what I hear from my friends in place - they don't speak of winning, they speak of how now to administrate a failure.

But Iraq is, in fact, now a marginal(ized) issue, and the reasons are the traditional ones, the traditional reasoning and attitudes of the liberal doves who all pray now, as they did forty years ago, that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in this land of wreck and ruin. And they’re either encouraged or silenced by the good news about Iraq.

And there is good news. The Multi-National Force–Iraq, (I think three Poles are still battling it out in there somewhere) carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. It’s an important part of counterinsurgency or any form of domination - you want to know what your subjects are thinking. It released a report last December. It was a study of focus groups, and it was uncharacteristically upbeat. The report concluded—I’ll quote it—that the survey of focus groups “provides very strong evidence” that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to what’s being claimed. The survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups…and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis” from all over the country and all walks of life. This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post.

Well, the “shared beliefs” are identified in the report. I’ll quote de Young: "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the US military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of [what they call] ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” So those are the “shared beliefs.” According to the Iraqis then, there’s hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence and the other atrocities, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis. That’s pretty much the same as what’s been found in earlier polls, so it’s not all that surprising. Well, that’s the good news: “shared beliefs.”

There was a recent poll which found that 75 percent of Americans believe that US foreign policy is driving the dissatisfaction with America abroad, and more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values and of the American people are also to blame. Dissatisfaction is a kind of an understatement. The United States has become increasingly the most feared and often hated country in the world. Well, that perception is in fact incorrect. It’s fed by propaganda. There’s very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction—that is, the hatred and the anger—they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they’re perceived to be rejected by the US government, which does indeed seem to rile some fickle folks up.

There’s other good news that was reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during the extravaganza staged last September 11th. ("September 11th?", you might ask. "Why that timing?" ;) ) Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to explain the good news. The figures they provided showed that the Iraqi government was greatly accelerating spending on reconstruction, which is good news indeed and remained so until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office [17-page pdf], which found that the actual figure was one-sixth of what Petraeus and Crocker reported and, in fact, a 50 percent decline from the previous year.

Well, more good news is the decline in sectarian violence; that’s attributable in part to the ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion. There are fewer people to kill, so sectarian violence declines. It’s also attributable to the new counterinsurgency doctrine, Washington’s decision to support the tribal groups that had already organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to the decision of the Sadr’s Mahdi army to consolidate its gains to stop direct fighting. (That’s what the press calls “halting aggression” by the Mahdi army.)

Well, it’s possible that Petraeus’s strategy may approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where—I’ll quote the New York Times from last September — Chechnya, the fighting is now “limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom” after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack. Well, maybe some day Baghdad and Fallujah also will enjoy, to continue the quote, “electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new businesses opening and the city’s main streets repave