Afghanistan: Special Comment. Longtime Readers know that NightWatch has had a continuing project to monitor the security situation in Afghanistan since mid-2006, using a consistent sample of unclassified reporting. In 2006, when the Taliban resurgence was just beginning, NightWatch began publishing monthly summaries of the security situation.
In the past three years, the number of incidents per month has increased so that compiling and analyzing monthly reports threatened to become a full time job.
NightWatch has continued to track data in detail for all 400 districts of Afghanistan every other month and spot checked fighting reports in between. Preliminary analysis of the data for May 2011 was completed today. The table below shows the data from three tracking measures since last November.
Although the core postings appear, this search was so frequent today we thought to present the top three hits and a comment. First, the map of levees is the best way to identify the existing known flood risks. Everything has been predicated on both “average” flooding, and on no internal attacks against flood control infrastructure. Second, flooding has to be considered in terms of after-effects, including melt-downs of nuclear reactors, flood dissemination of nuclear and bio-chemical and radiological waste, flood impact on corroded chlorine containers, and so on. The USA is not ready. Government at every level has been terribly irresponsible for decades.
The remarks of the President are beneath contempt in so far as they completely avoid reality. Every statement about Afghanistan is questionable if not an outright misrepresentation. Al Quada and Afghanistan are not the same. This entire statement is a crock of warm, diseased spit. It is offensive in the extreme in its disrespect for public intelligence and the expectation of integrity in governance.
An honest president would admit that we are losing in Afghanistan and the Taliban is gaining (while also resupplying itself from our stocks); that suicide terrorism is directly related to the presence of US troops in countries where there is no public interest, only a special interest.
An honest president would apologize for attacking Libya and committing war crimes in Tripoli, a Congressional declaration of war not being in effect, and an honest president would admit that we are assassinating people–often the wrong people–all over the world.
An honest president would address the fraud that has bankrupted the nation and the corruption in the US government that allows all white collar criminals to avoid justice.
An honest president would admit that the domestic economic and social situation is desperate–the last twenty years have seen what Grover Norquist called the ultimate bi-partisanship: when the two parties get together and agree to screw the American people.
Barack Obama–like his immediate predecessors–is not an honest president. His rhetoric is false, offensive, and if Congress were honest, which it is not, he would be facing impeachment prior to the 4th of July.
Phi Beta Iota: This just in from NIGHTWATCH (forthcoming): …..tells a much different tale than what was said tonight…..
Just finished the first analysis of May 2011 finished. Unprecedented level of engagements of all kinds. Over 2000 for the first time in my data sample. The number of districts under stress is over 280 out of 400, all time high just under three-fourths.
For honest appraisals of Afghanistan, see Spinny Afghanistan. Washington is occupied by people who lack intelligence and integrity, who have abdicated their responsibilities under their Oaths of Office to defend and support the Constitution (not a corrupt chain of command), and who have absolutely no clue how to go about–even if they wanted to–serving the public interest.
Afterthought: The standard retired military flag officers are making fools of themselves across the channels, none more so than MajGen Bob Scales, USA (Ret), who just threw his integrity under the bus on Fox. GO ARMY. This is pathetic. How do we censure retired generals for deceiving any portion of the public?
At the end of May the British press was filled with stories headlined “Gaddafi to be told to stand down or face Apache attack.” As of this writing, the Apaches have attacked, but Gaddafi has not stood down.
The Apache threat is a case study in the sterile but financially lucrative marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes by precision guided weapons. What passes for a war strategy in Libya is now a comic opera starring NATO as an understrength, self-referencing techno bully, who acts as if he is now so fearsome that he does not even need a carrot to go with his stick.
There is a growing movement towards peer-to-peer value exchange and production, prompted by a variety of things, like economic conditions, shifting cultural values, exploration into collective intelligence, and further enabled by social technologies.
I've been tracking the online marketplaces that have been cropping up for sharing, swapping, gifting and renting, as well as sites that give people different kinds of opportunity to share skills and knowledge, innovate, and work collaboratively both on and offline. Below are a few sites I've come across, please add any I've missed.
Each of these has informed and shaped my thinking. I'm looking for guidance for activists, philanthropists, and others who wish to make a positive difference. I seek not only to identify what actions offer the highest leverage — the “more bang for the buck” factor which is so important right now. I seek also to understand the value each different approach offers and how all the approaches might usefully fit together. Finally, I tend to think of all this in evolutionary terms: What will help us make the collective evolutionary leap we need within the next few decades?
In recent years a new approach to this has been slowly coming together for me. I offer here an outline of its current form, in which I appreciate each approach for its real value while listing them in order of what I consider their increasing transformational leverage, where #7 offers the highest leverage.
