This week's Book post, Infinite Wealth for All, set the stage for this week's Politics post, which focuses on The New Craft of Cyber-Intelligence–a blending of advanced public intelligence and advanced Information Operations (IO). Let's start with a great Mashable piece, 4 Predictions for the Future of Politics and Social Media, from which I have remixed the graphic showing the two-party tyranny sniffing at social media.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The inauguration of a new Parliament in just weeks threatens to worsen ethnic tensions and instability and to drive an important part of President Hamid Karzai’s political base into the arms of the insurgency, Afghans and foreign officials warn.
Instead insecurity, disaffection and fraud, particularly in the south, left the country’s largest and most important ethnic group, the Pashtuns, with sharply reduced representation. The results have been vigorously disputed for three months and have pushed the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
Now a range of Afghan officials and losing candidates say the election could have much the opposite effect from what many here had hoped. Seating the new Parliament, they warn, could fuel the insurgency and even the kind of ethnic strife that might lead to civil war.
“Step by step Pashtuns will say we are not represented, the government does not care about us, our people are not in government, and step by step they will join the enemy,” warned Jamil Karzai, a former member of Parliament and cousin of the president.
The results were surprisingly bad. <preconditions of revolution> is a little better but still not great. Here is the meat you were looking for plus some. The bottom line on revolution is that it results from scarcity compounded by corruption. The USA is in a pre-revolutionary situation today, with all the preconditions present, lacking just a precipitant.
Revolutions occur in the following domain areas: political-legal/military, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techo-demographic, and natural-geographic. Preconditions are different from precipitants. Preconditons can cross-pollinate but a precipitant is the spark. Take a careful look at the first graphic–generally a concentration of wealth, an inattentive elite, a breakdown of ideo-cultural confidence, and a demographic crisis (major unemployment plus an epidemic) are four that come to mind as especially troubling.
Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don’t be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations—thanks to massive government largesse—to survive the mess they created. The basics are dismal: Unemployment is unacceptably high, the December consumer confidence index is down and housing prices have fallen for four months in a row. The number of Americans living in poverty has never been higher, and a majority in a Washington Post poll said they were worried about making their next mortgage or rent payment.
In a parallel universe lives Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama’s former budget director and key adviser, who even faster than his mentor, Robert Rubin, has passed through that revolving platinum door linking the White House with Wall Street. The goal is to use your government position to advance the interests of your future employer, and Orszag and Rubin’s actions in the government and then at Citigroup provide stunning examples of the synergy between big government and high finance.
Very hard to disagree with anything this article says. ((HOWEVER)), increasing special operations forces (SOF) is constrained by a set of iron laws, the five “SOF Truths”:
1. Humans are more important than hardware.
2. Quality is more important than quantity.
3. Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
4. Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after an emergency occurs.
5. Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
To put a fine point on it, if we try to crank up the pipeline now, we may not get significant benefit before the Presidentially-mandated disengagement point for Afghanistan. Then, we could find ourselves, as we did after Vietnam, over-resourced with special operators. Some of us can remember standing on a PT field at Fort Bragg every morning in 1976-77-78 and receiving the latest play-by-play as to whether our Special Forces Group was going to be deactivated in the post-Vietnam drawdown. Other elements of the US Government can relate similar experiences.
If there is a bright side to this, IMHO, it would be that there does not today appear to be the antipathy toward SOF on the part of conventional forces that existed during the Vietnam era. A former colleague, well known for competence and dedication to some of you, visited his Army assignments officer while assigned as an A-Detachment commander in the 10th Special Forces Group, then at Fort Devens, MA. His assignments officer told him, “… see, you're not soldiering. …” I think that is less of a problem today, but I'm not sufficiently sanguine to believe that the knife fights will not recur as resources tighten while conflicts and attendant requirements persist indefinitely.
Phi Beta Iota: Not mentioned in the article are the fact that Private Military Contractor (PMC) firms have been allowed to rape, pillage, and loot the ranks of Special Forces. Retaining highly-qualified individuals and outsourcing indiscriminately are a contradiction.
An address for the Taliban in Turkey ? Reuters, Dec 28, 2010
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has supported a proposal to open an office for the Taliban in a third country such as Turkey. Such a move could help facilitate talks with the insurgent group on reconciliation and reintegration of members back into society, and Kabul was happy for Turkey to be a venue for such a process, he said last week, following a trilateral summit involving the presidents of Turkey and Pakistan.
The question is while a legitimate calling card for the Taliban would be a step forward, the insurgent group itself shows no signs yet of stepping out of the shadows, despite the best entreaties of and some of his European backers. The Taliban remain steadfast in their stand that they won’t talk to the Afghan government unless foreign troops leave the country. More so at the present time when U.S. commander General David Petraeus has intensified the battle against them and the Taliban have responded in equal measure.
