Journal: China Maps Afghan Solution, India Comments

02 China, 03 India, 08 Wild Cards
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China Speaks: Afghan peace needs a map

The United States should first put an end to the war. The anti-terror war, which the former US administration of George W Bush launched in 2001, has turned out to be the source of ceaseless turbulence and violence in the past years.

To promote much-needed reconciliation among the parties concerned, the US should end its military action. The war has neither brought the Islamic nation peace and security as the Bush administration originally promised, nor brought any tangible benefits to the US itself. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US military action has been under increasing doubt.

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India Comments: China maps an end to the Afghan war

The China Daily makes several important points. First, it bluntly calls on Washington to forthwith bring the US military operations in Afghanistan to an end. There are no caveats here while making this demand, no alibis. Simply put, the war has only resulted in aggravating the political and social turmoil Afghanistan causing great turbulence and violence and it has brought neither peace and stability as the administration promised nor any “tangible benefits” to the US itself. “On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US militaryaction has been under increasing doubt.”

Clearly, therefore, the urgent necessity arises to promote reconciliation among the warring Afghan groups and this effort needs to commence with the US forthwith ending its military operations.

Phi Beta Iota: The USA would appear to be in a quagmire of its own making, one very likely to terminate the Obama Administration's aspirations for a second term.

Journal: Afghanistan as Microcosm

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Policy, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Threats
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10 Steps To Victory In Afghanistan

Reform or Go Home (David Kilcullen)    End Suicide Attacks (Robert Pape)    If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join (Linda Robinson)    Pump Up the Police (Anthony Cordesman)    Kick Out Corruption (Nader Nadery)    Learn to Tax From the Taliban (Gretchen Peters)    Polls Have the Power (Merrill McPeak)    Take a Risk (Andrew McDonald Exum)    Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose (Frederick Kagan)    Pakistani Patronage (Paul Pillar)

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4 Broad Strategies Weighed — From Pullout To Boosting Troop Level

Getting out   Scaling back

Staying put    Ramping up

Strategic Analytic Matrix

Integrated Analytics
Integrated Analytics

Phi Beta Iota: In the context of holistic strategy and integrated analytics as depicted by the two thumbnails (click on each to get to the larger graphic), we are stunned by the mediocrity and myopia of the “conventional wisdom.”  It's all connected.  Absent a coherent world view and strategic analytic model with integrity, this Administration is toast.  The Republic has no strategy, no mature threat construct, no Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS), and zero integrity in the sense of being honest about the totality of the substance of governance.

Journal: Google $10M for Top Five Ideas

Collective Intelligence
 Project 10 to the 100
Project 10 to the 100

Check out Google's Project 10 to the 100, and vote for the ideas among the top ten that you favor.

They are listed below for reader convenience but descriptions and voting blocks are only available at Google's Project 10 to the 100th page.

Help social entrepreneurs drive change    Make government more transparent    Provide quality education to African students    Create real-time natural crisis tracking system    Build real-time, user-reported news service    Drive innovation in public transport    Make educational content     available online for free    Create more efficient landmine removal programs    Work toward socially conscious tax policies    Build better banking tools for everyone    Collect and organize the world's urban data    Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists    Promote health monitoring and data analysis    Enhance science and engineering education    Create real-world issue reporting system    Create genocide monitoring and alert system

The scattered nature of these “surviving ideas” gives us pause.  Several of them should have been grouped into a Collective Intelligence category, many are so far down in the weeds we have to wonder about the substance of the process by which this final list was derived.

Journal: “Expert Judgement” vs. Public Intelligence

Collective Intelligence
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

When one is brought up, professionally trained, in “systems thinking” and the importance of feedback loops, diversity, and integrity, everything else becomes pedestrian.  Today we highlight two books re-inventing the wheel so as to feature an extraordinarily useful but slighting incomplete oration on “expert judgement by our much-admired colleague at NIGHTWATCH, concluding with a list of books on Collective Intelligence as the engine for Epoch B Human Scale Integral Consciousness and Conscious Evolution….i.e. the antithesis of Washington, D.C. politics.

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

We are beginning to see the emergence of a very earnest and most promising form of historical revisionis, a series of books testing “what if” hypotheses that revolve around “what if” our leaders had acted with integrity; “what if” our leaders had sought out all the facts, been transparent, not been selfish, not been corrupt?

Below is an excerpt from NIGHTWATCH (find the rest halfway down the page for 23 July 2009) at NIGHTWATCH 20090723 in a “Special Note on Porfessionalism in Analysis–worth a complete read!

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Journal: Afghanistan as Corruption Squared

Government, Policies, Threats
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Afghanistan Journal

(PoliticsDaily.com)

October 1, 2009

Obama's War: Take Your Time
By David Wood

One brigade commander, Col. Michael Howard, is on his fourth tour in Afghanistan and understands it like few others. Still, there are pieces of this war that stop him cold. One of them is government corruption. “It's a cancer without a cure in Afghanistan, and if we don't come up with a cure, it will cause us to fail,” Howard told me last month, biting off his words angrily.  . . . . . . .  Given the stakes, Biddle said, “it is appropriate for the commander in chief to be aggressively challenging what he's told by anybody.'

Phi Beta Iota: Truth really is stranger than fiction.  The White House is NOT getting the “full spectrum” intelligence it needs to make good decisions, for three simple reasons:

1.  No one with access who has both strategic holistic vision and the integrity to demand that the President be fully and properly briefed on the ten high-level threats, the twelve harmonizing policies, and the costs and consequences of ignoring 8 out of 10 threats and 9 out of 12 policies.  The President needs a mentor not a partisan nanny or a blindly obedient advisor.

2.  A secret intelligence community leadership unable to think for itself and actually generate strategic matrices for the President that are helpful.  Right now, using the long-standing OSS.Net, Inc. motto of “Information costs money, intellience makes money,” the US IC is a $75 billion a year sink-hole, largely worthless to the White House or Congress.

3.  The President is still wrapped in the partisan bubble that got him elected–like Bush-Cheney, when backed by Wall Street, his insiders know how to steal elections, but they do not know how to govern.  Phi Beta Iota persists in believing that Barack Obama could be the George Washington of the 21st Century, but he MUST find his own voice and a new set of advisors that combine strategic vision, integrity, and loyalty to the Constitution over the partisan crime family.

Worth a Look: New Society Publishers

Worth A Look
Catalog Online
Catalog Online

For the first time we are posting a link twice, in both Professional Sites (as a publisher) and in Righteous Sites (as a contributor).  For some time now we have been struck by the consistent value and inherent righteousness of much of what this organization does.

They describe themselves as Deep Green for 25 Years, and in the introduction to their latest catalog, speak of “being addicted to ideas that promise to rebuild our culture on a more compassionate, sustainable basis.”

All good.  As will be evident from our review of The Resilient Earth, a book not published by New Society Publishers, the green movement leaves a lot to be desired in terms of coherence, holistic analysis, and plain common sense–Al Gore being a stricking example of smoke over substance.

Below are a few of the titles that represent the best of this earnest organization's offerings:

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2009 Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth

About the Idea, Articles & Chapters, Real Time

Robert David STEELE Vivas
Robert David STEELE Vivas

Earth is at a tipping point. Changes to the planet that used to take 10,000 years now take three.  This means that both real-time science and real-time policy and decision-making will be the non-negotiable essence of success in the 21st Century.

Near-Earth Objects (NEO) are a more immediate threat than climate change; energy from geothermal, nuclear (as an intermediate solution), and combinations of solar, wind, and bacteria energy are desperately needed; and no nation, least of all the USA, is being intelligent about addressing the ten high-level threats to humanity or harmonizing policies and spending across all policies from Agriculture to Water.

Only a World Brain with an embedded EarthGame able to honestly depict “true costs” in near-real-time, will allow the eight demographic challengers to nurture and harvest the Earth instead of destroying it. Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity, has come up with one three-part big idea for creating a prosperous world at peace:

Continue reading “2009 Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth”

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