Category: 08 Wild Cards

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Journal: Multi-Polarity Here to Stay….

08 Wild Cards
Chuck Spinney Recommends

Very good summary of Turkey's emerging regional influence. CS

Turkey, America, and Empire’s Twilight

by Conn Hallinan, Antiwar.com,  July 06, 2010

When U.S. forces found themselves beset by a growing insurgency in Iraq following their lightning overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the most obvious parallel that came to mind was Vietnam: an occupying army, far from home, besieged by a shadowy foe. But Patrick Cockburn, the Independent‘s ace Middle East reporter, suggested that the escalating chaos was more like the Boer War than the conflict in Southeast Asia.

It was a parallel that was lost on most Americans, very few of whom know anything about the short, savage, turn-of-the-century war between Dutch settlers and the British Empire in South Africa.

But the analogy explains a great deal about the growing influence of a country like Turkey, and why Washington, despite its military power and economic clout, can no longer dominate regional and global politics.

FULL STORY ONLINE

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Journal: Continuity of Gerbil Operations

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

COMMENTS:

1.  The “fact of” PDB distribution is well known; Administrations influence who is on the distro list.

2.  Of the principals showcased here, some are (at least sort of) competent patriotic and some…well…

3.  This article is, perhaps unknowingly, deceptive in that it creates an impression that USG is postured to continue mission 24/7 from wherever necessary.  Not necessarily so.  There is a long established and openly acknowledged “Continuity of Operations” (COOP) program and a related personnel program, “telework,” that are essentially broken — misunderstood and pitifully under-resourced.  At least within DoD, the COOP programs are inextricably trapped in Cold War mentalities where the principal threat was nuclear strikes on key command and control nodes.  The concept was that a very small and elite segment of the workforce evacuated to predesignated facilities to sustain a very small set of “mission essential functions” for a relatively short period (say less than 30 days) after which the survivors emerge from their smoking holes and restart the world.  That mindset endures.  COOP and the people running it have not been able to transition to the idea that contingencies now exist that require USG to sustain a much greater fraction (say; 90%) of normal day to day functions for much longer periods (say 270 cumulative days over an 18-24 month period) and do it from distributed locations in order to intentionally avoid concentrating the workforce.  Inflexible security policies retard achievement of that standard as does misconstruction of “telework,” which is cast as a personnel benefit program, intended as a reward for a picked set of supposed high performing employees, and hampered by traditional information security strictures, computer security strictures, and pervasive management concerns about how to intensively manage and supervise teleworkers in order to ensure that they do not defraud the government.  Some of the policy documents governing telework are mind-boggling garbage.  Further, the overriding intent is that the teleworking employee financially support telework, particularly internet access back to the employing agency and in many cases basic hardware and software.)

President Obama's nighthawks: Top officials charged with guarding the nation's safety

By Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, July 4, 2010; A01

Headlights approach on an empty road. A government agent steps out of an armored SUV, carrying a locked, black satchel.

“Here's the bag,” the agent says, to the intelligence official. “Here's the key.”

The key turns, and out slides a brown leather binder, gold-stamped TOP SECRET. The President's Daily Brief, perhaps the most secret book on Earth.

The PDB handoff happens in the dead of every night. The book distills the nation's greatest threats, intelligence trends and concerns, and is written by a team at CIA headquarters.

FULL STORY ONLINE

Phi  Beta Iota: The President's Daily Brief (PDB) costs $75 billion a year to produce, and provides the President and senior commanders with “at best” 4% of what he  needs to know.  The US Intelligence Community lacks a strategic analytic model and does nothing of consequence for Cabinet Secretaries, regional and functional Assistant Secretaries, or individual action officers (e.g. the one deep Energy officer responsible for proliferation).  Madeline Albright it right when she described herself and others as “gerbils on a wheel.”

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Continue reading “Journal: Continuity of Gerbil Operations”

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Journal: Versailles on the Potamac in Flames….

08 Wild Cards

Chuck Spinney Recommends

This is an excellent analysis of why our leadership's hair is on fire and will remain on fire in Versailles and Bagram.  CS

When Rolling Stone Calls the Shots, It’s Time to Negotiate

By Fred Branfman, Truthdig, 30 Jun 2010

It is amazing how little commentary there has been on the key issue raised by the McChrystal Affair: Should U.S. war policy be made by Rolling Stone? The very fact that it took a magazine article for President Barack Obama to remove Gen. Stanley McChrystal provides the strongest possible reason for allowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban.

One point must be understood above all: McChrystal was not fired because he disrespected civilian authority, despised his administration colleagues and was running a dysfunctional operation. He was ousted because he allowed the public to find out—the one unforgivable sin for a U.S. executive branch long accustomed to operating its wars with little public or congressional knowledge or accountability, behind a PR curtain maintaining the myth that U.S. foreign and military policy is conducted democratically.

If the Rolling Stone piece had not appeared, McChrystal would still be running the war in Afghanistan, still ignoring e-mail messages from Richard “Wounded Beast” Holbrooke, still feeling betrayed by Karl “Traitor” Eikenberry, still blowing off Joe “Bite Me” Biden and James “Clown” Jones, and still disparaging Barack “Disengaged” Obama.

FULL STORY ONLINE

Phi  Beta Iota: Since 1988 the official US Government position on “the truth” and those that speak “the truth” has been to label both the truth and those that speak the truth “lunatic.”  It is high time the public took its Republic back, to include a demand for Electoral Reform in time for 2010 and 2010; the wholesale firing of BOTH Democratic AND Republican Members of the Senate and of Congress, and the creation of a Sunshine Cabinet led by Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, and Jackie Salit, with strategy support and intelligence support from across America, harnessing the distributed minds of our great Republic in being (simply being held prisoner in Washington, D.C. and New York City).

See also:

Search: smart nation intelligence reform electoral reform national security reform

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Journal: Moral Intellectual Vacuum in USA

02 China, 03 India, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards
Chuck Spinney Recommends

You gotta love it when the War Party reveals its desperation to come up with yet another soundbyte to justify continuing the long Afghan War — a war becoming known to cynics in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac as the Great Afghan Cash Cow, because it is a golden cornucopia for so many, including, inter alia, the Pentagon, defense contractors, USAID, NGOs, Warlords, the family Karzai, and even the Taliban, which is helping to fund its anti-US operations by running a protection racket paid for by the US-funded  trucking companies running supplies to the US forces in Afghanistan.

To wit:  The Pentagon just entertained the booboisie with recycled old Russian reports of Afghanistan's supposed mineral wealth (the Saudi Arabia of lithium, for example), which the New York Times and Fox dutifully amplified as new news.  Now, if the attached essay by Steve Levine is correct, we are about to be subjected to another recycling as well as a grand synthesis of old theories about turning Afghanistan in a “superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines, and energy pipelines for the entire Eurasian landmass.”  And lying in echelon behind this assault on our senses is the romantic magnetism of a new Great Game, perhaps devolving ultimately into a never-ending competition between the US and Russia on the high ground of Eurasian Continent.

It is easy to poke fun at such grand strategic nonsense, and Levine does a good job of dissing the latest.  But when these delusions are coupled with domestic politics, like …

  • the hysterical hype surrounding the FBI's allegations of a keystone-cops spy scandal where incompetent sleepers infiltrated the PTA meetings that fewer and fewer parents attend,
  • the now likely scuppering by Congress of a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia,
  • the likely torpedoing of the Obama-Medvedev rapprochement,
  • the increasing possibility of a congressional election debacle for the Democrats in 2010,

… it begins to look like the building blocks are falling into place for a return to political-economic normalcy in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a normalcy taking the form of a permanent new Cold War with Russia.

Blaming Obama for losing the un-winnable Afghan war and for either ineffectually attacking or being afraid to attack Iran should ice the cake in 2012, thus paving the way for a new burst of defense spending in the second decade of the 21st Century, accompanied by its handmaiden, the politics of fear, and funded by greater debt as well as a renewed assault on Social Security and Medicare.

So, don't be surprised by the sound champagne corks popping in the Hall of Mirrors.

Chuck Spinney
Pilos, Greece

An Afghan trade route: What could possibly go wrong with that?

Steve Levine, Foreign Policy, 29 June 2010

The U.S. military is studying a plan to solve Afghanistan's problems by turning it into a superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines and energy pipelines connected to the entire Eurasian landmass. According to a piece in the National Journal by Sydney Freedberg, the proposal has the ear of Gen. David Petraeus, whose confirmation hearings to be the new U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan start today in the Senate Armed Services Committee.

FULL STORY ONLINE

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Journal: Wrong War, Wrong Strategy, Wrong ….

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Chuck Spinney Recommends

Against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan

BY HUGH GUSTERSON, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 JULY 2010

It says something about American politics that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was not fired because U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are running at record levels, because the much vaunted Marja initiative has failed, or because the Kandahar offensive is already in trouble during its preliminary rollout. No, he was fired because he and his team embarrassed the White House with carelessly frank talk to a journalist. “This is a change in personnel, but not a change in policy,” said President Barack Obama in announcing General McChrystal's dismissal. Or, in the words of Rep. James McGovern, we have the “same menu, different waiter.”

But you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today.
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Reference: National Drug Threat Assessment 2010

07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Government, Law Enforcement, References
U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center

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CrisisGroup’s CrisisWatch Monthly Report N°83, 1 July 2010

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Civil Society, Corruption, CrisisWatch reports, Government, Military, Non-Governmental

New CrisisWatch bulletin from the International Crisis Group

CrisisWatch N°83, 1 July 2010

Four actual or potential conflict situations around the world deteriorated and none improved in June 2010, according to the new issue of the International Crisis Group's monthly bulletin CrisisWatch, released today.

In Kyrgyzstan large-scale violence between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks tore through the south of the country. Over 200 people have been officially reported killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting, the immediate spark for which is not yet clear. The country's provisional government was unable to control the situation and failed in its efforts to secure an international military intervention.

An uneasy calm has now descended over the area and the 27 June constitutional referendum was conducted peacefully. However, there remains significant potential for the violence to reignite unless effective security measures and a reconciliation process are promptly put in place.

Turkey's Kurdish PKK insurgents intensified their attacks in the country after calling off their 14-month unilateral ceasefire in early June. The violence reached its peak in the middle of the month when at least 40 soldiers and militants were killed in clashes in the country's south-east. The Turkish military responded with a land and air offensive against PKK bases in northern Iraq. The renewed clashes highlight the faltering of Prime Minister Erdogan's Kurdish “opening” policy and represent a significant deterioration in the government's relations with the Kurdish population.

In Burundi presidential elections took place amid escalating violence, with several people killed in a series of grenade attacks and shootings over the month. Opposition candidates boycotted the poll and labelled the re-election of President Nkurunziza – with over 90 per cent of the vote – a sham. With the opposition also set to boycott parliamentary polls scheduled for late July, growing tensions risk endangering Burundi's fragile democracy and undermining progress made since the end of the country's brutal civil war.

June also saw rising tensions in neighbouring Rwanda ahead of presidential elections planned for August. The government denies involvement in recent attacks on high-profile critics, including the shooting of a former army chief in South Africa and the murder of a journalist in Kigali. But the events point to an atmosphere of repression that appears to have deepened in recent months.

June 2010 TRENDS

Deteriorated Situations
Burundi, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Turkey

Improved Situations
–

Unchanged Situations
Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, Armenia/Turkey, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Basque Country (Spain), Belarus, Bolivia, Bosnia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chechnya (Russia), Colombia, Comoros, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India (non-Kashmir), Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories, Kashmir, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Lebanon, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Moldova, Morocco, Myanmar/Burma, Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Nepal, Nigeria, North Caucasus (non-Chechnya), Northern Ireland, North Korea, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Serbia, Somalia, Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yemen, Zimbabwe

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