08 Wild Cards – Page 93 – Public Intelligence Blog

Afghanistan: Late last week, The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan published a quarterly report which included a section on manning in the Afghan National Army. The British newspaper Independent also published UK findings on manning as well, but with a slightly different focus.

The US report indicates the Afghan National Army has gotten smaller in the past year. Strength in March 2012 was But strength in February 2013 was 175,441.

The British reports that attrition in the Afghan National Army is about 30%, or three in every ten soldiers are killed, captured or dismissed for cause. The report also states that 5,000 recruits a month just quit, or annually a third of the current strength of the Afghan National Army.

The Special Inspector General stipulated that accurate and reliable accounting of government forces strength is necessary to help ensure US funds are spent for legitimate and eligible costs. It quoted a US command that there exists no “viable method of validating personnel numbers.”

Comment: The two reports read like Vietnam redux. The US report makes clear that without outside money, almost no Afghan security forces loyal to the government would exist.

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2013/05/052013/05/05

Neal Rauhauser: Understanding Syria (Dot Chart & Links to 13 Prior Posts)

08 Wild Cards

Understanding Syria

I began reading about Syria literally the day I knew I was done with domestic elections and less than two weeks later I produced my first article. I delved into the civil war, and I checked up on water and wheat, which is something of a proxy for overall food security.

. . . . . .

These are the thirteen articles I wrote being November 14th and February 17th. I am not going to get mixed up in the minutia of what just happened, as it’s a mob scene. I may break out Recorded Future again, or try to put some sensible bounds on what a post-Assad Syria looks like.

Read full post with three graphics and 13 Links

2013/04/30

Owl: Saudi Terrorists and Zionist Terrorists — From Same Jewish Roots?

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War

This post refers to some new and remarkable historical findings (at least for the English-speaking world), stemming from new translation to English from Arabic, that can put more pieces into the the puzzle of the apparently amicable relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The first part of this post is not new, though useful in quoting for context

“The U.S. Department of Defense has released translations of a number of Iraqi intelligence documents dating from Saddam’s rule. One, a General Military Intelligence Directorate report from September 2002, entitled “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical Roots”, shows the Iraqi government was aware of the nefarious purposes of the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, often known as Salafis, in serving Western interests to undermine Islam.The report relies heavily on the Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, which describe in detail how a British spy to the Middle East, in the middle of the eighteenth century, made contact with Adbul Wahhab, to create a subversive version of Islam, the notorious sect of Wahhabism, which became the founding cult of the Saudi regime. The movement was temporarily suppressed by the Ottomam armies in the middle of the nineteenth century. But with the assistance of the British [or more specifically, Lawrence of Arabia], the Wahhabis and their Saudi sponsors returned to power and founded their own state in 1932. Since then, the Saudis have collaborated closely with the Americans, to whom they owe their tremendous oil wealth, in funding various Islamic fundamentalist organizations and other American covert operations, particularly the “jihad” in Afghanistan. But the Saudis simulatenously use the immense wealth at their dispossal to disseminate this disruptive brand of Islam to various parts of the world, categorized by some of the largest propaganda campaign in history. Many who defend Wahhabism as a legitimate reform movement of Islam have tried to dismiss the Memoirs as a spurious fabrication. These include Bernard Haykel, Professor in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, who, without providing any evidence, presumes the Memoirs to have been created by Ayyub Sabri Pasha.”

But what is new is the claim that the Wahabis have directly Jewish roots (my emphasis):

Continue reading “Owl: Saudi Terrorists and Zionist Terrorists — From Same Jewish Roots?”

2013/04/282013/04/28

Marcus Aurelius: French Thoughts on Afghanistan — the Perfect Storm in 2014

08 Wild Cards, Officers Call

April 27, 2013

Departing French Envoy Has Frank Words on Afghanistan

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — It is always hard to gauge what diplomats really think unless one of their cables ends up on WikiLeaks, but every once in a while, the barriers fall and a bit of truth slips into public view.

That is especially true in Afghanistan, where diplomats painstakingly weigh every word against political goals back home.

The positive spin from the Americans has been running especially hard the last few weeks, as Congressional committees in Washington focus on spending bills and the Obama administration, trying to secure money for a few more years here, talks up the country’s progress. The same is going on at the European Union, where the tone has been sterner than in the past, but still glosses predictions of Afghanistan’s future with upbeat words like “promise” and “potential.”

Despite that, one of those rare truth-telling moments came at a farewell cocktail party last week hosted by the departing French ambassador to Kabul: Bernard Bajolet, who is leaving to head France’s Direction Génerale de la Sécurité Extérieure, its foreign intelligence service.

After the white-coated staff passed the third round of hors d’oeuvres, Mr. Bajolet took the lectern and laid out a picture of how France — a country plagued by a slow economy, waning public support for the Afghan endeavor and demands from other foreign conflicts, including Syria and North Africa — looked at Afghanistan.

While it is certainly easier for France to be a critic from the sidelines than countries whose troops are still fighting in Afghanistan, the country can claim to have done its part. It lost more troops than all but three other countries before withdrawing its last combat forces in the fall.

The room, filled with diplomats, some senior soldiers and a number of Afghan dignitaries, went deadly quiet. When Mr. Bajolet finished, there was restrained applause — and sober expressions. One diplomat raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly; another said, “No holding back there.”

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: French Thoughts on Afghanistan — the Perfect Storm in 2014”

2013/04/212013/04/21

Gordon Duff: Documented Words of Zbigniew Brzezinski on US Funding of Muslim Extremism in Afghanistan to LURE the Soviets In…..[Fast Forward to Chechnya]

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Officers Call

The CIA’s “Founding” of Al Qaeda Documented

The Muslim Terrorist Apparatus was Created by US Intelligence as a Geopolitical Weapon

Le Nouvel Observateur’s Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski

Originally published 15-21 January 1998

Translated by Jean Martineau

(Editor’s Note: The following article and interview have been suppressed by Google, now a “black-ops” contractor. The background on US backing for the Chechen rebels totally debunks attempts to assign blame for the Boston Marathon bombings to any group other than American security agencies and their domestic and foreign contractors who were very obvious at the scene, before and after the attack we believe they staged. Without adequate background on how we got where we are, real information can easily be “shaken off” as conspiracy.

If you want real conspiracy, read on and see who the very real conspirators are. G Duff for VT)

Below is our translation of an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is important for three reasons. First, it flatly contradicts the official US justification for giving billions of dollars to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, namely that the US and Saudi Arabia were defending so-called freedom fighters against Soviet aggression.

Continue reading “Gordon Duff: Documented Words of Zbigniew Brzezinski on US Funding of Muslim Extremism in Afghanistan to LURE the Soviets In…..[Fast Forward to Chechnya]”

2013/04/19

Neal Rauhauser: Understanding The Caucasus

06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards

Understanding The Caucasus

The news that Boston’s bombers were ethnic Chechens was a bit surprising to me, as the signature of the strike was closer to domestic right wing extremists.

I wasn’t that surprised, because I have collected maps of the Caucasus region, written about past and anticipated future conflicts there, and I spent some time abusing RecordedFuture in an attempt to fish out information on the remote, restive republics and oblasts of the Caucasus. I will be working through the weekend to provide a solid update. This post is sticky – it’s an index to prior work and anything new that I do.

Here are a few snapshots from my crystal ball that date back two to four months:

Four Places You Have Never Heard Of – Abkhazia, Ingushetia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabhak. (12/19/2012)

North Caucasus Update – Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, Ossetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya (2/14/2013).

Recorded Future vs. North Caucasus Republics – applying RecordedFuture to a region that is difficult to cover. (2/14/2013)

DefDog: North Korea — No War, Leaders in Luxury, Country in Famine

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Family, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society

A good read, ring of authenticity.

Never mind nuclear war, says North Korean defector Joo-il Kim, the reality of famine is bad enough

Joo-il Kim believes the rhetoric is just a distraction

Rob Hastings

Independent, 14 April 2013

EXTRACT

While he agrees that the current stand-off is more serious than previous events, he remains confident there will not be conflict. “This current regime does not want a war,” he tells me through a translator. “The people don’t have anything, so they don’t have anything to lose if they went to war – but the regime, they have wealth.” Living in luxury, he says, the leaders will not want to risk what they have.

After he escaped a closed and impoverished society, one imagines his greatest surprises in the outside world would have been at technology. Instead, it was the uneaten fruit he found in Chinese forests while running away that amazed him most. “There were apples just dangling in the trees, falling on the ground. In North Korea, even the smallest apple will be eaten because the people are starving. But China had abundant food,” he says.

Starvation and hunger is a topic he returns to several times, and with good reason. The death of his four-year-old niece from malnutrition, after he had already seen many others dying in an economy wrecked by the regime’s agricultural policies, convinced him to defect. The world might be concerned by the threat of nuclear war, but Mr Kim believes the dictatorship is using this to distract the international community and its own people from the problems they face.

Read full article.

Category: 08 Wild Cards

NIGHTWATCH: Afghanistan Army Imploding – South Viet-Nam Redux