Speaking of Tom's work … This morning I stumbled across a podcast, which includes the audio from a TV interview I did with Tom in the year 2000. The podcast is from Jarrett Sanchez' NEXT STEP, a podcast partially inspired by Tom's work. Tom was at least fifteen years ahead of the times in 2000 so his perspective is becoming more commonsensical today.
Phi Beta Iota: The audio tape is 30 minutes long. Tom Atlee is in many ways “ground zero” for deliberative democracy, a hub to whom all of the “modalities” from Open Space Technology to Collective Intelligence to Conscious Evolution to Appreciative Inquiry to Participatory Budgeting to Citizen Wisdom Councils to World Cafe all connect.
The Obama administration and its NATO allies will declare late this week that the war in Afghanistan has made sufficient progress to begin turning security control over to its government by spring, months before the administration’s July deadline to start withdrawing U.S. troops, according to U.S. and European officials.
Even as it announces the “transition” process, which will not immediately include troop withdrawals, NATO will also state its intention to keep combat troops in Afghanistan until 2014, a date originally set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The seemingly contradictory messages, in communiques and agreements to be released at NATO’s upcoming summit in Lisbon, are intended to reassure U.S. and European audiences that the process of ending the war has begun.
At the same time, the coalition wants to signal to the Taliban – along with Afghans and regional partners who fear a coalition withdrawal, and Republicans in Congress who oppose it – that they are not leaving anytime soon.
KABUL- President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday that the United States must reduce the visibility and intensity of its military operations in Afghanistan and end the increased U.S. Special Operations forces night raids that aggravate Afghans and could exacerbate the Taliban insurgency.
Phi Beta Iota: Deja vu…we have the uneasy feeling that Brzezinski and whoever is still whispering in Obama's ear is pulling a Kissinger–four more years will kill thousands more at a cost we cannot afford for a purpose we have never legitimately defined.
James Fergusson returns after three years to Chak, just 40 miles from Kabul, to find the Taliban's grip is far stronger than the West will admit
Independent, 14 November 2010
The sound of a propeller engine is audible the moment my fixer and I climb out of the car, causing us new arrivals from Kabul to glance sharply upwards. I have never heard a military drone in action before, and it is entirely invisible in the cold night sky, yet there is no doubt what it is. My first visit to the Taliban since 2007 has only just begun and I am already regretting it. What if the drone is the Hellfire-missile-carrying kind?
Three years ago, the Taliban's control over this district, Chak, and the 112,000 Pashtun farmers who live here, was restricted to the hours of darkness – although the local commander, Abdullah, vowed to me that he would soon be in full control. As I am quickly to discover, this was no idle boast. In Chak, the Karzai government has in effect given up and handed over to the Taliban. Abdullah, still in charge, even collects taxes. His men issue receipts using stolen government stationery that is headed “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan”; with commendable parsimony they simply cross out the word “Republic” and insert “Emirate”, the emir in question being the Taliban's spiritual leader, Mullah Omar.
The most astonishing thing about this rebel district – and for Nato leaders meeting in Lisbon this week, a deeply troubling one – is that Chak is not in war-torn Helmand or Kandahar but in Wardak province, a scant 40 miles south-west of Kabul.
Phi Beta Iota: We are reminded by this piece of how the best CIA desk officers knew instantly, the day we announced going to war in Viet-Nam, that we had gotten it wrong, that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, and that we would lose. By the time Afghanistan rolled around, intelligence had become both jejeune and unethical (silent in the face of treason), and politics had become even more ideologically psychopathic and corrupt than ever before. James Fegusson has given us a very fine contribution–this is ground truth at its best.
Mid-1990s: Gonzalez, 14, is visited by F.B.I. agents at his high school for hacking into NASA.
Gonzalez, law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com, an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey, Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, “an eBay, Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime.”
Phi Beta Iota: We opened Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in 1994, making the observation that when the Israeli's captured a hacker they gave him a job, while the US simply kicked them in the teeth and sent them to jail. We tried to keep Phiber Optic out of jail, and we have for decades been on record comparing hackers to astronauts–full of the right stuff and pushing the edge of the envelope. No one, including Marty Harris then in charge of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) wanted to listen. Today the US Government is again ignoring the warnings on the urgency of getting a grip on all information in all languages all the time, and roughly 20 years behind in creating “root” cyber-security. This article by James Verini is a phenomenal update on what we all knew in the mid-1990's that the US Government is still oblivious to–this is not a problem technology or wanton spending can solve–this is a problem that demands discipline, integrity, intelligence, and sharing. It is neither possible nor desireable to secure government or military computers in isolation–this is an “all in” smart safe nation challenge.
Obama inherited a federal deficit that was spinning out of control (mostly because of decreased tax take and increased expenditures for automatic stabilizers, e.g. unemployment insurance), and pressure is growing to cut Social Security (perhaps the most efficiently run program in government) while placing Defense (one of the most inefficiently run programs) off limits. These political pressures are not new and in fact have been building up for years. So, as a first cut into a complex issue, perhaps it is time for the angry masses to ask which political party put them into the fiscal straight jacket that is setting them up for this horrible choice?
A. Democrats?
B. Moderate Republicans?
C. Right Wing Republicans?
Hint:
Green => Reductions in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt (as measured by the debt to GDP ratio)
Red => Increases in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt
KABUL (Reuters) – When NATO leaders gather for a summit in Lisbon next week, where Afghanistan will top the agenda, they can expect a message waiting for them from the Taliban.
That message may well be a violent demonstration of their staying power, even though Washington and U.S. and NATO commanders have been talking up recent successes in Afghanistan before the summit and a strategy review by President Barack Obama next month.
This comes as many European NATO members begin to look at how long they can keep justifying their commitments to an increasingly unpopular war, and as Obama remains committed to beginning a gradual drawdown of U.S. troops from July 2011 before the 2014 goal set by Kabul to take total security responsibility.
President Obama was urged by the few White House insiders from whom he still takes advice to leave the country on his ten-day Asian trip, his longest trip abroad since becoming president, in order to not inflict any more damage to the Democratic Party in the wake of one of the worst electoral defeats for the party of an incumbent president in recent history. According to sources close to the White House, who put themselves in great danger by even talking to members of the media, the plans to have Obama leave for a visit to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan are an attempt to get Obama out of the country while top Democrats can sort through the political disaster created for the party by Obama's increasingly detached-from-reality presidency.
Virtual political guerrilla warfare has broken out between Obama's inner circle on one hand and senior Democratic officials, including outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party strategist James Carville, former Demcratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, and, behind-the-scenes, Vice President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton, on the other.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a remarkable “hit job” that will need much more corroboration. We see two underlying stories that merit exploration. First Story: Obama is scaring his own party. It took a lot to piece together all the little bits that have been hyped together here. Second Story: Obama is beginning to see that he can only win a second term as an Independent, without Biden and without Clinton II. What we do know is that Obama's advisors to date have been a mix of pogomists, pollsters, and political groupies. If he ever gets a grip on strategic reality and commits to restoring the Republic with Electoral Reform, he could still be the George Washington of the 21st Century. On this article, at this time, we stand with Barack Obama and not his detractors.
Complete Madsen reprint below the line so our military colleagues do not have to visit the other site.
