05 Civil War – Page 87 – Public Intelligence Blog

India: In eastern India, the Maoist insurgents have neutralized yet another large police contingent. About 70 police personnel are missing on 4 August in the Chhattisgarh forests following a gunfight between heavily-armed Maoists and police in Dantewada area, India, The Times of India reported. Maoists reportedly attacked a search party of the state police in a heavily forested region of Gumiapal, near Kirandul.

The key point of the item is that the India state police forces seem incapable of learning. The location of the attack is the same set of forests where hundreds of police have been killed this year, almost in defiance of central government warnings and advisories. Counterinsurgency means something entirely different in India than it does at Fort Leavenworth.

The Indians continue to rely on policemen and law enforcement forces to handle people who break the law. They consider Army forces and other armed services not appropriate or trained for handling law breakers.

NIGHTWATCH KSG Home

Phi Beta Iota: No government has achieved “whole of government” intelligence, which is a precursor to whole of government planning, programming, and budgeting, and of course to whole of government policy, acquisition, and operations. See the Graphics, especially on Intelligence (Im)Maturity and Whole of Government. Collated graphics at Information Sharing and at Connecting the Dots.

2010/08/01

Journal: Just How Important is the WikiLeaks AF Dump?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Kiss This War Goodbye

By FRANK RICH, New York Times, July 31, 2010

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.

. . . . . . .

What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president.

. . . . . . .

The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress.

FULL ANALYSIS ONLINE

2010/07/30

US, NATO Allies Prepare New Invasion Of Somalia

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Immigration, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Military

The 15th biennial African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda ended on July 27 with mixed results regarding support for U.S. and Western European plans to escalate foreign military intervention in nearby Somalia.

The 35 heads of state present at the three-day meeting were reported to have authorized the deployment of 2,000 more African troops to back up the beleaguered Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu and to bring the full complement of forces doing so to 8,000, but the new contingent will probably consist solely of troops from Uganda and Burundi, which supply the approximately 6,000 already serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Reports of another 2,000 reinforcements from Djibouti and Guinea are problematic and their deployment remains to be seen, not that pressure will not be exerted on those two nations and others from outside the continent.

AMISOM is the successor to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Peace Support Mission in Somalia (IGASOM) set up in 2005 by the six-member group which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda and which also was to have provided 8,000 troops for deployment to Somalia. The 53 members of the African Union except for Uganda and Burundi have been loath to commit military units to intervene in fighting in Somalia, whether against the Islamic Courts Union five years ago or against al-Shabaab insurgents currently.

In late 2006 U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa to plan the earlier IGASOM operation and in January of 2007 Uganda pledged its first troops which, along with those included in a reported offer by Nigeria, were to total 8,000.

Three and a half years later, there are only 6,000 foreign troops in Somalia (now under AMISOM, the only difference being the acronym now employed) and all of those from Uganda and Burundi, both nations U.S. military clients and surrogates.

The African Union (AU) initially approved AMISOM on January 19, 2007 and granted it a six-month mandate. In July of 2010 the real prime movers behind the mission, the U.S. and its NATO allies in the European Union, are pushing for an escalation of armed intervention in Somalia with more Western-trained Ugandan troops conducting open combat operations: Changing the mandate from, to use the terms employed to mask military aggression, peacekeeping to peace enforcement. Continue reading “US, NATO Allies Prepare New Invasion Of Somalia”

2010/07/302010/08/16

Journal: Wikileaks Afghan Collection Assessed

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Media, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda

Below is a good summary of the wikileaks database. It is also a good example of how the secretive conspiratorial mind, trained in the wilderness of mirrors that is the US intelligence establishment, conjures motivations out of the ether. The author builds a an inferential case to insinuate the massive leak of intelligence data via the wikileaks website was an orchestrated info-operation aimed at influencing the American polity by building the case for leaving Afghanistan. Left unsaid, but dangling tantalizingly in the last two paragraphs, is a subtle (and unsubstantiated) suggestion that this leak came from very high levels, perhaps the highest level, of the Obama Administration. Too clever by a half?????? Chuck

Thousands of reasons to leave

By George Friedman, Asia Times, 29 July 2010

On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.

Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior US and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.

FULL APPRAISAL ONLINE

2010/07/302010/07/30

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Dictators vs Iran in Middle East

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, 12 Water, History

Syria-Saudi Arabia-Lebanon: Syria and Saudi Arabia pledged to support efforts to stabilize Lebanon and preserve its security and unity, Reuters reported 29 July. A joint statement from Saudi King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al Asad also called for better inter-Arab relations, praised Turkey's support for the Palestinians and called for the formation of a government in Iraq to preserve the nation's Arab identity and security.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The King has undertaken another strenuous trip through Arab lands to build an Arab front that blocks Iranian influence in Syria and inroads in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. The Syrian Alawites, the Sunni Palestinians of Hamas and the Shiite Arabs of Lebanese Hezbollah have afforded the Persians unprecedented access to Arab lands and business.

The Saudi King continues to try to limit or reverse the damage to what passes for Arab unity from Iranian subversion. Thus far his energies have been misspent. His initiatives have not weakened Iranian influence in any of the three target entities.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Ambassador Mark Palmer has it right–the US should not be supporting dictators (nor, we would add, a genocidal Zionist movement that joins the Arabs against the Palistinians). See Review: Breaking the Real Axis of Evil–How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025. Will and Ariel Durant also have it right: morality is a strategic asset of incalculable value. See Review: The Lessons of History.

See Also:

Review: Palestine–Peace Not Apartheid

Review: Unspeakable Truths–Facing the Challenges of Truth Commissions (Paperback)

Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State

Review: The leadership of civilization building–Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century

and all the book lists.

2010/07/262010/07/26

Journal: What Revolution in Military Affairs? Shattering the illusion of bloodless victory

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security

It is not as if the disaster described below, in the Afghan war logs released by Wikileaks to the Guardian, the New York Times, and der Spiegle, was not foreseeable. Here, for example, is an op-ed I wrote for Defense Week in April 2001, well before we began the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And I was hardly alone or invisible. Readers familiar with the work of reformers Colonel John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Colonel James Burton, Colonel Mike Wylie, Colonel GI Wilson, Colonel Bob Dilger, and Tom Christie, among others, will know that they have been highly visible canaries in the high-tech coal mine since the late 1960s. For those unfamiliar with their critical analyses, I refer you to James Fallows' National Defense (Random House 1981), and Robert Coram's Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Little Brown, 2002), or The Winds of Reform, Time (7 March 1983). Emphasis below added. Chuck.

Afghanistan war logs: Shattering the illusion of a bloodless victory

Norton-Taylor, Guardian, 25 July 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/revolution-in-military-affairs-shock-awe

Real picture of a conflict longer than Vietnam, or either world war, refutes the idea of a ‘revolution in military affairs'

Continue reading “Journal: What Revolution in Military Affairs? Shattering the illusion of bloodless victory”

2010/07/252010/09/02