09 Terrorism – Page 94 – Public Intelligence Blog

Berto Jongman

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Special Services Group & Pak-Sponsored Terrorism (ICT 15/11/2009)

Till now, the international focus has been on the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as the sponsor and trainer of jihadi groups. Indications of a similar role being played by at least some elements in or of the the SSG—- possibly in tandem with the ISI — are coming to the fore now.”

Waziristan: A Stygian Dark (ICT 10/10/2009)

Crucially, Islamabad’s orientation to these various groups has been defined exclusively by the degree to which they have remained loyal to Pakistan’s objectives in destabilizing Kabul, or to which they have turned ‘renegade’ and attacked targets within Pakistan. The US and Pakistan, consequently, act at cross purposes with several of these and the many lesser groups operating in Waziristan.

How Close Are Blackwater and JSOC?

Could Prince be airing his CIA work to distract from his work with JSOC? As I wrote, operations from predator drones to militant detention seem to be shifting from the CIA to JSOC. As Marc wrote, Blackwater is controversial within the CIA and with the agency's congressional overseers. But JSOC has no such problems. If Blackwater's special operations work is being moved from CIA to JSOC, that would help Blackwater continue programs like drone-spotting in Pakistan unabated. It would also be yet another case of transferring authority from CIA to JSOC.

Continue reading “Journal: Pakistan, Terrorism, & Afghanistan”

2009/12/032010/09/02

Reference: Al Qaeda Violence Against Muslims

09 Terrorism, Monographs

Berto Jongman recommends…

2009/12/032009/12/05

Journal: Notes on David Kilcullen to US IC

05 Civil War, 09 Terrorism

David Kilcullen spoke to NCTC and ODNI on Dec 2, unclassified, and spent a good deal of time talking about good and bad ways to measure counter-insurgency.

His remarks are at a level below the “global police action against the jihadist criminal conspiracy” (how Bacevich characterized on morning NPR interview, Dec 3).

Kilcullen is now with the Crumpton Group.

His book The Accidental Guerrilla–Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One remains his most easily accessible offering.

Some general points on counter-insurgency:

It is “an adaptation struggle”
Governments almost always win under two conditions: if they negotiate to end it, and if they are fighting to take back their own country (not in occupation/colony). (He was using Correlates of War data from Univ. of Indiana.)
Insurgency is actually stronger in many ways when smaller, and the remnant is really hard to stop. He was decorated for fighting 400 Malay insurgents 30 years after the war was supposedly won.
The ratio of troops to population that is in the manual is based on an irrelevant figure from an old Rand study. He tried to keep it out of the manual. He says you can do quite well with fewer troops. In Vietnam, we exceeded this ‘standards’ and still lost.

Some bad measures

Continue reading “Journal: Notes on David Kilcullen to US IC”

2009/12/032009/12/03

Reference: Measuring Success and Failure in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism–US Government Metrics of the Global War on Terror (GWOT)

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence

Alex P. Schmid, one of a handful of trully expert scholars in the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and his colleague Rashmi Singh, have created a summary that is devasting on multiple fronts. The “Global War on Terror” or GWOT has lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined; the money expended (the authors do not include the military costs of occupying Afghanistan and Iraq) has been enormous, and in all that time, no one has defined the metrics by which to measure the endeavor. The chapter in included in After the War on Terror: Regional and Multilateral Perspectives on Counter-TerrorismStrategy

See also:

Search: Strategic Analytic Model

Search: QDR “four forces after next”

2009/12/012009/12/01

Journal: Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Ethics, Government, Military

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region.

. . . . . . .

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”

Phi Beta Iota: The chart is below the fold, or at the Full Story Online

Continue reading “Journal: Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?”

2009/11/252009/11/25

Journal: German Hackers Point to 9-11 Text Messages

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Analysis, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Methods & Process

Files of 9-11 Text Messages

Text messages sent in the hours before and during 9-11 are now becoming available for public examination.

It will take time, but a number of individuals are working through them (remember what the Iranians did with CIA's singular shredded messages) and we anticipate findings within a few months. We've also suggest a quick tag cloud cross-references to time and location.

For the text files themselves, click on Wikileaks logo. For the Reddit discussion click on the Frog.

CNN Catches Up with Phi Beta Iota

2009/11/24

Journal: UK Complicity in torture of its own citizens

09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics

Full Story Online

Editorial, Wednesday 25 November 2009

Allegations about Britain's role in the torture of its own citizens in Pakistan are not new. They have been made persuasively by our own investigative reporting. What is new in the report published yesterday by Human Rights Watch is the corroboration it obtained from the torturers themselves. Ali Dayan Hasan, HRW's senior south Asia researcher, found sources in Inter-Services Intelligence, the military-controlled spy agency in Pakistan, and the Intelligence Bureau, a civilian-controlled one, to admit they tortured five British citizens at the behest, and with the full knowledge, of British intelligence.