Commentary: Mr. President, take your time on Afghanistan
Joseph L. Galloway
Friday, November 13, 2009
The word is that none of the options contains what the president wants to see — an estimate of how many more years beyond the eight already invested would be needed and an exit strategy.
Bravo!
Simple question and a vital requirement: How much longer will it take, and how do we get out when that time is up?
Let's call that Military Planning 101 and, like the president, we're left to ponder why that basic first step in committing a nation and its military and its treasury to a war wasn't taken before now and was missing from all the alternatives offered at this critical junction in a war that's now in its ninth year?
Kilcullen: Send either lots of troops or none at all
November 12th, 2009
Some quick notes from Georgetown, where David Kilcullen has just addressed students and faculty at the Center for Peace and Security Studies. Highlights below:
The oft-touted 1:50 (or 20:1,000) ratio is “flawed.” It was based on post-war reconstruction studies done by the Rand Corporation, not on actual insurgencies. Successful COIN campaigns have employed ratios that vary widely. It also refers to total security forces, not just — in our case — American troops. Finally, it’s better to think about the military presence functionally, rather than numerically.
“Where local officials sleep” is a good indicator to track progress. In the film, I Am Legend, Will Smith must get home before the vampires come out to feast. Similarly, in Afghanistan today some 70% of provincial governors sleep in Kabul instead of the provinces they govern. This is bad.
TURN IN THESE CIA FUGITIVES : They’ll get 5-8 Years
By Carolyn Keuhn
NOV.4, 2009: Italy convicted 23 CIA rendition perps. All could be imprisoned if they leave the US.
An Italian judge on November 4, 2009, convicted 23 CIA agents and two Italian agents over their role in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric. Milan judge Oscar Magi sentenced former Milan CIA station chief Bob Seldon Lady (on left in PHOTO with Luciano Pironi) to 8 years and 22 other agents (PHOTOS) to 5 years in prison for their role in the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Also convicted was Air Force Colonel Joseph Romano (COLOR PHOTO), who was responsible for the CIA kidnapping team’s flight to Egypt from a U.S. air base in Italy.
WANTED: CIA Renditiones
CONTACT: Interpol, the international police agency, by email or at this FAX number in Switzerland: +33 4 72 44 71 63. (Refer to the warrant number given in the Robert Lady photo caption.) Or contact your local or national police.
The US is shielding the perps, whose names and PHOTOS are shown [at original source].
This article by two young scholars is a very good one, very provocative and persuasive. It lacks reference to other giants that have gone before, but stands as the best effort we have seen since WIRED did its own cover story on alternative and renewable energies in 2001, coming out the very week that Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon to discuss the elective war on Iraq. Also available from the lead author:
Phi Beta Iota: We are often irritated by the young who represent their triumphant ideas as if arrived at by immaculate conception. No discussion of this topic is credible without reference to, at a minimum, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, and Paul Hawken, among many others. Below are just three books among the many we have received pertaining to sustainable design, zero waste, and green to gold, and the most recent book to put all of this into proper perspective.
On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President's proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex ‘shadow' financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.
Phi Beta Iota: The illicit global economy is at least two trillion dollars a year against a seven trillion dollar a year legitimate economy, and the latter is both full of legal crime and legal tax avoidance, as well as focused on the one billion rich rathyer than the five billion poor. One of the many dirty not-so-little secrets about Wall Street is that it relies heavily on laundered drug money for its liquidity; another is that the banking community has been all too happy to manage the funds of dictators and war lords and others. Below are just three of the many books we recommend in this area.
Phi Beta Iota: Blessed commons sense from a Captain and intelligence professional in the U.S. Army. When we first entered Iraq we were told to avoid the immams and tribal chiefs, and this wasted at least four years of key leader engagement. Neither the secret world nor the military “Human Terrain Team” program have gotten a grip on cultural intelligence or a coherent holistic matrix for strategic, operational, and tactical exploitation of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic Essential Elements of Information (EEI). We still have not integrated provincial team civil reporting with military tactical reporting, and still have both hugh gaps and costly overlaps. This monograph, this captain, are the tip of the spear not just in leadership engagement, but in reconcilation–there is a reason why “truth” is included “Truth & Reconciliation Commission.” BRAVO ZULU.
