President Barack Obama's Afghanistan war plans took two major hits this week: First, his longtime adviser and chief diplomat in the region, Richard Holbrooke, passed away unexpectedly. Now, two classified intelligence reports, one each on Afghanistan and Pakistan and intended for congressional committees, had their contents leaked to The New York Times and their findings are not good.
September 2010
Authors: Todd Gabe, Jaison R. Abel, Adrienne Ross, and Kevin Stolarick
This study identifies clusters of U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas with similar knowledge traits. These groups—ranging from Making Regions, characterized by knowledge about manufacturing, to Thinking Regions, noted for knowledge about the arts, humanities, information technology, and commerce—can be used by analysts and policymakers for the purposes of regional benchmarking or comparing the types of programs and infrastructure available to support closely related economic activities. In addition these knowledge-based clusters help explain the types of regions that have levels of economic development that exceed, or fall short of, other places with similar amounts of college attainment. Regression results show that Engineering, Enterprising, and Building Regions are associated with higher levels of productivity and earnings per capita, while Teaching, Understanding, Working, and Comforting Regions have lower levels of economic development.
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega’s government accepts bribes from drug traffickers, harbors terrorists and attempts to endear itself to Iran, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables.
By Samuel Rubenfeld
U.S. diplomats accused Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government of taking bribes from drug traffickers in exchange for freeing suspects, in cables released by Wikileaks.
The bribes formed a kind of “judicial ‘campaign finance’ machine” in return for not-guilty verdicts, according to a May 5, 2006, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Manangua, Nicaragua. It says the ruling Sandinista party regularly accepted cash from drug traffickers, “usually in return for ordering Sandinista judges to allow traffickers caught by the police and military to go free.” The scheme, the cable said, was run by the director of the state security service and overseen by Supreme Court judges, including Rafael Solis and Roger Camillo Arguello.
Phi Beta Iota: What US diplomats don't get is that CIA lies to them all the time, and very often is also paying the same people while sanctioning the drug trans-shipments. Similarly, DEA and the FBI cut deals. The single best known case with respect to Nicaragua and the CIA destroying an entire black population in the USA dealt with Contra leader Blandon, a strategic-level (massive) drug exporter. This is told inReview: Dark Alliance–The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Hark back to Panama and General Noriega, who regularly received warm assurances (as well as serious cash payments) from CIA, in some cases from Bill Casey personally, to the effect that as long as he allowed CIA support for the Contras out of Panama, all drug-related matters were “off the table.” It was an ambitious attorney general in Florida that actually undid that deal. What CIA has done in our name–what the Pentagon and Special Forces have done in our name–is reprehensible. Tim Wiener has it right in Review: Legacy of Ashes–The History of the CIA and so do General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret) in Review: War is a Racket–The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier and James Carroll in Review: House of War. ENOUGH!
“If the expansion of the Human Terrain System gains traction at TRADOC it could kill any efforts to develop a cultural expertise construct by the Civil Affairs community, specifically the Civil Affairs Proponent at USA JFK SWCS. Everybody is looking to get as much money as they can for their organizations as the Defense budget begins to get squeezed. Naturally there could be a potential dog fight between TRADOC and any other Army organization making claims for HTS-like capability. Once something becomes institutionalized in the military it is difficult to change the new status quo.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Army Civil Affairs Brigade got off to a very good start under Col Ferd Irizzarry, USA, and then he got sent to Afghanistan to punch his pre-flag combat operations ticket and it took a nose dive. HRT is the most badly managed–unethically managed–program in the DoD Human Intelligence inventory. While recognizing that the author above is on a vendetta against HRT, the bottom-line is that he is right, HRT is wrong, and TRADOC does not know the difference.
(actually, to steal a phrase from Alan and Bill, an advance. Retreat is too negative).
There's a tremendous opportunity to create events where people connect. Unfortunately, it's also easy to turn these events into school-like conferences, not the emotional connections that are desired.
You can create an advance with a team that knows one another from work, or even more profoundly, with a bunch of independent thinkers who come together to energize, inspire and connect.
I've been to a bunch and here's what I've learned, in no particular order:
Must be off site, with no access to electronic interruption
Should be intense. Save the rest and relaxation for afterwards
Create a dossier on each attendee in advance, with a photo and a non-humble CV of who they are and what they do and what their goals are
Never (never) have people go around a circle and say their name and what they do and their favorite kind of vegetable or whatever. The problem? People spend the whole time trying to think of what to say, not listening to those in front of them (I once had to witness 600 people do this!!)
Instead, a week ahead of time, give each person an assignment for a presentation at the event. It might be the answer to a question like, “what are you working on,” or “what's bothering you,” or “what can you teach us.” Each person gets 300 seconds, that's it.
Have 11 people present their five minutes in an hour. Never do more than an hour in a row. The attendees now have a hook, something to talk to each presenter about in the hallway or the men's room. “I disagree with what you said this morning…”
Organize roundtable conversations, with no more than 20 people at a time (so if you have more attendees than this, break into groups.) Launch a firestarter, a five minute statement, then have at it. Everyone speaks up, conversations scale and ebb and flow.
Solve problems. Get into small groups and have the groups build something, analyze something, create something totally irrelevant to what the organization does. The purpose is to put people in close proximity with just enough pressure to allow them to drop their shields.
Do skits.
Have a moderator who is brave enough and smart enough to call on people, cut people off, connect people and provoke them in a positive way.
Invite a poker instructor or a horseshoe expert in to give a lesson and then follow it with a competition.
Challenge attendees to describe a favorite film scene to you before the event. Pick a few and show them, then discuss.
Don't serve boring food.
Use nametags at all times. Write the person's first name REALLY big.
Use placecards at each meal, rotating where people sit. Crowd the tables really tightly (12 at a table for 10) and serve buffet style to avoid lots of staffers in the room. Make it easy for people to leave boring tables and organically sit together at empty ones.
Do something really interesting after 10 pm.
Serve delicious food, weird food, vegan food, funky food. Just because you can.
Don't worry about being productive. Worry about being busy.
Consider a tug of war or checkers tournament.
Create an online site so attendees can check in after the event, swap email addresses or post promised links.
Take a ton of pictures. Post them as the advance progresses.
Here's the goal: new friends. Here's the output: a new and better to-do list.
In the first treatise written on the art of war, sometime around 450 BC [1], Sun Tzu explained why “the wise general sees to it that his troops feed on the enemy,”
EXTRACT: The militarization of development aid is a central pillar of General Petaeus's counterinsurgency strategy to buy the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, ninety per cent of whom are spread out in remote rural areas. So it should not be surprising that the military is controlling the bulk of the billions of dollars in aid money flowing into (and being smuggled out of) Afghanistan.
In the very important CounterPunch report on 13 December, Patrick Cockburn, certainly one of the most informed observers of insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, described how the militarization of development aid in Afghanistan is riven with corruption.
“Cyber security is now critical to our survival but as a field of research [it] does not have a firm scientific basis,” according to the Department of Defense. “Our current security approaches have had limited success and have become an arms race with our adversaries. In order to achieve security breakthroughs we need a more fundamental understanding of the science of cyber security.”
To help advance that understanding, the DoD turned to the JASON defense advisory panel, which has just produced a new report (pdf) on the subject.
“There is a science of cyber security,” the JASONs said, but it “seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them.”
The JASON report began by noting that “A science of cyber security has to deal with a combination of peculiar features that are shared by no other area of study.”
“First, the background on which events occur is almost completely created by humans and is digital. That is, people built all the pieces. One might have thought that computers, their software, and networks were therefore completely understandable. The truth is that the cyber-universe is complex well beyond anyone's understanding and exhibits behavior that no one predicted, and sometimes can't even be explained well [after the fact],” the report said.
