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Dr. Chet Richards at DNI had this post on Mexico:

A fourth generation war near you

…..An alternative is that what we’re going to face might better be described as a fourth generation, non-trinitarian conflict and not classical insurgency because it doesn’t appear that the goals of the groups employing terrorism and guerrilla warfare tactics involve replacing the government of either Mexico or the United States (see Bill Lind’s latest, below, for a discussion of this point).

So it is armed conflict, and if it isn’t insurgency, is it war? This is an important question because, as the current president claims and as the candidate from his party agrees, in war, a president has extraordinary powers.

While such powers have proven useful when the country faces the military forces of another country, they also allow the president to undertake activities that would be counterproductive if used against a guerrilla-type opponent, where the outcome depends primarily on moral elements – that is, on our ability to attract allies, maintain our own determination, and dry up the guerrillas’ bases of support.

The post elicited the following comment from Global Guerilla theorist, John Robb:

You are exactly right Chet, will this counter-insurgency stuff work against an open source enemy with billion dollar funding?

The narco-cartel killers, especially the Zetas, resemble the tiny, highly professional, 1GW armies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Very few in number relative to the population as a whole that they generally ignore ( or run roughshod over) while they engage the other, numerically small, professionals ( Mexican police and Army). Perhaps the appropriate strategic counter is analgous to the French Revolution’s response to invasion by monarchical 1GW armies – a levee en masse in the form of an ideologically turbocharged popular militia. This was one of the ideas being toyed with in the 1920’s by the German officers of the Reichswehr under von Seeckt, that had it’s last, twisted, gasp as Ernst Rohm’s vision of a 4 million man SA National Militia, a possibility extinguished in the Night of the Long Knives. Even the stealthy Zetas would have trouble operating in a city where the police and Army were backed by, say, 40,000 armed militiamen who were part of a national network. A loyalist paramilitary on steroids.

However, any such hypothetical popular militia will have to come from a social movement as the Mexican state no longer commands enough political legitimacy to recruit such a force to it’s side – even if it had the courage to grasp that kind of wolf by the ears.

A recent report from The Jamestown Foundation put a spotlight in the activities of Neo-Eurasian ideologist, the politically connected extremist Aleksandr Dugin, to build bridges with Turkey’s Pan-Turkic movement:

“….On the one hand, attempts are made to turn the two “Eurasias” into allies rather than competitors; on the other hand, there has been a Dugin-style ideologization of the term in response to American ascendancy. The question is whether the concurrence of these two modes of “Russification” of the Turkish Avrasya is incidental, or whether they are two sides of the same coin. In the 1990s, articles on the Turkish variety of Avrasya systematically criticized Russian Eurasianism; in the early 2000s, the tone changed noticeably. Several Turkish advocates of a more militant Eurasianism called upon their fellow citizen to emulate Russia in developing a specifically Turkish interpretation of this concept [6]. In 2002, at the conference “How to Establish a Peace Belt around Turkey” held by the Military Academies Command, the secretary general of the National Security Council, General Tuncer Kilinc singled out Russia as Turkey’s most strategic partner. In 2005, Turkish analyst Anar Somuncuoglu from the Russia-Ukraine Research Department at the National Security Strategies Research Center (TUSAM) published an article in Strateji Dergisi proving the need of rapprochement with Russia [7].

The term Avrasya has also become popular with religious circles that were not previously linked to the pan-Turkic extreme right. Thus the modernizing Islamists around Prime Minister Erdogan have been publishing the newspaper Avrasya kusagi since 2000, and partisans of a Turko-Islamic synthesis edit Yeni Avrasya [8]. Fethullah Gulen’s movement publishes DA Diyalog Avrasya in Russian and Turkish, which has already carried several interviews with Dugin [9]. Other proponents of this movement include the Ahmed Yasawi Foundation and the Marmara Group Foundation, directed by Akkan Suver, which regularly organizes “Eurasian economic summits.” In November 2006, this NGO was the first to be accorded an observer member status by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (PABSEC). There are also two social-democratic newspapers-Avrasya  Etnografya Vakfi and Avrasya Dergisi-as well as the above-mentioned Zaman [10].

Dugin participated in this reorientation in his own way, managing to have his book on geopolitics translated into Turkish (and Arabic). The translation was published in Ankara in 2003 as Rus Jeopolitigi Avrasyaci Yaklasim, and seems to have gone over well with part of the Turkish military.There have been several conferences on Eurasianism that called for cooperation with Russia, all of which included participants from the military. The first visit of the International Eurasianist Movement took place in December 2003. It received quite widespread media coverage in Turkey, due in particular to the presence of writer and journalist Atilla Ilhan (1925-2005). Over many decades, Ilhan consistently wrote on the subject of the Turkish-Russian alliance, even during the Cold War. Through his books, he popularized the idea of a Turkish-Russian alliance preordained by geopolitics and insisted on “Eurasianist” heroes such as Ismail Gasprinskii, Sultan Galiyev and Mulla Nur Vahidov [11]. This rapprochement between Dugin and Ilhan consequently helped Russian Eurasianism to reach some Turkish political and intellectual elite”

Read the whole thing here.

Of the obscure figures mentioned in the last paragraph, Gasprinskii was a Silver Age “jadid” ( Modernist) who sought an awakening of the Russian Empire’s Tatar-Turkic Muslim peoples; Vahidov and Sultan-Galiev, were Old Bolshevik Tatars who developed a Muslim variation of “national Bolshevism” that challenged Stalin’s ideas on Soviet nationalities ( Sultan-Galiev was ultimately shot during the Great Terror, unsurprisingly). These men represent historical failures whose intriguing ideas were suppressed by Tsarist and Stalinist authorities long before they could acquire political traction. Why is any of this important ?

In a nutshell, both Putin’s siloviki regime and Turkey’s Kemalist establishment are feeling the need for ideological rejuvenation  these days, in the former case to fill a vacuum in the public mind left by the collapse of Soviet Communism and in the latter to fend off a creeping Islamism that is undermining Turkish adherence to hallowed, secular, Kemalist traditions. The Neo-Eurasianism of Dugin is a frankly authoritarian, anti-western and quasi-fascist witch’s brew and synthesizing it with the Pan-Turkism of Turkey’s own nationalist fringe can only be unhelpful to Western interests and the prospects for liberalism and democracy in the region.

A pleasant downstream effect of having blogged for a while is that readers will send you interesting things from time to time. Like the following…

Check out: The Complex Terrain Laboratory

Snippets:

This is muddled and confusing. Human Terrain is “an emerging area of study”? No it’s not. Human “terrain” is a label, a metaphor, for guess what? History, geography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, communications, etc., etc. It’s “major goal is to create operational technologies”? No it’s not. That’s what mathematicians and engineers can deliver on multimillion dollar DoD contracts. Human terrain is, just in case anyone hasn’t read a newspaper or wireclip over the last few years, about people, what they think, their perceptions, their loyalties, the consequences they bear in wartime, the support they may or may not provide to insurgents, the physical, cultural, and informational spaces they create and occupy in  times of conflict and crisis. 

Freaking mad scientists. They’re everywhere. Technology is a tool, not the answer

and

What is really meant by ‘fragile’ states is ones that have acquired legal sovereignty but that have lost, or more probably never acquired, the effective powers attached to that status. There are more and more such states. How many depends on one’s definition of fragility. The United Kingdom’s government development agency, the Department for International Development (DFID), one of the smartest outfits in the business, estimates that 46 states, over one quarter of the world’s total, fall within its definition of ‘fragile states’. The population of these 46 states is over 870 million. DFID bases its definition of fragility on a state’s record in combating poverty. Others define fragility not by reference to poverty, but to security. Referring to the slightly different concept of ‘failure’, in the United States’ 2002 National Security Strategy, President Bush stated that America ‘is now more threatened by weak and failing states than…by conquering ones’.

“Human Terrain Mapping” is one of those relatively new concepts I’ve been meaning to investigate and CTLab – run by a distinguished trio of scholars and authors Stephen D.K. Ellis, Michael A. Innes and Brian Glyn Williams – fits the bill. Definitely a “blogroll-worthy” site for all of the Intel/COIN/IO/DIME/Foreign Policy bloggers and of interest to the history blogosphere as well since two of the three gentlemen are professional historians.

I look forward to many enjoyable and profitable visits.

UPDATE:

Mike Innes has written in to explain that CTLabs is still expanding their team of SME’s as well as the working on the aesthetic and functionality aspects of the site itself, which will be formally “rolled out” with a higher level of interactivity and collaboration.

For readers who are not aware, blogfriend Shlok Vaidya also publishes the excellent Naxalite Rage site dedicated to the analysis of that particular insurgency in India. Shloky has been getting well-deserved VIP attention of late – check out Naxalite Rage and find out why.

Courtesy of Lexington Green:

Our British friends have become alarmed at self-radicalization of British Muslims juxtaposed with the “uncertainty”effect of the EU on the national security of the U.K. and the moral malaise of the British elite. The RUSI Risk, Threat and Security: The case of the United Kingdom  (PDF) outlines a scenario where a situation recognizable as 4GW, a situation that if left unchecked, imperils primary loyalty to the British Crown.

The authors, who include General Sir Rupert Smith, are UK heavyweights and this document has the air of a call to arms reminiscent of Kennan’s X Article or the Iron Curtain speech. Fascinating.