zenpundit.com

Some astute observations on COIN practice from the founder of Executive Outcomes, Eeben Barlow:

….Governments, despite often being the prime reason why an insurgency starts, are often only too keen to make the armed forces responsible for establishing workable governance in areas that have become positively disposed towards the insurgency.

As it is an internal problem, countering the insurgency is essentially a law enforcement responsibility. The problem is that often the law enforcement agencies do not realise that an insurgency is developing and through ignorance and denial, mislead government – and the nation – on the seriousness of the situation. This provides the insurgents with numerous advantages, most crucial being time to organise, train and escalate the insurgency.

The end goal of the insurgency is political in nature and therefore, the main effort aimed at countering it ought to be political and not militarily. This “passing the buck” approach places the armed forces in a position they can seldom if ever win as the military’s role is not to govern but to ensure an environment in which governance can take place.  

An insurgency is neither a strategy nor a war. It is a condition based on the perception(s) of a part of the populace that poor governance exists, that government only governs for its own benefit and that they – the populace – are being marginalised or politically suppressed. In reality, an insurgency is an internal emergency that, left unchecked, can develop into a civil war. The insurgency itself is a means to an end and it is an approach aimed at either weakening or collapsing a government’s control and forcing a negotiation in the favour of the insurgents.   

The Diplomad 2.0 – The UN Arms Treaty, AKA The Lawyer Full Employment Act 

….Articles 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 comprise the core of the treaty. These articles would provide endless employment activity for “activists’ and their lawyers. They establish obligations on the “State Parties” that would, in essence, kill the trade in small arms. The language about weapons “being diverted to the illicit market,” or “used to commit or facilitate gender-based violence or violence against children” means endless lawsuits against exporting and importing states, manufacturers, and sellers.  While the ostensible purpose is international trade, that would quickly become a domestic legal issue in the US.  Say, for example, that a Glock, either one made in Austria or in a Glock factory in the US, were used for “illicit” purposes or was involved in an incident of “gender-based violence” in the US, the lawsuits would be ferocious. The threat of constant legal action effectively would halt the export and import of small arms–at least from and to those countries that take laws and treaty obligations seriously.  The treaty would provide the basis for additional US domestic legislation that would incorporate the UN language and ideas into our laws. Private firm gun manufacturing and sales would be halted by the constant threat of lawsuits.

Pundita -Upcoming ‘make or break’ meeting between CIA and ISI chiefs 

….So it seems Washington’s ball on Pakistan is now in Gen. Petraeus’s court; after consistently flubbing, it looks as if State, Defense, and the White House want to make him responsible for persuading the Pakistani military/ISI that they shouldn’t keep fighting a proxy war against NATO in Afghanistan. 

As to the request for drone technology, I think that has been floated every time a ranking member of the Pak military/ISI has met with an American counterpart. The Pakistanis have their own drone technology but they want weaponized drones from the USA. What they want most of all, however, is for the U.S. to share all its intelligence on terrorist activity with the Pakistani military.

HG’s World – Battleships: America’s Symbol of Becoming a Great Power, This week, the “Transit of the USS Iowa”, matched the “Transit of Venus”, for a once in a lifetime event, USS Iowa: Progress Report and A Love Affair 

A naval appraisal of some of the most powerful warships in the history of Earth by ZP amigo HistoryGuy99

Walter Russell Mead– Our President the WASP 

In his own way, however, President Obama is one of the neo-Waspiest men in the country. He is not a product of Kenyan villages or third world socialism. He was educated at the Hawaiian equivalent of a New England prep school, and spent his formative years in the Ivies. He has much more in common with Harvard-educated technocrats like McGeorge Bundy than with African freedom fighters and third world socialists of the 1970s.

President Obama’s vision of a strong central government leading the people along the paths of truth and righteousness has “New England” stamped all over it. Puritan Boston believed in a powerful government whose duty was to promote moral behavior and punish the immoral; by 1800 many of the Puritan descendants were turning Unitarian and modernist, but while they lost their love of Christian doctrine they never abandoned their faith in the Godly Commonwealth and the duty of the virtuous to make the rest of the world behave.

Gene Expression – We are all Anglo-Saxons now 

Razib delivers a brutal beatdown fisking of Max Fisher of  The Atlantic (hat tip TDAXP, PhD)

Fast Transients-Positioning for the melee 

Venkatesh Rao has another thought provoking post up at his Tempo blog. Go take a look and then come back here … Play close attention to his distinction between “planning” and “positioning” near the bottom of the piece.

Rao’s concept of positioning & melee moves seems similar to the military’s concepts of operational and tactical levels of war. Even more interesting for business — where these concepts of levels apply only by analogy — they appear to be closely related toshih, Sun Tzu’s framework for employing force or energy.  For those of you not familiar with shih, it’s the title of the fifth chapter of The Art of War and encompasses a variety of concepts including zheng / qi (cheng / ch’i). For an excellent intro, see David Lai’s paper “Learning from the Stones,” available from the Federation of American Scientists.

 The concept of positioning moves is inherent in shih, in creating configurations of great potential. Or, as Gimian and Boyce (The Rules of Victory) explain:

In employing shih, each action is one step in a process that changes the ground, reorients the relationship among things, and creates different possibilities. (p. 121)

A lot of this activity is zheng — according with the opponents’ expectations in order to set them up for decisive strikes. At other times, we may just be developing the situation, trying to create ambiguity and anxiety, and probing opponents to force them to tell us something about their intentions and capabilities (As Gimian and Boyce put it, “if you can’t get destination, go for direction.” p. 126)

If these activities don’t cause the opponent to give up or panic or otherwise quit providing effective opposition (and this is Sun Tzu’s ideal, of course), then we look for opportunities to release the potential energy we have built up in as short, abrupt, “fast transient” a manner as possible, as “when strike of a hawk breaks the back of its prey.” (Griffith trans., 92)

Wise advice from uber-diplomat, Ambassador Ryan Crocker.  No one will listen.

iRevolution –Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge 

CTOVision (Alex Olesker) –General Alexander’s Vision, the New DARPA Director, and More 

Russia blog –Congress Is Getting Ready for the Wrong Move, The Magnitsky Act and Magnitsky Act as a Test for American Democracy 

99.9% of the American public and I wager 90% of their MoC don’t know who Sergei Magnitsky was, why there is a bill in his memory or how it’s passage into law would shape US-Russian relations or that the State Department can already deny foreign officials suspected of human rights abuses entry into the United States. That probably includes some of the bill’s sponsors.

Look, neither Russia nor Putin merit any special favors from the USG,  but there’s large factions of Beltway political activists on the Hill who are on retainer for the government of Georgia (including the Podesta Group of Democratic Party bigwig John Podesta) or from their domestic opposition, as registered foreign agents, who would like to poison relations with Moscow as much as possible in the interest of their clients with little regard to American interests.

It is only slightly less shady than the long list of  boomer generation DC VIPs lining up, hat in hand, to take money from the MeK.

That’s it.

Arakcheev: grand vizier of the Russian Empire by Michael Jenkins

Time Of Stalin, The: Portrait Of A Tyranny by Anton Antonov-Ovseenko

I just returned from a short vacation in Door County and was able to squeeze in some time to browse some of their independent and used bookstores. One in Ellison Bay had an unusually good Russian and Soviet collection and I picked up a few titles. Naturally, it would have been even cheaper on Amazon, but the used and rare bookstore is an experience for a serious reader, not just a transaction. Supporting their existence and preserving the tacit knowledge about books, authors and publishers of that niche market is worth a few extra dollars.

Count Alexei Andreievich Arakcheev was a somewhat terrifying figure from early 19th century Tsarist Russia whose career came to personify the out-of-control military authoritarianism nurtured by “the Gatchina system”. Gatchina was the princely estate of the Tsarevitch under Catherine the Great and it was here that military culture was first imported from Prussia and took root in Imperial Russia. While this had the beneficial effect of stimulating modernizing advances in Russian artillery, the Gatchina system also inculcated a zealous love of  “paradomania” in the Tsars and their army officers who served there – a fetish for obsessive detail in the minutia of barracks square drill, the ritualistic mummery of military insignia and a sadistic excess of harsh disciplinary measures for discipline’s sake.

Arakcheev, a parvenu who climbed into the ranks of the aristocracy through the Petrine state service nobility, embodied both aspects of the Gatchina system and combined it with the fanaticism of a totalitarian bureaucrat. He was loathed by the powerful families of  high boyar-descended nobility, but Arakcheev’s dog-like loyalty to the mad Emperor Paul I and the quixotic Tsar Alexander I made Arakcheev an invaluable figure who was part fixer, part chief of staff, friend and confidant to the supreme Autocrat.

I had not expected that Arakcheev would have a biography in English and skimming this one tells me that Jenkins is writing from an overly sympathetic POV for a historical figure who really merits very little empathy. While no Beria or Himmler and a more than competent artillery general and military reformer, Arakcheev was an intolerant man of violent temper, given to casually arbitrary brutalities that were shocking even by the standards of  Tsarist Russia. He presided over a disastrous experiment in agrarian military socialism that foreshadowed Soviet collective farms that intruded into the most intimate aspects of the lives of peasants and soldiers alike and combined all the disadvantages of serfdom with military service.

Anton Antonov-Ovseenko is the son of an Old Bolshevik executed by Stalin during the Great Terror, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, and a former inmate of Stalin’s Gulag himself. Given that his father had been an ally of Trotskii and Tukhachevskii, it is something of a minor miracle that the author survived to write a denunciation of his family’s great tormentor. Many other Soviet citizens of his generation, with tangential or purely imaginary connections to Stalin’s enemies vanished without a trace, unlettered and unremembered.

Despite being a professional historian, Antonov-Ovseenko’s The Time of Stalin belongs grouped with the dissident/defector literature of the likes of Kravchenko, Solzhenitsyn, Penkovskii, Amalrik, Kalugin, Chambers, Djilas, Pacepa, Voslenskii and many others. This book is less a work of objective history than an impassioned testimony of an eyewitness to horrific crimes or a memoir. Even from a casual thumbing through, one can see that there are valuable nuggets here but a critical eye is required of the reader. Stalin is admittedly one of the greatest monsters in all history but he was not superman, but a conductor of an orchestra of repression and democide.

Many hands lent themselves, often eagerly and more often fearfully, to carrying out Stalin’s will.

[ by Charles Cameron — Jerusalem and apocalyptic sentiment, not at the emergency crash warning level, but still something to keep an eye out for ]
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If you’re interested, as I am, in the ways that end-times theology impacts geopolitics, whether in its Christian, Judaic or Islamic (Sunni or Shi’ite) formulations, then two recent articles in Ha’aretz deserve your attention.

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The first, published July 27, has Ari Shavit interviewing Gov. Mitt Romney on behalf of Ha’aretz, and asking the following question:

Governor Romney, you’ll be arriving in Jerusalem on Saturday night, on the eve of the day on which we commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Many Israelis feel that the fate of the ‘Third Temple’ relies on its strong bond with a strong America. Can you assure them that should you be president, you will reverse the trend of American decline? Can you guarantee that both America, and Israel’s bond with America, will be strong once again?

Gov. Romney does not speak to the Third Temple issue in his response, though the rest of the interview will no doubt interest those with a focus on foreign policy – and policy with regard to a nuclear Iran in particular.

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The second Ha’aretz piece, posted almost a month earlier, gives some context on why the issue of the Third Temple is important – it is part and parcel of Jewish messianic prophecy. The problem here is that the rebuilding of the Temple would presumably take place on the site that’s currently considered the third holiest in Islam – the plateau that Muslims term the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount.

And that could mean trouble:

In 1990, after Muslims became concerned that the Temple Mount Faithful would come to lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple – as they had several times in the past – the muezzin of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the mount called on the thousands of worshippers there to defend the site against such a move. This led to what became known as the Temple Mount riots, in which 17 Palestinians were killed and several Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall were injured. The riots led to a serious toughening of the police stance regarding the Temple Mount, but it did not stop attempts by the various right-wing organizations to restore a full Jewish presence there.

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Tisha B’Av, the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples, begins in the evening of Saturday, July 28 this year, and ends in the evening of Sunday, July 29.

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Gershom Gorenberg calls the plateau “the most contested piece of real-estate on earth” — and his book The End of Days is the definitive text exploring the different apocalyptic expectations asspociated with it in the three Abrahamic religions.

In it, he notes that according to one Jewish source, the fight between Cain and Abel arose over a dispute as to which of them had the better claim to the Temple Mount.

[ by Charles Cameron — are they talking about shooting for a goal, hitting your target, making a move — or lofting one up the fairway? ]
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As you may have gathered, I really love that quote from the philosopher MacIntyre. Here we go again:

Image courtesy of my friend Oink, aka Peter Feltham. It seems like gameplay gets more risky by the hour…