zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — a question of priorities ]
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photo credit: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
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The attack in Qargha was not about liberating one’s own people from an occupying power, but about imposing one’s religious morality on compatriots who do not share one’s enthusiasm. Or to put that another way: at times, war is the continuation of religiosity by other means.

Offered without further comment, from The attack in Kargha: Return of the Taleban Puritans? by Thomas Ruttig of Afghan Analysts Network:

For the first time in many months, the Taleban have attacked a target that is almost exclusively used by Afghan civilians, while statements by their leader Mulla Muhammad Omar and their code of conduct (the layha, see an AAN report about it here) suggested a desire to protect civilians as much as possible. In the past, when causing civilian casualties, Taleban spokesmen often argued that they had actually been attacking a military target (like a convoy, a checkpost or another military installation) and that they had not planned to harm civilians. This time, such an excuse would have sounded ridiculous. Instead, in a statement under the name of their spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed they called the hotel a ‘hub of obscenity and vulgarity frequented by the lusty foreign and local top-level military and officials to satisfy their impure lust especially on Thursday nights’ and where ‘anti-Islamic meeting are usually being held’ (sic).

Equally ridiculous was their claim that it was mainly foreigners who had been targeted at Kargha. In the statement already quoted they claimed that their fighters had killed and wounded ‘several dozens of the top-level foreign diplomats and military figures and high-ranking puppets’. But everyone in Kabul knows that many foreigners are not even allowed to go to most of the restaurants in the city centre, particularly ‘top-level diplomats’. Kargha, well outside the city, is off limits for all foreigners except those few who do not have strict security rules. Instead, Kargha, with its little restaurants (which Afghans tend to call ‘hotels’), ice cream parlours and even cottages furbished in Swedish style and a few pedalo boats to rent, is a typical weekend retreat for Kabulis from all walks of life, from the young and well-off to rather ordinary people who enjoy the only accessible lake in the vicinity of the capital. To target such an area is not only a clear deviation from recent stated Taleban policy, if not practice, it is also an outrage.

That the Taleban tried to justify their attack by claiming that it was a venue of ‘anti-Islamic’ behaviour also shows that the old puritan tendency in their movement is alive and kicking, to which all kind of temporal amusement are anathema, especially if men and women are attending without being strictly separated.

I linked to this only in passing previously:  here is eminent Clausewitzian scholar Colin S. Gray at NDU PRISM:

Concept Failure? COIN, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Theory 

….Argument

If this debate about COIN is to be reset along more productive lines than those typically pursued in the often heated and bad-tempered exchanges of recent times, it is necessary to place some reliance on the conceptual tools that strategic theory provides. Unsurprisingly, in its several forms that theory yields what Clausewitz specified: it sorts out what needs sorting. There is much that should be debated about COIN, but the controversy is not helpful for national security if the structure and functioning of the subject matter, suitably defined, are not grasped and gripped with intellectual discipline. To that end, what follows is a nine-part argument intended to make more sense of the not-so-great COIN debate triggered by the unmistakable evidence of confusion, frustration, and either failure or unsatisfactorily fragile success in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is neither policy nor strategy advocacy, but generically it is advocacy of policy (and its politics) and strategy, properly employed.

Formal education in strategy is not an adequate substitute for experience or talent and aptitude, but it should help.COIN debate would benefit if the debaters took a refresher course in the basics of strategy. Many fallacies and inadequate arguments about COIN in Afghanistan, for instance, are avoidable if their proponents were willing to seek and were able to receive help from theory. Harold Winton offers useful guidance when he identifies five functions for competent theory: such theory “defines, categorizes, explains, connects, and anticipates.”10 About what does theory perform those functions? The answer, which for strategy is the equivalent of E = mc2, is ends, ways, means, and (with caveats) assumptions. If a strategist’s narrative performs well on this formula, he has indeed cracked the code that enables—though it cannot guarantee—strategic success. The strategist needs to understand his subject, which is not COIN or counterterrorism; it is strategy for his particular challenge in COIN or counterterrorism. It is hard to find compensation for a lack of case-specific local knowledge, but it is even harder, and can be impossible, to compensate for weakness in understanding of strategy.

There is a classical canon of authors worth reading for their contributions, both intended and not, to the general theory of strategy. This theorist has reshaped and assembled the theory in the form of dicta (formal statements that are not quite principles and definitely not laws).11 Rather than test readers’ patience with a recital of my dicta, here I capture much of their meanings and implications by offering a list of “strategists’ questions,” some of which, with some amendments, I have borrowed with gratitude from the late Philip Crowl, followed by my own redrafting of the now long-traditional “Principles of War” as a set of Principles of War that I believe more suitably serves the declared purpose. First, the following are the strategists’ questions:

• What is it all about? What are the political stakes, and how much do they matter to us?
• So what? What will be the strategic effect of the sundry characters of behavior that we choose to conduct?
• Is the strategy selected tailored well enough to meet our political objectives?
• What are the probable limits of our (military) power as a basket of complementary agencies to influence and endeavor to control the enemy’s will?
• How could the enemy strive to thwart us?
• What are our alternative courses of action/inaction? What are their prospective costs 
  and benefits?
• How robust is our home front?
• Does the strategy we prefer today draw prudently and honestly upon the strategic education that history can provide?
• What have we overlooked? 

Ok, so far but take a look at this claim:

….It is not sensible to categorize wars according to the believed predominant combat style of one of the belligerents.Guerrilla-style warfare is potentially universal and, on the historical evidence, for excellent reasons has been a favored military method of the weaker combatant eternally. There are no such historical phenomena as guerrilla wars. Rather, therehave been countless wars wherein guerrilla tactics have been employed, sometimes by both sides. To define a war according to a tactical style is about as foolish as definition according to weaponry. For example, it is not conducive of understanding to conceive of tank warfare when the subject of interest is warfare with tanks and so forth, typically, if not quite always, in the context of combined arms. It is important conceptually not to allow the muscle to dominate the brain. 

So there is no qualitative difference between a nuclear war (WWIII) and a war in which some nuclear weapons were used (WWII)? What?

No. Gray is correct that many  wars partake of a blend of tactical fighting styles or that most wars are better defined (or at least should be in terms of causation) by their political character. That said, a specific fighting style sometimes is a definitive descriptive characteristic of a war, particularly if a dominant tactical style explains one side’s consistent comparative advantage (ex. the Macedonian phalanx vs. the Persians) in battle and some of the resultant choices which were forced upon the adversary.

[ by Charles Cameron — Egyptian presidency, Mahdist candidate, Center for Millennial Studies, Christ candidate ]
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Source.
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I ran across this reasonably remarkable web image while following a link from the tail end of Tim Furnish‘s comments on the Egyptian presidential election, and can’t really comment on the candidate himself, either as Mahdi-claimant or as (failed) aspirant to the Presidency.

I am, however, put in mind of my days with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, and a fellow I met at one of their conferences there called Chris King. But I’ll let another friend of mine from those days make the introduction — here’s Damian Thompson, writing in the Daily Telegraph a while back:

I spent the evening of December 31, 1999, climbing up the Mount of Olives, only to be confronted by a wild-haired messiah figure in a patchwork robe walking down the slope. That was surprising enough, but my jaw really dropped open when he said: “Hi, Damian.” Turned out we’d met a few weeks earlier, at a conference organised by the Center for Millennial Studies in Boston. The “messiah” was a Kiwi maths lecturer called Chris King, which he explained also meant “Christ the King”, though only in a complex esoteric way. (He was a lovely guy, actually.)

Chris King was, as Damian reports, both a likeable guy and an academic, and what I found most appealing about his self-presentation — beyond the very fact of his turning up to attend a conference on Millennial Studies — was that his view, essentially a gnostic one, was that we are all Christs in potentia, if we would but realize it… wait for it…

and his consequent request that his claim to messianic status should be peer-reviewed!

[ by Charles Cameron — jihad and struggle, a question of terminology ]
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Now isn’t that curious? Right at the end of Jonathan Demme‘s film The Silence of the Lambs, after the copyright notice, after the obligatory comment about the characters being fictitious and no similarity to actual persons, living or dead, being intended or to be inferred, we’re informed that A Luta Continua: the struggle continues.

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I’m reminded of this from time to time by the use of the term jihad, which has come in some circles to have a meaning quite close to holy war or just war (and for five points, quick, the difference is?) or even crusade — but can also mean the effort to align oneself with the will of God. There are those who say jihad means bloody warfare, and those who say that’s the lesser jihad while the greater jihad is the struggle against the nafs, roughly speaking our selfish nature…

And then there are those who use the term — who may be meaning warfare by it, or some kind of moral effort — or even a political one.

But when the term is used, we all too often think we know what it means — with the possibility of misreading it in more than one direction, likely depending on whether the reader, viewer or listener views Islam as warlike, peaceable, both, neither, or none of the above.

Consequently…

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It occurred to me that it might be interesting to consider our word struggle.

When Jonathan Demme says the struggle goes on in Portuguese, what’s he getting at? Does he simply mean that Hannibal Lecter will shortly have his unsavory psychiatrist colleague for dinner?

I think not — for one thing, Demme has tagged the phrase onto the end of several other movies.

Struggle’s an interesting word: it straddles the distinction between violent and non-violent effort.

Would we understand events unfolding in the Middle East and elsewhere any better, if we substituted the word struggle for jihad every time we heard it? Perhaps it would help us understand that there’s an inherent ambiguity to the word…

I don’t know. I thought I’d ask.

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Selected reading:

David Cook, Understanding Jihad
Reuven Firestone, Jihad: the Origin of Holy War in Islam
Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History

also of possible interest by of comparison:

Reuven Firestone, Holy War in Judaism: The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea

[ by Charles Cameron — this one’s a prose poem: it begins with a statement so tight it needs to be unwound, and unwinds it ]
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I wrote this urgently starting when it “woke” me at 4am one morning in the late 1990s or 2000, and as soon as it was out, I found myself writing #3 in the series, a game design. Together, the pair of them represent a stage in my games and education thinking intermediate between Myst-like Universities of 1996 and my vision today of games in education, which I hope to address in a further post addressed to Sebastian Thrun & with appreciation to Bryan Alexander and Lewis Shepherd. In this posting, I have added the words “figuratively speaking” for absolute clarity: otherwise, the piece remains as written all those years ago.

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A copse. Photo credit: Ian Britton via FreePhoto.com under CC license. Note how the wind sweeps the trees into a group shape.

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Trees: Phototropic Simplexities

Trees are phototropic simplexities, no wonder we like them they cowork so well too: copses, see.

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Meaning:

Trees we know: I as writer can refer you, reader, safely to them, “trees”, in trust that the word I use will signal to you too — triggering for you, also — pretty much the assortment of branching organic thingies about which I’m hoping to communicate that they are complex entities whose complexity comes from a simplicity of rule — branching — repeated with variations, said variants doing their branching in thirst of light, each trunk rising, limb outpushing, branch diverging, twig evading other twig much as one who seeks in a crowd a clear view of a distant celebrity shifts and cranes and peers — branching, thus, by the finding of light in avoidance of nearby shadow and moving into it, into light as position, that light, that position, growing, and thus in the overall “unified yet various”, we, seekers of the various and unified love them, to see them in greens themselves various in their simplexity is to say “tree” with a quiet warmth; while they themselves also, by the necessity of their branching seeking, if clumped together seek in an avoidance of each other’s seeking, growing, thus space-sharing in ways which as the wind sweeps and conforms them to its own simplex flows, shapes them to a common curve we call aerodynamic, highlit against the sky huddled together as “copse” — this, in the mind’s eyes and in your wanderings, see…

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Meaning:

Trees we can talk about. Simplexity is a useful term for forms — like trees — which are neither simple only nor complex only, but as varied as complexity suggests with a manner of variation as simple as simplicity implies.

Trees? Their simplexity is conveyed in principle by the word “branching”. Its necessity lies in the need of each “reaching end” of the organism to ascertain from its own position and within the bounds of its possible growing movement, some “available” light — this light-seeking having the name “phototropism”.

Simplexities — and thus by way of example, trees — we like, we call them beautiful.

Clustered together, too, and shaped by the winds’ patterns of flow, these individual simplexities combine on an English hilltop (or where you will) to form yet other beauties.

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Thus:

Trees are phototropic simplexities, no wonder we like them they cowork so well too: copses, see.

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Meaning:

I love trees. Want to talk about simplexities, beauty.

I wish to talk about beauty because it is beauty that I love, if I love it, that is beauty: love is kalotropic, a beauty-seeking. I am erotropic, love seeking — you can find in this my own simplexity, my own varieties of seeking, of the growths that are my growth, and clumping me with others under the winds, the pressures that form and conform us, you can find also the mutual shapes that we adopt, beautiful.

Simplexity, then, is a key to beauty, variety, self, character, cohabitation… Tropism, seeking, is the key to simplexity. Love is my tropism. Ours, I propose.

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Meaning:

Beauty is one simplexity perceived by another: the eye of the beholder, with optic nerve, “brain”, branching neuron paths that other simplexity, “consciousness” the perceiving.

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Meaning also:

That all is jostle, striving — a strife for life, in which the outcome overall is for each a “place in the sun” but not without skirmishes, shadows. The overall picture, therefore, beautiful — but this overall beauty hard to perceive when the specific shadow falls in the specific sought place of the moment, the “available” is not available, and the strife of the moment is paramount.

Branching being the order behind simplexity, differentiation…

Differentiation for maximal tropism at all levels — life seeking always the light, honey, beauty, is always and everywhere in conflict also with itself, competitive: and competition the necessary act of the avoidance of shadow, and the shadow creating act.

And beauty — the light, thing sought, implacably necessary food and drink, the honey — thus the drive that would make us kill for life.

I could kill for beauty.

I could kill for honey.

Figuratively speaking.

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Implying:

Paradise and Fall, simultaneous, everywhere.

It is at this juncture, at this branching, that we are “expelled from the garden” — can no longer see the beauty that is and remains overall, that can allow us to say also, “we are never outside the garden” — for the dappling of light on and among the leaves has become to us, too closely jostled, shadow.

And shadow for shadow we jostle, and life is strife.

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Thus:

The dappling of light on leaves, beautiful, is for each shadowed leaf, shadow, death-dealing, is for each lit leaf, light, life-giving: a chiaroscuro, beautiful, see.

Roots, too, have their mirror branchings.