Tag Archives: COIN

A slow day today….

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…it’s raining again which would normally be a good excuse to spend the day inside modelling or exercising myself intellectually but the twins are overnighting so that’s meant putting everything breakable and valuable out of reach of little hands and then providing a one on one overwatch on both of them them all day as, man, they are fast now…

It’s also been a long day as I got up just before 4AM for a COIN Center online brief (we always get the short end of the time zone stick!) only  to find that when Adobe says that Connect will work over a dial-up connection, they don’t really mean it and you will be lucky to get a second of sound over the whole hour. Josh also missed it after a few too many vinos before bedtime on Friday night but there was a still a good turn out of some 60 staff from across the community. I suppose I will have to resign myself to nighting over and logging in from work for future activities until such time that Telecom or some other ISP can give us affordable (i.e. not $250/month!!) broadband here…

I have been chipping away at the Trumpeter B-4 203mm cannon most nights since getting home and it is progressing nicely. One of the beauties of this kit is that most of the major subassemblies can be completed prior to painting so construction is a. simple and b. relatively fast – be nice, though, if they could do a barrel without a ditch of a seam running down each side…Carmen picked me up some paint in Taupo on Friday on her way back from getting Little Red panel-beaten after her little faux pas in the driveway last month so I’m all good to go there – once the bloody rain stops as the humidity levels are still too high for smooth airbrushing…

It’s been quite nice taking a break to day but will be back in to the Thursday/Friday War tomorrow once the twins depart…I’d like to be outside chopping the rest of the wood and getting it under cover but it’s looking like MORE rain again tomorrow which precludes the use of an electric saw outside (we use a drop saw for dicing firewood that is less than 5-6 inches thick – Carmen scored it at a garage sale in 2005 and it has delivered sterling service since)…

Two blog entries that I have noted over the weekend have been this great one from Steven Pressfield on Resistance and Self-talk; and John Birmingham’s commitment to end each week on Cheeseburger by writing on writing which will be both enlightening and useful for struggling wannabes like myself…

I also finished Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq tonight and there are some great general insights on COIN and conflict generally (no pun intended) that I will try to distil down into a single post in the next few days…

The COIN drops…

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…or is it just a penny…?

Previously in The World According To Me: “Over time some insurgents will tire of the constant harassment in the face of growing public confidence in government forces and disdain for the insurgents… encouraging THEM one by one to consider coming to the talking table…”

barracuda 945I picked this up on my way through Singapore last month, thinking that with Admiral Sandy Woodward of Falklands War fame as an advisor, it would be pretty good. Not only is it not, but I could also see why other commanders in the fleet were worried that Woodward, with limited aviation or amphibious experience, be the wrong guy for the job:  once the plot puts to sea the whole premise is based on the ‘fact’ that the US Navy is the only service in the US DoD which helps the story along by skipping gayly around inconveniences like AWACs…I also think that the three unnamed Special Forces officers who allegedly advised on the story need to hand back any beers they received for ‘advice’ as the SF side is pretty weak as well. So the connection with COIN is…?

Without spoiling what story there is, a key assumption in the book is that the way to win an insurgency is to out-exasperate the opposition, i.e. harass them to the point of just giving up and going home…at the time of reading the book, these seemed like a great recipe for success for insurgents and difficult to beat from a COIN perspective – until I I reread the piece on the Information Militia this afternoon…could initiatives like Crimestoppers in a COIN/Stability campaign actually be the start of the Death of 1000 Cuts for an insurgency? Turning The War of the Flea on its head and subjecting the insurgents to an endless series of pinpricks and mossie bites until they have just had enough and start to consider their options…?

One thing I did like about Barracuda 945 is that the ending is not the righteous vengeance that one might have been expecting. Instead it presents a very left-field scenario which strikes at a core issue and not just a symptom – does that sound like something that might be drawn from FM 3-24 – even if the story does use major elements of national power to achieve the effect…?

I’ve commented a lot, as have many other commentators, on the apparent lack of strategic objectives for the war in Afghanistan. This summary came off one of the distribution lists I’m subscribed to; it states pretty clearly that al-Qaeda is still the primary raison d’etre for the war from a US point of view but one wonders how logical that really is…some things to think about:

  • The Taliban are not AQ; they may have supported and hosted them prior to 9/11 but are now probably not that impressed with all the attention that has drawn.
  • AQ are probably well-established in many other locations are the globe – where next after Afghanistan for the GWOT?
  • If there is any lesson to be learned by insurgents (as opposed to simple terrorists) from 9/11 and the London Tube bombings it is that such actions are more counter-productive for the ’cause’ – as Yamamoto feared, once you wake the sleeping dragon, it is damn difficult to put it back to bed…so AQ cells around the world are probably more discreet than to parade themselves openly in training camps as once was their wont.

These things being the case, then perhaps we need to reread FM 3-24 and ensure that such fundamentals remain in the 2010 version, and start to focus the campaign on ending the insurgency…if the aim is an AQ-free Afghanistan, then maybe we need to be casting off the dream of democracy for all and realistically start to look at ways of bring the Taliban to the table…carrot and stick…turn the war of the flea back on them…out-exasperate them until talking becomes the way better option to fighting. It is unlikely that we will be able to bring the Taliban (or any other significant Afghan group) to the table by force – didn’t work for Alexander, didn’t work for Victoria, didn’t work for Mikhail, and it wouldn’t have worked for Napoleon either if he had strayed in this direction….

Could we live with a stable Taliban in Afghanistan if that meant an al-Qaeda-free Afghanistan?

The Information Militia

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…it was really great to see former Chief of Army, Lou Gardiner, fronting for the recent launch of Crimestoppers NZ (0800 555 111). This initiative is the silver lining from the cloud of the December 2007 Army Museum VC theft that brought General Lou and Lord Ashcroft together and got the  idea fermenting (‘though the head of Crimestoppers NZ probably won’t have his own jet!!).

Initially I was a bit dubious about the whole idea of anonymous reporting and the opportunities to play ‘Dob Thy Neighbour‘ but I’ve been following the news reports this week and even if the Kiwi version is only half as effective as the UK one, that is still a 10% dent in the crime stats which is pretty respectable by anyone’s standards. More power to Crimestoppers and it will be interesting to visit in a few months to see  how the stats are panning out. In the meantime, I exhort everyone to pop across to Crimestoppers and plant a few words of encouragement on the Crimestoppers Blog. Consider this your personal contribution to domestic Info Ops for 2009: the more obvious public support there is, the more likely it is that ordinary people will use the site….away you go…

Defence Capability Centre 033 small

This mobile signpost is in one of the display areas at the Defence Capability Centre at Shrivenham – it was in this complex, which is absolutely packed with big boys toys for ambient effect, that the CLAW was conducted this year. At first, I thought it looked kinda dumb and just a big invite for a couple of rounds of ‘Dob Thy Neighbour‘ and other forms of neighbourhood score-settling and mischief. But then I thought about it some more from an information perspective. Clearly in any COIN, Irregular Threat or Stability environment – and when you get down to it, domestic crime-fighting is as much about stability ops as is providing security in an operational theatre – there is a very real risk or kickback and retribution for ‘narks‘ and ‘informers‘ thus anonymity is not only good but essential.

This is probably easier to effect in an operational theatre where the onus of evidence might not be as rigid as in a civil courtroom even though the process of analysis and decision may be no less rigorous or difficult. I’m about 2/3 of the way through Australian General Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq (top read – highly recommended!!) and he goes into considerable detail on the rigour that his staff applied before approving prosecution of a target, often under very tight time imperatives (which is why it’s called Time Sensitive Targeting). Instead of having to satisfy a judge a a jury of his/her ‘peers’, the operational requirement is to satisfy a specific decision matrix based on four considerations: (from Running the War in Iraq) proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity. So in this environment, the painting of a picture based upon all source information, including that from anonymous sources, is more directly linked to an actionable result.

In a domestic criminal environment, there remains an equal or possibly greater burden of analysis and validation on information from anonymous sources which ultimately may have to satisfy a formal legal evidential chain. But over time, what we develop is a complex and detailed picture of a society and its environment that is constantly enhancing and evolving. The key to this, is the reliance upon informal, part-time, intermittent information sources…uh-oh, it’s THE PEOPLE again and these are whom I am starting to think of as the Information Militia…they are often not formally organised, particularly reliable, or often even that useful but every little titbit they provide adds to the picture, even (possibly not even intentionally) their place in it…a resource that supports the campaign, even while perhaps attempting to further its own myriads of ends…

And then I thought, wow, what if you took this model and applied it to Afghanistan – could this be where the support of the people might actually make a difference? It is not realisitic, although we keep on doing it, to expect ‘the people’ to just wake up one day and decide ‘Enough!’ and turn in all insurgents and their supporters. Not realistic at all, and we’ve all seen it happen one place or another, where the insurgents/criminals  (the same or another mob) come back and dish out retribution. But what if we had Crimestoppers Afghanistan? Very specifically Crimestoppers and not any play on words like Talibanbusters, etc etc…the objective is to focus on crime and by very clearly unstated inference, insurgents because they are nothing but criminals…the Information Militia provide leads, feeds, rumours and whispers – all anonymously – which paint a picture which then informs counter-criminal operations – reducing crime is always a good start to getting the people onside – and as the picture evolves, oopsy-a-daisy, a counter-criminal feed ‘accidentally’ knocks off some insurgents…and on it goes…

Over time, as occurred in Northern Ireland, some insurgents will tire of the constant harassment in the face of growing public (‘the people’ again) confidence in government forces and disdain for the insurgents. I refer to ‘insurgents’ deliberately in order to decriminalise the Taliban associations, to encourage THEM to consider one by one coming to the talking table…

Something’s missing…

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Today I’ve made similar comments on both the COIN Center blog and Steven Pressfield’s blog on the war – maybe I’m missing something but has anyone recently i.e. since December 2001, actually clearly articulated what we are trying to achieve in Afghanistan? Every man and his dog (maybe we should start listening to the dogs?) are presenting their theories on how to win the war BUT, if these is one lesson we think we have learned since WW2, it is don’t get into anything unless you have some idea on how you’re going to get OUT of it. So what is the endgame for Afghanistan? Please… anyone…?

  • Exploit the mineral wealth of Afghanistan? Which minerals would they be?
  • Prevent Pakistani nukes falling into Taliban/AQ hands?
  • Return Afghanistan to its pre-1979 state?
  • Save it for/from democracy?
  • Prevent Iran or someone else filling the power vacuum left by the Taliban post-2001?
  • Secure new markets for globalised industry?
  • Something else?

Maybe I’m just dumb, or wasn’t  paying attention that day the endstates were being explained…I’ve read FM 3-24 and similar publication on the subject of COIN, irregular threats and stability ops and actions and a common theme in most of the is the absolute need to identify what the root issues of the conflict are and set out to address them in your long game…are we doing that? Have we done that? Is there a cycle of ongoing review and adjustment….?

As LCOL Malevich says in the Center blog “The Taliban have a simple message “foreigners out.” And, they promise only “security” and “justice.” What is our mission, what is our compelling narrative?”

I suppose the other question that we might want to review is why does America care? When is NATO going to get its act together and get into the game; Ditto the Islamic Brotherhood – if they really do care for all Muslims, where are the aid packages, the troops and the initiatives from closer to home – would an Iranian Brigade be more effective than an SBCT…?

And some more in a similar vein here that I stumbled across while tag surfing…

And we pay for this…

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Couldn’t sleep again this morning so got up and have been pottering around for a few hours now. I came across the latest Consumer magazine (NZ consumer watchdog magazine for overseas viewers) and had a read. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that some of the reporting has been rather superficial, if not downright inaccurate in some areas, and the article in the October 09 issue on tramping boots and jackets is a ripper – written by their technology writer, no less!!

High and Dry

  • One would expect Consumer to be able to source more empirical comment than from a company that is in the business. There are numerous resources available, including Google, that should allow a staff reporter to draw their own conclusions without relying on a single commercial source.
  • The implication in the ‘a boot to match’ paragraph that synthetic material boots may be more prone to leaks may be true but it is not as simple as that as many boots from synthetic and natural materials feature built-in waterproof membranes to provide waterproofing. Any boot, synthetic or natural, will let water in sooner or later – if dry feet are that essential, then find a pair of boots with a breathable waterproof membrane, or get a decent pair of Goretex socks. On a decent tramp, though, your feet will probably pump out enough moisture  from the inside of the boot that damp feet are almost inevitable – trampers should plan on drying feet, having spare dry socks, for the end of a days walking…
  • More important than insoles for the comfort of your feet is the support structure of the boot, of which the insoles are only a relatively small part – like any form of footwear the internal structure of the boot is what really defines the comfort of a boot, not the insole.
  • Soles should avoid rounded edges on the sole and at the heel so as to better dig into soft ground. The article should define what an open tread pattern actually is instead of leaving it up to the reader to interpret. Looking for a name brand sole is also a good idea.
  • It is false to state that boots with higher uppers offer more ankle support – while a higher upper may offer better protection to the lower leg and also make it more difficult for water to come in over the top of the boot (thus negating any perceived advantage from natural material boots!), they provide little in the way of extra ankle support and possibly, if laced too tightly, have an adverse ‘splint-like’ effect in restricting the natural movement of the foot and lower leg. This is why many, if not most, experienced trampers still stick with traditional ankle style boots. Ankle support comes in a rough line from the heel, just below the ankle bone to the top of the foot a la a shoe – this is why modern boot designs with extended uppers often have a lock eyelet at the ankle to gain ankle support at this point and to eliminate a requirement to tightly lace the upper part of the boot.
  • Cheap does not equal uncomfortable for footwear anymore that it does for any other items of clothing – people should buy for their requirements and shop around for the best item at the best price – I would offer that most NZ tramping shops do NOT offer the best price; or even the best advice or items in a number of cases. I have just finally worn out a pair of quality name brand leather European boots that I bought in 2000 for around $200 and replaced them with a like item for around the same cost.
  • Cheap jackets don’t necessarily equal poor or non-breathable jackets and vice versa – sometimes the label and not the material is the more significant contributor to the retail cost; there are also some quite good and inexpensive breathable fabrics around should one care to search. It is more important that the buyer select a jacket made from a material that meets their needs – in many circumstances, the good old Kiwi Swanndri still does the business as well as any high-tech material. Seam sealing in garments made from Goretex and similar materials adds considerably to the cost – I have worn both sealed and unsealed garments over the years and experienced few leaks through the seams. There is no panacea for comfort in the bush and if someone really wants to stay warm and dry then they should probably stay at home.
  • Goretex is but one of a number of different technologies for breathable waterproof materials – it is however the best and most aggressively marketed but this does not make it the best for any specific purpose. Certainly Goretex is less effective in dirty dusty environments where an osmotic membrane would be better. It’s performance is also downgraded if it is not regularly washed.
  • Under the ‘Lots of Layers’ heading, the three layers that are most important in a  breathable waterproof garment are the outer and inner layers to protect the breathable membrane, and the relatively delicate membrane itself. Without and sometimes even with especially if heavy packs are being carried, the membrane will wear through at pressure/rubbing points very quickly and with it goes the waterproofing. Any inner wicking layer is an extra and would probably be better off as a separate item as part of a structured layered clothing system (an important concept for comfortable and safe tramping that it not even mentioned in this article). The quote from Dave Stewart in this section is a blatant commercial plug that deserves no place in a supposedly neutral public service publication. I have dealt with Goretex and a number of its competitors and the statement is simply not true.
  • It is not unreasonable with 21C technology to expect a new pair of boots to be wearable out of the box. A quality boot of good design, with prestretched leather, that has been properly fitted, should be able to be worn pretty well immediately – it’s not like big boot users like the Army can get soldiers to just wear their boots for a couple of hours a day if a pair has to be replaced in the field.
  • Footwear should be cleaned and maintained with the products recommended by the manufacturer. many waxes and other cleaning products also seal the seal and prevent it breathing and drying. This can lead to a problem in boots with a built-in waterproof liner where moisture gets trapped between the outside of the waterproof membrane and the leather, leading to accelerated degrading/rotting of the leather – in worse cases with results in the tongue pulling away when the boot is being pulled on – not good in the middle of the Kaimanawas!
  • The footwear table on p24 contains a number of the inaccuracies listed above. It is also not true to say that four season boots are ‘not suitable for lighter walks’ – a good pair will be able to cover the spectrum; or to list the requirement for boot maintenance as a ‘con’ – that’s much like describing the need to periodically check a car’s oil and water as a ‘con’!

I found this article not just superficial but inaccurate and not the sort of item that Consumer has established its reputation on. Perhaps in a country like NZ, Consumer needs a specialist staff expert on the outdoors, instead of roping in its technology writer? It really gets up my nose that an organisation like this, that is a Kiwi icon for standing up for the under-dog has come to this; even more so when we pay a subscription for crappy product – maybe it’s time that Consumer reviewed itself???

In other news, Coming Anarchy has an comment on AG Parody videos which it suggests would be a great way to undermine AQ; I disagree as this reeks of once again applying a Western solution to a non-Western problem: “Agree that this may help discredit AQ in cultures like ours but I do wonder how such attempts may be viewed in the Islamic and other non-Western cultures where they may be perceived as denigrating the ‘sacrifice of the fallen’ and thus have a contrary effect? If Al-Jazzera started running pisstakes of fallen US, UK, NATO, etc soldiers, how well would it go down at home?”

It also has an item on what is calls deviant globalisation i.e. when globalisation goes bad, or gets even worse depending on your POV…like the post says, possibly nothing new but also a side of globalisation not often covered articles listing globalisation as the root or a contributing cause of the world’s evils, failing nations, the price of cheese (seriously) or the demise of Coro St as serious TV drama…there’s no way the slides or video will be viewable here at home (if the internet is the information superhighway, we are on a little dirt road way up the back of Hazzard County!!) so maybe some follow-on comment when I go back to work and have broadband access again next week…

There’s been some great discussion re the Birmoverse Axis of Time on Cheeseburger (well, as good a discussion as you can get within the limitation of blog comments) – a number of contributors have been lauding the B-52 as the best bomber for the US to develop in the AoT alternate universe to polish off the bad guys in WW2 and there have been numerous statements that it’s speed and manouevrability would enable it to easily avoid German air defences like the Me-163 rocket fighter – this has been nagging me for a couple of days now and it strikes me that the Me-163 and similar in the same vein are not much different from the SA-2s that wreaked havoc over North Vietnam and parts of the Middle East in the 60s and 70s except for having a slightly brighter guidance system…so I still reckon that a. even in the AoT universe, the Germans would still have given the Allies a good run for their money in air defence and b. the B-49 would still be a way cooler option that the B-52…

Almost famous…

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…excusing a bit of  a time lag from unwinding the rubber band back to NZ over the last few days hence the silence…I was quite flattered to open up Cheeseburger on Monday to find one of my comments re the Birmoverse starring on the front page as it were. Certainly led to an interesting dialogue – people should check out the various discussions re what’s next in the Birmoverse and maybe even contribute if they have anything meaningful to say…while I’m interested in a 50s/60s sequel to the Axis of Time trilogy, I’m way more interested in a 21C prequel that explores the modern Birmoverse (less the wormhole device) – this would be a great tool (shades of self-interest!) to explore possibilities for where our version of this century might go…

Am now safely back at home (thank you very much to Singapore Airlines – truly a great way to fly!!) having enjoyed another brief stopover in Singapore which I largely slept through despite being booked into the Crowne Plaza Changi which is right by the main runway (ask me how I know that the last flight into Changi is at 0230 and the first out at 0600!!!. The beauty of Singapore though is that the light rail system can get you pretty well anywhere in an hour or so absolutely max so I still got to spend a good 4-5 hours in town hopping from one airconned enclave to the next. I very much enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Miniature Hobbies (03-380) in Marina Square – so fun fun to explore an unfamiliar top-class model shop and of course I managed to make a couple of acquisitions that I’ll probably never build: the Academy I-19 sub is very nice, more so for only $20 and comes with some very nice etch work; and the Trumpeter B-4 203mm gun is one of those big chunky ‘I was built in a tractor factory‘ bits of Soviet kit.

The Singapore Air entertainment programme for October was a bit weak – I was expecting Up, GI Joe and G-Force at least but had to make do with Transformers II which didn’t rock and I watched first movie straight after just to confirm that it wasn’t just a teeny screen issue…even though I was awake the whole Singapore-Auckland leg, all I watched was the canned TV episodes because there was nothing in the movies that appealed in the slightest…I did enjoy the first Doctor Who special from Season IV and have to wonder what is going to happen between the Doctor and Lady Christina who is just way too hot to be written out so early in the season…as I was watching Doctor Who of which I have always been a fan since it stopped scaring me witless in the late 60s, It struck me that the whole idea of the Tardis drifting aimlessly lost in space and time may have been inspired by a BBC writer who got caught up in the Oxford Ring Road space-time discontinuum (no, obviously, I’m still NOT over it yet!!)…

Just doing a final peruse of the blogs before I sign off…yes it is 0158 which just shows how screwed up my body clock is from the rubber band…anyway here’s a commentary on the Coming Anarchy about the US and China buddying up in Afghanistan – when you step back from currently-held models, it sounds sensible and when you get down to it, China has a pretty good track record for countering insurgencies as well – just not according to our book, speaking of which, David Kilcullen’s visit to Wellington on 1 Oct, from all reports, went exceptionally well and I hope to get a more detailed backbrief in a few days…

And making a good point for possibly the wrong reasons, The Strategist has mention of what is probably the best chance of success for Afghanistan ( as opposed to every other man and his dog who are trampling around the place)…good old COIN principle #1 Compromise IS Good!

I’ve been thinking….

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….and I’m not even from the ACT Party…(sorry, NZ in-joke – Google for ‘Prebble’, ‘I’ve been thinking’ for more info – the most common response to the book was a request for some evidence that he had actually thought very much about anything).

This COIN thing – the more I think about it the more parallels I see with Vietnam (and someone drew a parallel between the ANA and the ARVN on the latest thread on the COIN blog over the weekend):

♣ What’s it all about? We went into Vietnam on the premise that it was an insurrection supported by a hostile neighbour to the north, all in support of global world domination by the communists. The real issue in Vietnam was one of reunification and perhaps if we had identified that up front we would have conducted the whole war with a totally different aim and approach and achieved the ultimate endstate earlier and with way less cost on blood and treasure. What is the real issue in Afghanistan? COIN and SSR are means. To what end are we applying them?

♣ An underlying principle of COIN is that in the end the successful campaign by Western standards seeks to redress wrongs and address/resolve the core issues, which may in the end, as in Malaya, Aden, Ireland (across the 20th Century), and New Zealand (1840-90), pretty well give the insurgents what they want. What are the issues in Afghanistan and what do the insurgents want? That’s what do they really want as opposed to what we think they want…

♣ The non-HN COIN forces in Vietnam were largely from Western nations (US, Australia and New Zealand. The only Asian forces there were from Korea but there were no forces from what we now know as ASEAN. In all fairness, that might not be a bad thing as most of the those military forces were still in a fledgling stage of capability in the 60s. The main exception would be Indonesia but it was a bit scarred from The Misunderstanding with Commonwealth forces in Borneo and Southern Malaysia around the same time. There was an interesting discussion over dinner on Saturday regarding Iran’s role in Middle East politics at the moment…while it has been happy to stir up trouble in Iraq to further its national interests regarding the Gulf, it is less happy to do so in Afghanistan because Iran does not actually want a fundamentalist Islamic nation sitting on its own borders. Apparently it is one thing to be or have been one, and quite another to have to live with one. As a result, Iran considers it in its own interests to have a stable Afghanistan. Perhaps the current defrosting (warming is probably too positive a term) in the relationships between Iran, the US and the UN may lead to an Iranian force deploying to Afghanistan, possibly even as lead nation in an Islamic brigade/div under ISAF. This might bring the necessary degree of cultural awareness and engagement to the ISAF campaign that it currently so clearly lacks.

♣ Following on from the point above, perhaps the engagement that GEN McCrystal needs to be doing is not with the US and UK, or the parsimonious NATO contributors, but with the informal Islamic Alliance including Iran, Iraq (yes, you did read that right – how better to learn COIN for domestic use than understudy in another campaign), the Gulf States (how nice just for once to see them ante up, especially since they contributed so much to the original mess – yes, Saudi Arabi, that means YOU!!), Malaysia (whose forces had a good rep in Somalia and Bosnia – partly because of the Islamic cultural connection, partly because the Malaysians are very laid back and laissez-faire in their approach to just about anything),  Indonesia,  and Pakistan (see Saudi comments). Maybe the last thing Afghanistan needs is more Western troops…This point also came out in 2000 after the INTERFET deployment into East Timor, after Australia announced the Howard Doctrine whereby Australia would become more active in regional affairs. There was a massive kickback from ASEAN which felt, probably with some justification that it could look after its affairs and those of its members very nicely thank you very much. Similar regional interventions have been attempted with varying degrees of success in Africa. perhaps the actual question is What’s in Afghanistan for NATO?

♣ Would it just be easier to load up everyone who does not want to return to the living hell of Taliban rule and relocate them to New Afghanistan somewhere else? Is the war about saving the people or is it about stopping the Taliban getting their hands on nukes as per the head of the British Army, General Sir David Richards’ warning last week?

♣ In another parallel with Vietnam, the Taliban are being supported by a neighbouring nation albeit without the direct blessing of the Government of Pakistan. Like North Vietnam, although for different reasons perhaps, NATO is unable to shutdown this support via military means and diplomatic means only have limited effect because Pakistan is not officially support the Taliban. Applying the ‘isolate the insurgent’ line from COIN doctrine, how do we isolate the Taliban from its support base in Pakistan  over what is some of the most unnavigable and inhospitable terrain on the planet (You’re not in the Fulda Gap anymore, Dr Ropata)?

Lot 31, miscellaneous, unclassified

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I really needed a quiet night last night after a week of full-on CLAW engagement. I didn’t have high hopes of actually pulling it off, noting my rather parlous record this week, did actually enjoy a couple of hours post-dinner immersed in a massive leather armchair and glass of Bud (I have learned this week that the real deal bud actually comes from the Czech Republic) and worked through The Telegraph and The Independent.

Snippets…

The UK Attorney-General has to decide whether or not to order the prosecution of BAe for ‘greasing the wheels’ in its securing of numerous international arms contracts. The short-term gain; a billion £ fine for government coffers and an opportunity for UK pollies to morris dance their way around the moral high ground. The longer term pain: factory closures and job losses as BAe scrambles to pay the fine; loss of orders as other, less scrupulous competitors wing into the vacuum leading to more factory closures and job losses.

There are some unpalatable facts of life about doing business in most of the world and wheel-greasing is one of them – the moral high ground doesn’t develop much GNP…of course, the silver lining if BAe does step off centre stage is that the customers would then have a better chance of buying kit that a. works, and b. doesn’t need a PhD in Mechanics just to change the spark plugs…

The courts here have just issued their first order via Twitter. It’s a cease and desist order to an unknown offender who posts anonymously on a blog using the same username as the blog owner. Have fun enforcing that one and don’t too surprised if soon everybody starts abusing that username…there’s no Highway Patrol on the information superhighway…

There was an item on BBC4 this afternoon on the problems facing schools with yobbo students (this is in the same country that decided that yobs aren’t really a Police problem as the Police have better things to do – clearly if they can only manage 6 hours per bobby per week actually on the beat – and you should call your local council if you’re being harassed to the point of suicide, hammering your head beaten in with a hammer or having rocks hiffed through your front window every other night).

Anyway…there seemed to be some close parallels with current COIN campaigns: schools are disguising rather than confronting the problem; there is no clear or uniform strategy within any one school let alone nationally; the problem might go away if we can move it to another area; if we change the metrics (much as I hate the term and the philosophy), the problem might disappear; we don’t actually know what the problem is because we are too busy addressing the symptoms.

It kinda struck me as I did my 15th lap of the Oxford Ring Road (I spit on the Oxford Ring Road and all its descendants for a thousand years!) that the solutions might be similar as well: identify what the real issues are; identify what strategy will work in that society and environment; accept there are no easy answers or quick fixes; apply the strategy long enough for behaviours to change and become the norm. As schools deal with compressed generations of students, I thought it might be an idea to observe the various anti-yob initiatives and analyse what works and why as a possible cue for COIN concepts…after all, anyone with teenagers knows you don’t have to travel to encounter strange alien cultures…

The Birmoverse

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John Birmingham, the Australian author of World War 2.1, 2.2, and  2.3 (Axis of Time trilogy), and Without Warning (1st of the ‘The Wave’ series) has set up blog entry  over at Cheeseburger Gothic for discussion on both series…if you haven’t read any of these you really want to give them a go…a secondary theme of the AoT trilogy is a prescient (probably because it agrees with me) glimpse of one version of the next decade of so of the 21st century….

I see on the COIN blog today that Canadian forces are advocating a new approach in Afghanistan but as discussed by a number of members on the blog, this appears to be a desperation-driven attempt to accelerate the course of the campaign and it probably hasn’t been all that well considered. Trying to make the people the new bad guys is probably one of the more innovative approachs to COIN I have seen but will it fly? Like a brick…

From the COIN blog:

“In Afghanistan one of my close friends (an Afghan that would die to save me and almost did) let me know the difference in “their ways” of thinking.  “If you just give me something I may be thankful, but I am not grateful.  I think – look what I was able to get from you, not thankful of what you gave me.  If you attached a price to what you gave me in favors or later chips to be used when you needed something, now we are communicating and building our relationship.”  At first that bothered me but I then began to see through his eyes.  If we take that to winning the “hearts and minds” we have missed the boat.  It does nothing to give to these people as it does to have their own countrymen give, help, and make choices for themselves.  We need to be the facilitators and not the handout.”

Think about it….

And there I was…

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…just standing in the library waiting for the nice young lady to log me into an Internet PC (I have 24/7 run of this magnificent library but have to get one of the staff to log me into a internet PC – go figure!) when I noticed a stack of papers and such on a table under a big sign “Please Help Yourself”…Always being in for a giveaway, I grabbed a couple of interest for later reading…

Some important people really need to have a serious read of Strategic Communication: A Primer, written by, of all things, a RN Commander, Steve Tatham…quite positively the best reference I have found for IO, Influence and Perception Shaping…it should be compulsory reading for anyone in the PR, IO or COIN games…

I would most interested to hear of anyone else’s thought’s on this treatise…

Another balmy (barmy?) day here at CLAWville – analysis and reporting is progressing well and I finally have a tick in the box to take photos of the big boys toys that are lined up all throughout the venue…