“We aren’t going to be doing counterinsurgency again. We’re not that good at it.”
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thabet
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Shams al-Nahar
Highly interesting chart, via Balloonjuice.
This why I find it incredibly difficult to believe that Exum, Kilcullen, Petraeus et al actually understand anything about social network theory (SNT). Just look at all that terrorist-creating revenge-influence propagating along both social and consanguineous connections.
quelles imbeciles. -
thabet
The Afghanistan Study Group, its critics and its defenders.
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thabet
A very good round up of both sides.
And yet more at Newshoggers.
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Shams al-Nahar
Both sides are retards.
If the Garani massacre comes out while the Qur’an protests are still hotbutton, i see in my quantum crystal that we are likely to see a replay of Blackhawk Down.
your quote brother thabet.Demonstrators chanted “Death to America,” “Death to Christians,” and “Death to Karzai,” the latter referring to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in the biggest protests since unrest erupted last week over plans by a U.S. pastor to burn the Koran.
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Shams al-Nahar
In the context of Insane Clown Posse juggalo-in-chief Glenn Beck’s “restoring honor” Dark Carnival event, I am seriously wondering about what Bush should do.
He had a chance at redemption in the Park51 Mosque non-troversy, but remained mute.
Now his book and the hagiography efforts of his followers are going to be majorly disrupted by the upcoming Wikileaks doc release. Palin was able to fend off Team McCains blades by gettin’ to the publisher first….it looks to me like the Iraq exposee is going to be about synchronous with Bush’s book.
History is going to be verry cruel to Bush.
I have a suggestion…..The Operative: You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.
Not literally, but an autobiographical mea culpa for nearly destroying our country and raining meaningless death and destruction on Iraq and Afghanistan….do I think he’ll do it?
Nah…but he should.has teamed up with media organizations—including major television networks and one or more American media outlets—in an unspecified number of countries to produce a set of documentaries and stories based on the cache of Iraq War documents in the possession of WikiLeaks.
Assange learned……this time the document dump will be ON TEEVEE.
the revolution will be televised.
NWBCW!-
Rodney McGruebelstein
Speaking for the Juggalo community, we resent and reject any imagined connections between Glen Beck and ourselves.
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shams
LOL!
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Shams al-Nahar
apres moi, le deluge was certainly the slogan of the Bush adminstration.
This is going to radically interfere with the Bush hagiography.A London-based journalism nonprofit is working with the WikiLeaks Web site and TV and print media in several countries on programs and stories based on what is described as massive cache of classified U.S. military field reports related to the Iraq War. Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tells Declassified that his organization has teamed up with media organizations—including major television networks and one or more American media outlets—in an unspecified number of countries to produce a set of documentaries and stories based on the cache of Iraq War documents in the possession of WikiLeaks. As happened with a similar WikiLeaks collection of tens of thousands of U.S. military field reports on the Afghan war, the unidentified media organizations involved with the London group in the Iraq documents project will all be releasing their stories on the same day, which Overton says would be several weeks from now. He declined to identify any of the media organizations participating in the project.
Overton acknowledges that the volume of Iraq War reports that WikiLeaks has made available for the project is massive, and almost certainly more than the 92,000 Afghan field reports the organization made available for advance review to The New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel. The material is the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has ever occurred, Overton says. As we reported when stories on WikiLeaks’ Afghan holdings first appeared, the site’s stash of Iraq documents is believed to be about three times as large as its Afghanistan collection. After the Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel published their stories based on the Afghan war documents, the site itself posted 76,000 of the papers. But after coming under criticism from both Pentagon spokesmen and human-rights activists for publishing information that could jeopardize the lives of Afghans cooperating with American and allied forces, WikiLeaks said it would not itself post the remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents until activists had taken some time to review, and, if necessary, edit sensitive information from the material.
I wonder if this will cause a delay in the release of Bush’s book?
A confession: I worked behind the doors before going back to school. The sheer volume and variety of the documents suggests a revolt of the analysts, and is inconsistent with Manning being the sole source. Need-to-know and theater tasking constrains cross-pollination of data.
The soldiers are still loyal, but i think a significant proportion of the analyst class has turned.
Manning just volunteered to be the conduit.
If the Pentagon has lost moral authority over a cabal of analysts, those-who-see the data raw and unfiltered, the wars are all over but the shouting.
And it is the internet that made this possible. -
Shams al-Nahar
what do you suppose is in Wikileaks crypted Insurance file?
do you think its a bluff?Cryptographers say that the file was likely made using a 256-bit encryption standard known as AES256,
strong, but not unbreakable.
because the gov’t crypto hackers are pretty l33t and the gov owns the supercomputers to do codebreaking……
is Assange boasting not only a smoking gun on the gov’t’s head but also that his hackers are better than gov’t hackers?
mebbe Assange used quantum encryption….that is the only ‘unbreakable’ encoding i know of.
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thabet
All this outrage over what some guy did over the internet, and what it may or may not lead to (deaths of Afghans by insurgents/Taliban).
Yet when an American general is honest (!) enough to say NATO and chums have killed a several shed loads of people (“an amazing number”) nobody bats an eyelid.
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shams
the outrage over Assange is radar chaff to distract from the content. the warpimps are pushing the walk on by, nothing to see here, we knew this……. EXCEPT THAT ASSANGE ENDAGERED AFGHANS!!
what Wikileaks docs show is that Afghanistan is unjust, immoral, and unwinnable.
and WE ARE LOSING VERY BADLY.
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Shams al-Nahar
For anyone that is superbored, you can check out this Abu Muqawama thread.
The Father of Resistance meets the Mother of Truth. -
Shams al-Nahar
I just feel pretty sad for Andrew Exum at this point. The one thing that is sure to come out of the Wikileaks core dump on Af-Pak is the end of COIN.
he has like a hundred comments on his multiple posts and no one has mentioned that…..COIN is about to become something politicians scrape off their shoe. -
Shams al-Nahar
David Frum, stunt doubling for Sully.
In a 2003 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, al-Naqib said that the “decadent immorality of Western civilization must be almost, but not quite, wiped off the face of the earth.”
How about we just wipe the intransigent stupidity of Western civilization off the face of the earth and keep its decadent immorality? Its much less harmful.
In recent examination of the failure of COIN and the mini-surge exposed by McChrystal’s resignation/firing in Afghanistan…. at Abu Muqawama’s counterinsurgency blog, it became apparent that COIN has the same flawed base premise as the Bush Doctrine….that somehow when empowered to vote, aka “democracy promotion”, the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan will vote for quasi-secular judeoxian-style democracy. In al-Islam the clergy are the lawyers, and vice versa. There is no secular substrate to build on– ISLAMIC law is the only rule of law available. Unless Bush was prepared to go into Iraq and build secular law schools from the ground up, and wait 50 years or so for the model of the rule of secular law to permeate the nation, the whole misadventure was doomed to Epic Fail.
So the upshot is 5000 young american soldiers have died because Bush and his “advisors” were apparently too stupid to realize that when muslims can vote, they vote for MORE Islam, not less.
I understand that even the Obama administration might not want to acknowledge this…it is pretty demoralizing for the troops. But this is the identical reason that COIN is failing. Because of the Dragon’s Teeth Axiom of SNT (social network theory) even population-centric COIN actually generates more terrorists than it kills. The reason COIN was successful in Anbar, is that al-Q was not local. But the Taliban ARE local, and so influence propagates among two networks, both the social connection and the consanguinous connection.
The only way to fix COIN is to start to exploit the existing “brightest” (most powerful) local influence nodes, the mosques and the local islamic jurisprudents/muslim clergy.
Leverage “the consent of the governed.”
But to do that we have to give up on the War on Islam.
The raving about shariah, stonings, fgm, and little girls not going to school is just misdirection at this point.
It is simply a way of not having to admit that we expensed 5000 troops in blood, and a trillion dollahs in treasure, to create an islamic state in Iraq with shariah in the constitution, religious political parties, and that declared a national holiday when american troops left the cities. And where islamic jurisprudence still calls the shots. Fadlallah was a major advisor to Maliki.
I think that realization would be heartbreaking for the families of the fallen.
But it is going to come eventually.
And meanwhile we have a choice in Afghanistan. Use COIN to bricolage the substrate, the existing embedded system of islamic jurisprudence to create a rule of islamic law, or expense more blood and treasure to achieve the identical result we got in Iraq…..after another 6 or 8 years. -
Shams al-Nahar
I’m very curious to see what Petraeus is going to do.
The use of SNT(social network theory) to evolve strategy is the first third culture meme i’ve seen exploited in mil-culture.
And it WORKED! in Anbar against al-Q.
Petraeus, the father of COIN, was able to force out al-Q because they weren’t local, so they didn’t have blood kinship network connections in Anbar. In 2008 Petraeus said a surge strategy in Afghanistan probably couldn’t work, (likely for the very reason i cite). The Taliban have both kinds of connections because unlike al-Q, they are local…see Dragon’s Teeth Axiom of Social Network Theory.
Also drone useage was not prevalent in Anbar. Drones are very, very bad for popcentric COIN, because the collateral damage on civilians propagates ginormous amounts of influence on local nets. to the locals, it looks like ALL the kills were civilians, the Tali’s pick up the bodies and bury them before sundown. the locals don’t get US briefings.What will Petraeus do now?
I think he is setting up talks with the Taliban.-
thabet
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Shams al-Nahar
Drama, kabuki, misdirection. I don’t think Petraeus will ever run for president.
I think…Petraeus and Obama are most worried right now that America’s Crazy Ex-grrlfriend is going to whack some Iranian nuke sites if she starts feeling sufficiently unloved.
That is why Petraeus walked back from the obvious truths in the report, to give Obama some plausible deniability cover when Israel starts hysterically screaming you don’t love me anymore!
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shams, 
thabet, and 
MikeLyons are discussing. 
Rodney McGruebelstein are discussing. 
shams 9:32 am on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Be honest.
It wasn’t counterinsurgency, it was proselytizing judeoxian/westernstyle democracy.
Lets hope the dumbass WECs learned their lesson.
shams 10:02 am on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
you see…..brother thabet…..it isn’t imperialism…..its colonialism and missionarism. that is how Bush spoofed us into being crusaders for Jesus. its the missionary position (heh) that we are just raining hell on those muslims to bring them the glories of superior xian civilization and western culture.
That is why all the raving about shariah law.
Its raw evangelism….it must be justified.
That is why we are building girls schools while splattering their families over the countryside with drones….
Because we can’t bring our selves to admit the truth.
we are missionaries with guns.
thabet 10:34 am on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
British imperialism was all about bringing light to the darkies too.
shams 10:52 am on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Yep, Big White Christian Bwana in action– like this….
remind me why we disagree, brother thabet?
shams 11:41 am on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
could it be…..that you feel superior to those cousin-marrying barbarian hirgabi? And praps……..you feel that they might benefit from an infusion of western moral authority?
/giggles behind hand
thabet 3:14 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You were doing ok until this comment.
I really don’t need middle class white converts telling me how to interact with members of my own family, my friends, my work colleagues and my neighbours, most of who happen to be ‘non-western’ and Muslim.
shams 5:41 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink
what is our disagreement then brother thabet?
and im upperclass.
I ride with the Hunt. I got my colors when i was 12.
shams 6:25 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink
is a revert less in your eyes than an ethnic muslim, brother thabet?
thabet 7:50 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink
Not less at all.
But this incessant need to lecture me about what Muslims really think is annoying and I wish you’d drop it.
shams 8:54 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink
i would be glad to….but i think i deserve an explanation of why you linked the muslim cousin-marriage article and then deleted my perfectly rational response that all semites historically intermarry, as evidenced by contemporary genetic screening for Tay Sachs carrier and the heritability of IQ in the Ashkenazai .
shams 9:01 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink
And have i convinced you that the AKP is evidence of islamic democracy, and that “secular” western democracy is actually a lie?
‘Westernstyle’ democracy in America is judeoxian democracy.
The cake is a lie.
shams 10:17 am on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Possibly the Grand Experiment in selfgovernment could be considered a Fail at this point.
The self-representation of the cudlips allowed for the election of a man so profoundly stupid that he nearly destroyed America.
If Palin gets elected the Grand Experiment of the Founders could concieveably terminate in bombing Iran to start WWIII, and the destruction of large parts of the earth.
Representation of the stupid by the stupid.
MikeLyons 11:48 pm on October 3, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The self-representation of the cudlips allowed for the election of a man so profoundly stupid that he nearly destroyed America.
Oh, come on, don’t be so hard on Obama. Just because his supporters thought “Obama’s gonna pay my mortgage” and voted for him is no reason to call them “cudlips”
BTW, how’s that near 10% unemployment rate working out for you?
shams 5:38 am on October 4, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Better than it is for older white xian males who will likely never work again.
Bush was a fucking WEC moron. He is going down as the worst president in history. I think WEC should disqualify any one from being president– inshallah that is what will happen…a sort of cultural gulag for moronic xian leadership…an electoral prejudice against christianist morons.
Romney wont be elected– he is MORMON.
The number of judeoxians is shrinking…..the consent of the governed eventually will tear the reins of power from your old shaking-with-parkinsons hands.