Center for a New American Security

This article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek on how Obama tamed his generals is great and worth reading -- although not necessarily for the reasons the author intended. I'm going to offer up my bottom line conclusion up front and then use the article as a starting point to consider some other issues.

BLUF: President Obama has brought civil-military relations back into line in a way that would have made Samuel Huntington proud. There are problems with this, as I will note later on in this post, but overall, this is a really good thing. Alter:

Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.

I have spent a little time recently with Paul Pillar, a man whose intellect and record of service I really respect. Paul has made a point similar to Tom Donilon's regarding the Iraq war -- that there never really was a coherent governmental decision-making process. Obama's decision-making process on Afghanistan, by contrast, is to be applauded for the way in which it differed from the "decision-making process" (if you can even call it that) of 2002 and 2003. Why?

First, do what Dick Betts does when writing about Huntington's so-called "normal theory" for civil-military relations and draw a big triangle on a sheet of paper. Now draw three horizontal lines on the triangle, dividing it into four levels -- political, strategic, operational and tactical. In the normal model, civilians have responsibility for the top section. They decide the policy aims. Then civilians and the military decide on strategic goals and resources. (Betts adds a fifth layer, actually, for ROE.) The military has responsibility for everything else under Huntington's model.

If you look at the decision-making process in 2009 on the war in Afghanistan, things more or less proceeded according to the normal theory. The president commissioned a review of policy and strategic goals in the winter of 2009, which resulted in this white paper. Gen. McChrystal then thought about how to operationalize the president's policy and strategic goals and submitted his own assessment along with a request for more resources. That assessment, combined with a corrupt Afghan presidential election, caused the administration to re-think its assumptions and prompted another strategic review. This was, on balance, a good thing that made me feel good about the president. The president then re-affirmed his policy aims, articulated new strategic goals, and committed more resources to the war in Afghanistan. (I write more about this process here.)

The good news in all of this is that whether or not you agree with the decisions made by the president and his team in 2009, the national security decision-making process more or less worked, and the civilians were in charge every step of the way. This is as both Sam Huntington and the U.S. Constitution intended.

Now for the problems...

1. Jonathan Alter allowed himself to be spun like a top for this article. Reading Alter on Obama is like reading Muhammed Hassanein Haykal on Gamal Abdul Nasser. As veteran media critics have noted, a growing number of "journalists" have exchanged ridiculously uncritical coverage of this administration for the kind of high-level access necessary to write "insider" books on the administration. This article is -- surprise! -- an excerpt from one of those insider accounts. Nothing in this article seriously challenges the administration's version of events, which leads to some humorous moments. In Alter's narrative, for example, Obama courageously stood up to his general's request for 80,000 more troops for Afghanistan. In reality, of course, Gen. McChrystal offered the president several options, and the president chose the middle path. Making it seem like Obama was fighting his generals over every infantry company, though, presumably makes the troop surge Obama authorized more palatable to his base. (It also conveniently ignores Obama's rather consistent campaign rhetoric in 2008 about how President Bush had ignored the war in Afghanistan and how he, Obama, would more fully resource the war.) In Alter's narrative as well, the generals are all media-savvy leakers trying to box in the administration, while the Obama Administration is filled with media "neophytes" (he honestly wrote that) who would presumably never leak anything to a reporter ... and just fell off the turnip truck yesterday. I shouldn't criticize Newsweek when it's run by a Chattanooga boy-turned-good who has had a bad enough week already, but Alter's "journalism" more closely resembles court stenography than a public service.*

2. We've still a long way to go before civil-military relations get as healthy as they should be. On the one hand, the U.S. military and its officer corps is seriously sick in terms of its relations with the elected civilian leadership. I subscribe to many of Richard Kohn's worries that the officer corps is overly politicized. My cousin, who serves as an officer in the Marine Corps, just returned from Iraq and reports that officers there regularly make disparaging remarks about the president in front of subordinates. Have any of these guys ever heard of George C. Marshall? (The fact that these soldiers are serving in Iraq yet spare the younger President Bush any criticism is kind of hilarious if sad.) On the other hand, it seems clear the Obama Administration thinks "us vs. them" more appropriately describes the administration's relations with the uniformed officer corps than it does the fight against the Taliban. Why, I have to ask myself, have members of this administration -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Vice President -- seemingly gone out of their way to cast the June 2011 decision as a zero-sum game between the civilians in the administration and the uniformed officers in the Department of Defense and at NATO/ISAF? Shouldn't we all be in this thing together and reconvene to assess our strategy as one team this winter? I'm encouraged the president apparently likes Stan McChrystal, because honestly, if a Democrat can't get along with Gen. McChrystal, there's not much hope he can get along with any U.S. general. But below the president I sense this paranoia in the administration's staff that the military is out to get them. And that's not healthy, because...

3. The normal theory of civil-military relations is not enough for Afghanistan. This was the theme of my most recent policy paper at CNAS. When I first read Eliot Cohen's book on civil-military relations, I thought he had lost his mind. I now realize Eliot Cohen is simply much smarter than I am. For starters, it is highly unlikely Huntington established his normal theory as prescriptive. Dick Betts has convinced me he instead established it as more of a theoretical reference point. The problem is, military officers (and sometimes civilians) look at it and think it's the way things should be because it basically leaves the execution of war at the operational level up to the military with little to no civilian oversight. (And what military officer wouldn't want that!) When fighting counterinsurgency campaigns as third parties, though, civilian leaders need to stay involved during the execution of the campaign. They need to convince and cajole the leadership of the host nation, for example, to act in ways that serve both their interests and our own. I think the Obama Administration has realized this about Afghanistan and Hamid Karzai, if belatedly. But the administration does not have the luxury of just putting the war on auto-pilot and allowing the military to win or lose it. It has to stay involved. Which means it has to work with its uniformed officers.

Anyway, I think I have succeeded in writing something in this blog post to offend nearly everyone in Washington, DC, so I'll be surfing the internet for jobs back home in Tennessee for the rest of the afternoon. To sum up my points above, though, I think the president has restored some much-needed balance between the civilians and the officer corps on national security decision-making in the past year. But the U.S. military's officer corps and the administration are both going to have to do a lot more work to repair civil-military relations back to where they need to be. And Jonathan Alter ... well, I'm sure his book will be a best-seller.

*If Jon Meacham had gone to Baylor instead of McCallie, of course, I wouldn't even think twice about giving him grief.

I received a note last week from a former USAID administrator lamenting the fact that while the U.S. Department of Defense annual budget remains comfortably north of $700 billion, the U.S. Department of State struggles to keep its measly $58 billion per year. There are a lot of reasons why it's easier to pass a mammoth defense budget than to protect money reserved for foreign aid and diplomatic operations. If U.S. foreign service officers were constructed in as many congressional districts as the F-22, for example, I suspect we would have a lot more congressmen fighting to increase their ranks.

But in their excellent book Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home, Gordon Adams and Cindy Williams offer another explanation:

The State Department's dominant culture -- the Foreign Service -- takes pride in [the department's] traditional role as the home of US diplomacy. Diplomats represent the United States overseas, negotiate with foreign countries, and report on events and developments. Diplomats, from this perspective, are not foreign assistance providers, program developers, or managers. As a result, State did not organize itself internally to plan, budget, manage, or implement the broader range of US global engagement ... State department culture focuses on diplomacy, not planning, program development and implementation.

They go on to lament that "Foreign Service Officers increasingly have responsibility for program planning, budgeting, and implementation, tasks for which they receive minimal training."

There are a number of ways in which military organizational culture changes, and the literature on the subject is extensive. (For an introduction, you can hardly do better than Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff's The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology.*) Strong leadership and emulation of other organizations are two ways in which change comes about, and external shock is another. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, to a large degree, functioned as external shocks that have changed elements of the U.S. military's organization culture. I could be wrong, but I do not think those wars have had a similar effect on the Foreign Service.

*There is, of course, a much larger body of "rationalist" explanations for military change and innovation, starting with this book and this book. I am pretty well read in the corpus, but the best guy to explain the various explanations dispassionately is my buddy Mike, who is wicked smaht and who I am meeting for beers in about half an hour. (Yes, I know what time it is in the afternoon, but give me a break: I have just returned from Saudi freaking Arabia, and happy hour will begin this week when I want it to.)

I am just back from a ten-day trip to the Arabian Peninsula, so expect posting to remain lighter than usual for the next few days. I want to highlight, though, the unclassified U.S. government assessment on the war in Afghanistan which the executive branch is required by law to submit to the Congress every six months. The bottom line:

The continuing decline in stability in Afghanistan, described in the last report, has leveled off in many areas over the last three months of this reporting period. While the overall trend of violence throughout the country increased over the same period a year ago, much of this can be ascribed to increased International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) activity. Polls consistently illustrate that Afghans see security as improved from a year ago. At the same time violence is sharply above the seasonal average for the previous year – an 87% increase from February 2009 to March 2010.

Translation: We have halted the Taliban's momentum. Violence is up, but we expected this to happen as we escalated our activities.

The president's December 2009 speech, we should note, explicitly called for halting the Taliban's to be the #1 goal of our military efforts. So that's good news. But for me, this report is not nearly as important as the one that will be delivered after the next Friedman Unit. The next FU will really and truly be important because a) we will be able to actually assess the full effects of the as-yet-incomplete Obama surge of troops and b) we will likely use that assessment to decide how fast and in what way we will begin to withdraw U.S. and allied units beginning in June 2011.

That having been said, if you are one of those -- and I have heard this the most from military officers -- who complains we do not have a strategy for the war, this report is instructive because it lays out, in detail, the strategy. You can then turn around and argue that the assumptions underpinning the strategy are faulty or that counterinsurgency is a poor operational choice, but you can't argue that folks have not thought about ends, ways and means.

Anyway, this report should keep you busy. It's loaded with interesting stuff, such as the fact that insurgent groups consider 2009 to have been their most successful year but that a majority of Afghans continue to blame them for the security problems in the country. (Only 1%, by contrast, blame the ANSF.)

Enjoy. (And thanks, Laura, for sending this along.)

Report Final SecDef 04-26-10

I've avoided posting on the recent attempt to bomb Times Square as I'm not in Pakistan at the moment, and couldn't honestly say from London what Pakistanis think about it. However, a profile of suspect Faisal Shahzad printed in the New York Times brings up points which I think are worth expanding and putting into context.

Many people still believe that extremists must be poor and badly educated. It's almost the polite thing to believe because it seems we only have two options in explaining terrorism carried out in the name of Islam. If extremists aren't poor and angry then we have to find another common thread that might explain their ideas and actions, and the only other option seems to be Islam. Of course, this reading of events is the one preferred by bigots and so reasonable people would like to steer clear of it.

However, we have more than two options. Islamist extremism has had a long evolutionary process. It can be argued that it started in the late 1700s in Arabia, found its modern voice through Syed Qutb in 20th century Egypt and tested itself on the field of battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That fairly slow process was supercharged after 9/11 and the international events that followed. It is reported that Osama Bin Laden wanted the attacks on the United States to serve as a catalyst. To some extent he got what he wanted. What we are seeing now is the mainstreaming of Islamist extremism. The language and aims of Islamist extremism have become the premier mode of expressing anger at the world around you.

In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, the angry young men of London's inner cities were drawn to crime, the language of black supremacy movements in the US or radical leftwing politics. My favourite quote from a friend about Islam was "a bunch of Indian men in beards bowing to radiators". Now, to many of those young men's younger brothers and sons, Islam is a shadowy force capable of scaring "the establishment", "the man" etc.

What strikes me about the profile drawn up by the New York Times is not that Shahzad was from a well established and well connected professional Pakistani background, but rather that he seems to have made the same transition that I have seen taking place in Egypt, Sudan, inner city London and Pakistan. Shahzad came from a comfortable background and he and his family seemed on an upwards trajectory until something went wrong and he ended up facing "financial troubles". He then became sullen and withdrawn and "started talking more about Islam". My guess is that he wasn't talking about Ghazzali's classic The Alchemy of Happiness, or someother such work that is considered traditional Islam. Chances are that "talking more about Islam" means he was talking about war, invasion, drone attacks, Palestine, Kashmir and how the Western world was intent on making life miserable for Muslims.

A clue to this is in the observation of an acquaintance of Shahzad's:

"His personality had changed - he had become more introverted," Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. "He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things..."

The genius of the al-Qaeda-type extremism that we see today is its ability to seize on the inner turmoil of a diverse range of people (from Texas to Brixton to southern Punjab) and link them to its central world view and then motivate them to take action to they believe will lead to change - change they are not likely to live to see.

During three months with radicals in London and six months in Pakistan as well as various trips to Palestinian refugee camps, I have marvelled at the genius of a simple and powerful message that needs only the most minimal promotion - taking full advantage of the modern world, it's viral and encourages recruits to "self start". "Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be "on his own that he was learning all these things."

There's no one thing that results in someone trying to kill civilians in the name of Islam. Among the clever al-Qaeda messaging, the personal turmoil, individual personality and a host of other elements, there's the unavoidable connection to Pakistan.

Another family friend in Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad "emotional" and said that he used to carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had become enraged by the United States' military actions, fuelled by the Pakistani press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.

Pakistan is a country of 170 million people that used to value it's status as a US ally. Although, the government is still technically a key ally and relations between Islamabad and Washington seem to have improved, Pakistanis live amid violence and economic catastrophe much of which they blame - directly or indirectly - on US intentions towards their country. I work on a project that aims to remove the plank of religious legitimacy from the call of extremists in Pakistan. And in the past six months I have seen that we have our work cut out for us as that call finds followers and sympathisers in upper income urban areas as well as impoverished villages.

Preventing more Shahzads, underwear bombers, Ft Hood Shooters and Jihad Janes will involve challenging the wrong and simplistic view of the West as the ultimate source of all problems and of Islamist extremism as the only force capable of challenging it.

Who knew Michael Caine was a veteran of the Korean War? I sure didn't. I thought this quote of his from an article in the New Yorker, though, was pretty awesome:

“When I was nineteen and a soldier, I often wondered how I was going to be if I knew I was going to die. At one point, we were ambushed in the paddy fields, just four of us surrounded by Chinese. And my instinct — which has lasted me the rest of my life — was: All right, I’m going to die. And that’s O.K. But” — he paused and levelled a heavy finger at the recollected enemy, and at any future adversaries — “as many of you as possible are going to die with me. I’ll take the whole fucking lot.” He grinned. “I’m going to die expensive.”

By the way, if you're looking for a primer in the effects of massed firepower delivered by disciplined infantrymen, you could do worse than to watch this Caine classic.*

*One amusing feature of this movie is listening to Caine -- born and raised in working-class South London -- trying to affect a middle-class Home Counties accent. Almost as good/awful as Sean Connery's infamous Russian accent.

No one has ever explicitly told me this is part of my job, but I have always thought that one of the more useful things think tanks can do is to mine the world of the social sciences (and academia more broadly) in search of those theories and ideas that -- if proven true -- can and should have a big impact on U.S. policies. On my way to Abu Dhabi, I was reading Greg Gause's The International Relations of the Persian Gulf, and the author makes a pretty bold claim:

[Oil] was not the primary driver of any of the Gulf Wars ... [Regional] states acted more against perceived threats to their own domestic stability emanating from abroad than to counter unfavorable changes in the distribution of power or to take advantage of favorable power imbalances. They chose their allies not on classic balance of power considerations, balancing against the strongest regional state, but on how their own domestic regime security would be affected by the outcome of regional conflicts.

This is, to me, a classic example of a theory that, if proven true, should have major policy implications -- especially as we deal with an empowered Iran -- that you shouldn't need me to explain. I am still reading the book, but so far, Gause has made a compelling case.

As many of this blog's readers know, I helped facilitate the Tribal Engagement Workshop run by the crew at Small Wars Journal. I was put in charge of collecting lessons learned from those who have done tribal engagement at the local level in Afghanistan -- mostly Special Forces officers -- and wrote this with Jason Fritz, a former armor officer and Iraq veteran (and "Gunslinger" over at the Ink Spots blog). This will be really dry reading for 98% of the blog's readership but might be of interest to junior officers about to deploy to Afghanistan.

Tribal Engagement at the Tactical Level

This short paper is intended to supplement the Tribal Engagement Workshop (TEW) Summary Report by addressing those findings at the tactical level.  The information provided here was drawn from the experiences of the members of the tactical working group at the TEW to create a planning framework for community engagement at the tactical level – specifically at the team or company/platoon level – in Afghanistan. 

At the tactical level, tribal engagement would best be leveraged as community engagement for reasons outlined in the TEW Summary Report. Community engagement at the tactical level is something that can be done by both special operations forces and general purpose forces – but it depends on what you define as community engagement and where you attempt to do it. Significant time and effort must be devoted to determining which areas and communities are ripe for engagement (and when) while also determining how engaging those communities would benefit the overarching regional or theater campaign plan. Some communities do not readily lend themselves to engagement, and other communities do not lend themselves to engagement at all times – as any kind of engagement depends first and foremost on buy-in from local authorities.

The resources organic to a Special Forces “A Team” are different from those organic to a light infantry company. In order to do community engagement, though, both require specialist language, cultural, medical, and intelligence assets as well as dedicated air assets and, when possible, a detachment of female soldiers or civilians capable of interacting with the local female population.  Without the necessary enablers, either organization would have difficulty in effectively engaging communities.

Like all other military operations, community engagement proceeds by phase. The first phase, at the tactical level, involves a careful reconnaissance of a potential community to determine whether or not local buy-in makes the community ripe for engagement.  This phase also includes supporting operations such as allocating the assets identified above, determining the engaging unit’s logistics plans, and initiating the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration plan for any local forces mustered through community engagement.

The second phase can be described as either the “clear” or “secure” phase, dependent on whether or not it takes place in a permissive or non-permissive environment. It must be Afghan-led and tied to existing political structures in the village. Conditions for moving onto the next phase include the establishment of security, the establishment of relationships with community leaders, some semblance of government, an information operation campaign begun, and the community purged of anti-Afghan forces.

The third phase of the operation – “hold” and “build” – should end with security and governance firmly established, mid-term development projects begun and long-term projects identified, and ongoing shaping operations – to include information operations, key leader engagement, and direct action as necessary. The provision of essential services should be established as necessary to meet critical needs of the population, and security forces should be spread out among the population so as not to be a drain on local markets and resources.

The fourth and final phase of the operation is contingent on locals feeling confident they can provide security and govern on their own. As such, U.S. and allied forces should “test” the ability of local forces to do both. At this phase, there exists a huge risk that U.S. and allied forces will withdraw too early, leading to a collapse in relations between the people and security and the people and their government.

Success in engagement is defined by capable, responsible, and autonomous security and governance apparatuses perceived as legitimate by locals. Security and governance are both linked to higher echelons, and space exists for a peaceful political process to take place.

Despite what Pakistani politicians might say, extremism isn't all cut and dried in a hugely diverse (and equally stratified) country of 170-odd million people. This article by Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT lays it out nicely.

In a country where whisky-happy politicians ban alcohol and bribe-taking lawyers confront military dictators, pretty much everything comes down to politics.

"The university's plight encapsulates Pakistan's predicament: an intolerant, aggressive minority terrorizes a more open-minded, peaceful majority, while an opportunistic political class dithers, benefiting from alliances with the aggressors."

Well worth a read.

I have been crashing on a new paper on Afghanistan, which just went to the copy editor last night, and have not been blogging (or answering phone calls or emails) as a result. I have, though, been reading in my spare time, and if you are not one of the nearly 1,000 people who subscribe to this blog's Twitter feed, here's the best of what I have read recently:

1. Yesterday, CNAS released a new report that I edited. The team we put together explored several international peace operations in order to determine some of the risks of a peace operation in a future Palestinian state. This was a really fun project, because it was think-tankery at its best: a bunch of people with a variety of experiences gathered in a room to discuss something that might never happen but which is worth sorting through anyway because it might very much concern U.S. policy in the future. I learned a lot from reading and editing the chapters written by the other contributors, and I think you will especially enjoy Marc Lynch's concluding chapter, but Lebanon geeks should read what Kyle Flynn and I wrote about UNIFIL. (Kyle, by the way, is perhaps the most kick-ass intern in the history of interns. He served two tours in Afghanistan in 3rd SFG as an 18E before matriculating to Georgetown. I don't mean to brag, but how many other think tanks in this town enlist Green Berets to assist with their research, do you think?) Initial reaction to our report can be found here and here.

2. Just when CNAS takes up the cross, a very broken Aaron David Miller puts it down. It's not hard to see how a good guy like Miller could have grown so discouraged by U.S. peacemaking efforts in the Middle East given the many disappointments of his career. But mine his essay in Foreign Policy, and you'll actually find quite a few good warnings for any U.S. policy-maker who wades in the mess that is Israel and the Palestinians. (ex. "Negotiations can work, but both Arabs and Israelis (and American leaders) need to be willing and able to pay the price.")

3. Joe Klein has written a wonderful article on the trials and tribulations of Captain Jeremiah Ellis in southern Afghanistan. So many questions popped into my head while reading this article, like how the hell a general officer could, at this stage in the war in Afghanistan, convince a unit of soldiers that they would not be doing COIN but would instead serve as "storm troopers," thus sending units into Afghanistan better prepared mentally to kick ass kinetically than to do all the other things one has to do to be successful. Regardless, Joe's excellent piece is also a reminder to advocates of COIN that doing it on the ground is significantly more difficult than advocating for it from Washington or explaining it on CNN.

4. What the hell is Holman Jenkins going on about in this public relations memorandum for Goldman Sachs disguised as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal? If the SEC was really trying to wage war on shorts, as Jenkins alleges, would they not have sued John Paulson rather than Goldman Sachs? That said, Jenkins is probably correct when he argues that the SEC has a tough case to prove, as my friend Binya (C'01) helpfully explained yesterday in the New York Times. This is a blog on counterinsurgency, national security, and security issues in the Middle East, not finance, but the most readable three books I have read on the financial crisis over the past several months are:

1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
2. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves
3. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

That last book isn't about the current crisis at all, actually, but just won the Pulitzer for non-fiction and sheds some light on a previous generation of central bankers and their financial crisis. Anyway, now you know way too much about what I read when I'm not reading Flashman novels or books about Afghanistan. On the positive side of things, I was able to explain, in English, what a collateralized debt obligation was to Lady Muqawama over the weekend. (It helped that she has a math-oriented brain as well as an advanced degree in engineering. And is way smarter than me.)

A hobby of mine is to examine and reflect upon the ridiculous amount of money the military-industrial complex spends on advertising in the DC metro system in its effort to convince congressmen and bureaucrats to buy all the crap it sells. My rugby team practices on a field close to the Capitol South station, and for the past few months, I have passed this series of advertisements for Northrop Grumman trying to sell, uh, something to do with ISR. I'm not really sure what it's all about, but some of the advertisements highlight remotely piloted aircraft. This one advertisement, though, kinda sickens me. I am, like, 98% sure this is a picture of the southern suburbs of Beirut during or immediately after the July War of 2006. Whether or not Israel needed to bomb the southern suburbs during the campaign is up for debate, and I am sure you can make a strong case for Israel's decision to do so based upon the amount of Hizballah infrastructure in what is commonly referred to as "the Dahiyeh". (Which is the Arabic word for "suburb" but has the same societal connotations in Beirut that the French word "banlieue" has in the context of Paris -- no one from the northern suburbs of Beirut, for example, would ever say they live in the "dahiyeh.") Anyway, my point is, should we really be crowing about the destruction of civilian infrastructure during wartime, even when it's within the parameters of international legal conventions? Should the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- civilian housing, civilian businesses, etc. -- really be something we should be slapping each other's backs about, even when the military necessity of such operations is 100% clear? I think you all know the answer is no. And I'm not trying to get all Frantz Fanon on the readership, but if this was, say, a picture of some bombed out city in western Europe after the Second World War, we sure as hell wouldn't be giving each other this kind of collective high-five. ("Woo-hoo! We %$#@ed up Dresden! Hoo-ray, us!") But because this is a neighborhood populated by Shia Muslim Arabs it's somehow okay for Northrop Grumman to take pride in its destruction. Gross. 

Stephen Ellis, a scholar at the Free University Amsterdam, has a very good article on Open Democracy about what extremists are up to in the Sahara.

"It is not often that the words "cocaine" and "al-Qaida" are plausibly linked. But these two forces are turning the western half of the Sahara - approximately from southern Libya to the Atlantic coast - into a locus of illicit money-making and radical politics. The development, quite a feat for a sparsely populated region, presents a challenge that the rich states to the north cannot afford to ignore."

I spent some time in Mali not so long ago and thought it was one of those places that could suddenly become a "hot spot". At which point everyone would sit around scratching their heads saying, "Wow, we didn't know. That came from no-where". Well, it has been building and some of that has been reported. Stephen's article will give you a good round up on what's happened so far and what the situation is at the moment.

If suddenly something horrible were to happen and all attention turned to the Sahel, I'm pretty sure that we will hear the usual thing about how all Muslims - whether in the Middle East, Asia or Africa - are all violent mental cases who follow a religion that tells them to kill and dance in blood etc etc. That will be pretty annoying. So, I'm also posting an article I wrote while out there about the spread of extremism in the region and the reaction of local communities.

"In the market next to the grand mosque in the centre of town, Muslim women with their hair covered but their shoulders and arms bare barter for T-shirts emblazoned with photos of US President Barack Obama. In another part of the market, a young man in the austere Saudi-inspired dress of trousers hitched up at the ankle and long beard berates a bookstall owner for not carrying the "right sort of works".

And just for fun, here's a photo of Bamako market:

These are the kinds of emails Foust sends me at 11:00 at night because he knows I'm the only one who will appreciate them, even if I have never actually watched Glee:

Watching Glee tonight, as Jesse from Vocal Adrenaline conducted a major PSYOP operation against Rachel to throw off the Glee Club before Regionals, it struck me: Glee is an allegory for classic unconventional warfare. Shu knows he has a Sue (Russian) problem, who is screwed because the Indian principal (UN/NATO/EU) is being wishy-washy. He doesn't realize his internal policy team, the Glee Club (i.e. the Beltway Bandits), is flaky and indecisive. Meanwhile, the jocks are like dopey America, who care but really don't. The ex-wife baby drama is totally the insider threat or maybe the FBI. Vocal Adrenaline are like the Israelis - they want to make out, learn all about you, but they're really just screwing with you. And in the end, shit gets thrown down because the Club is functional in performance, but dysfunctional outside of its enclave or off-stage. Coach Tanaka represents disenfranchised allies like the UK and Australia—depressed he lost the chick, but always told what to do and eats for fun. Think about it, it's perfect.