Middle Eastern Links

Back from MWC. Heavy cold. Browser queue jammed with stuff. I'm going to do a brief succession of link posts to clear up. (Happenings last week; huge Leveson revelations, James Murdoch out, King Mob abolished workfare, horse, Borisbus fiasco, debate on Daniel Morgan, even more Leveson..)

This one deals with everyone's favourite global geo-political region, the Middle East. Anthony Shadid died, and Angry Arab thinks the obits weren't tough enough on the Israelis. Alyssa at ThinkProgress has a list of 20 of his best dispatches and only one covers the Palestinians and tangentially at that. Really?

Foreign Policy's David Kenner provides some history of the 1982 Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Syria and its repression by President Assad's dad President Assad. Worth noting that by the time the Syrian army began its infamous destruction of Hama in '82, the struggle had been going on since 1976. Just because the rebels have kept it up so long - which is astonishing and a demonstration of extreme courage - shouldn't be taken to mean that they are going to win in the end.

Colin Kahl, writing in the Washington Post, points out that the Osirak raid in 1981 didn't slow down Saddam Hussein's effort to build the Bomb, in part because it hadn't really started before the raid. However, the attack convinced him to make a concerted effort, and also caused Iraq to abandon the power reactor-reprocessing-plutonium route in favour of the highly-enriched uranium route, which is much easier to conceal and also to distribute among multiple facilities and which turned out to have a entire black market supply chain.

He also links to this piece on planning considerations for Israel, which highlights their air-to-air refuelling tankers as a key constraint. Kahl also points out that in the event of an Israeli raid, their air force would probably be needed at home immediately afterwards.

The Americans, for what it's worth, don't think a strategic decision has been taken to get the Bomb.

Bizarrely, the IAEA inspectors have discovered that the fortified enrichment plant at Fordow in Iran contains 2,000 empty centrifuge cases but not the centrifuges themselves. Is it a bluff of some sort? Is it a decoy target? Is it just a very odd way of going about building an enrichment plant?

Binyamin Netanyahu memorably described as "carrying both Anne Frank and the entire IDF around in his head", presumably in between the bees in his bonnet and the bats in his belfry. It is argued that he won't attack Iran because the settlers won't like it, or possibly that he's bluffing about Iran to draw attention away from them.

Ultima Ratio is down, but you can read their excellent (French) review of Syed Saleem Shahbaz's posthumous book Inside Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban in the Google cache. Fans of "Kashmir is still the issue" will be interested by the argument that Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri and ex-Pakistani officer Haroon Ashik introduced a new strategy aiming to bring about more conflict between Pakistan and India, in the hope of alienating Pakistani leaders from the alliance with the US. Apparently they were planning something against an Indian nuclear site when Kashmiri was droned in June 2011.

RQ-170 upshot, part 2: the bubble

Is there a drone bubble? It's not clear whether this is more like the .com bubble, when a lot of useful stuff was built but a couple of years too early, or more like the housing bubble, when a lot of stuff was built in the wrong places to the wrong standards at the wrong prices and will probably never be worth much. It's the nature of a bubble, of course, that it's precisely at the top of the bubble that the commitment to it is greatest.

One of the things the RQ-170 incident tells us about is some of the operational limitations of the drones. Typically, they are piloted in the cruise from locations that may be a long way off, using satellite communication links, but when they land, they do so under local control via line-of-sight radio link from their base. This allows us to set some bounds on how much of a problem link latency really is, which will take us circling back to John Robb's South Korean gamers.

Gamers are famous for being obsessed with ping-times - the measurement of round-trip latency on the Internet - because it's really, really annoying to see the other guy on your screen, go to zap'em, and get zapped yourself because it took longer for your zap to cross the Internet than theirs. Typically you can expect 40 or so milliseconds nationally, 60-80 inter-continentally...or several hundred if a satellite or an old-school cellular operator with a hierarchical network architecture is involved. A sat hop is always clearly identifiable in traceroute output because latency goes to several hundred ms, and there's a great RIPE NCC paper on using the variations in latency over a year to identify the satellite's geosynchronous (rather than geostationary) orbit as the slant-range changes.

On the other hand, roundtrip latency across an airfield circuit a couple of miles wide will be negligible. So we can conclude that tolerable latency for manoeuvring, as opposed to cruising, is very little. Now, check out this post on David Cenciotti's blog from January 2010. Some of the Israeli air force's F-15s have received a new communications radio suite specifically for controlling UAVs.

You might now be able to guess why even drone pilots are going through basic flight training. Also, this post of Cenciotti's describes the causes of six recent hull losses, all of which are classic airmanship accidents - the sort of thing pilot training is designed to teach you to avoid.

That said, why did all those drones get built? The original, 1980s UAV concepts were usually about the fact that there was no pilot and therefore the craft could be treated as expendable, usually in order to gain intelligence on the (presumably) Soviet enemy's air defences by acting as a ferret aircraft, forcing them to switch on the radars so the drone could identify them. But that's not what they've been doing all these years.

The main reason for using them has been that they are lightweight and have long endurance. This is obviously important from an intelligence gathering perspective, whether you're thinking of over-watching road convoys or of assassinating suspected terrorists (and there are strong arguments against that, as Joshua Foust points out). In fact, long endurance and good sensors are so important that there are even so-called manned drones - diesel-engined, piloted light aircraft stuffed with sensors, with the special feature that they fly with intelligence specialists aboard and provide a much faster turn-around of information for the army.

Their limitations - restricted manoeuvre, limited speed and payload, and high dependence on communications infrastructure - haven't really been important because they have been operating in places and against enemies who don't have an air force or ground-based air defences and don't have an electronic warfare capability either. Where the enemy have had man-portable SAMs available, as sometimes in Iraq, they have chosen to save them for transport aircraft and the chance of killing Americans, which makes sense if anti-aircraft weapons are scarce (and surely, the fact of their scarcity has to be one of the major unreported news stories of the decade).

But then, the war in Iraq is meant to be over even if the drones are still landing in Kurdistan, and the US may be on its way to a "pre-1990" military posture in the Gulf. This week's strategic fashion is "Air-Sea Battle" and the Pacific, and nobody expects anything but the most hostile possible environment in the air and in the electromagnetic spectrum. And the RQ-170 incident is surely a straw in the wind. Also, the Bush wars were fought in an environment of huge airfields in the desert, and the ASB planners expect that the capacity of US bases in Japan and Guam and the decks of aircraft carriers will be their key logistical constraint. (The Russians aren't betting everything on them either.)

I think, therefore, it's fair to suggest that a lot of big drones are going to end up in the AMARC stockpile. After the Americans' last major counter-insurgency, of course, that's what happened. The low-tech ones are likely to keep proliferating, though, whether as part of the Royal Engineers' route clearance system or annoying the hell out of Japanese whalers or even playing with lego.

The RQ-170 hack and the drone bubble

The fact that a majority of this year's graduates from USAF basic pilot training are assigned to drone squadrons has got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere. Here, via Jamie Kenny, John Robb (who may still be burying money for fear of Obama or may not) argues that the reason they still do an initial flight training course is so that the pilot-heavy USAF hierarchy can maintain its hold on the institution. He instead wants to recruit South Korean gamers, in his usual faintly trendy dad way. Jamie adds the snark and suggests setting up a call centre in Salford.

On the other hand, before Christmas, the Iranians caught an RQ-170 intelligence/reconnaissance drone. Although the RQ-170 is reportedly meant to be at least partly stealthy, numerous reports suggest that the CIA was using it among other things to get live video of suspected nuclear sites. This seems to be a very common use case for drones, which usually have a long endurance in the air and can be risked remaining over the target for hours on end, if the surveillance doesn't have to be covert.

Obviously, live video means that a radio transmitter has to be active 100% of the time. It's also been reported that one of the RQ-170's main sensors is a synthetic-aperture radar. Just as obviously, using radar involves transmitting lots of radio energy.

It is possible to make a radio transmitter less obvious, for example by saving up information and sending it in infrequent bursts, and by making the transmissions as directional as possible, which also requires less power and reduces the zone in which it is possible to detect the transmission. However, the nature of the message governs its form. Live video can't be burst-transmitted because it wouldn't be live. Similarly, real-time control signalling for the drone itself has to be instant, although engineering telemetry and the like could be saved and sent later, or only sent on request. And the need to keep a directional antenna pointing precisely at the satellite sets limits on the drone's manoeuvring. None of this really works for a mapping radar, though, which by definition needs to sweep a radio beam across its field of view.

Even if it was difficult to acquire it on radar, then, it would have been very possible to detect and track the RQ-170 passively, by listening to its radio emissions. And it would have been much easier to get a radar detection with the advantage of knowing where to look.

There has been a lot of speculation about how they then attacked it. The most likely scenario suggests that they jammed the command link, forcing the drone to follow a pre-programmed routine for what to do if the link is lost. It might, for example, be required to circle a given location and wait for instructions, or even to set a course for somewhere near home, hold, and wait for the ground station to acquire them in line-of-sight mode.

Either way, it would use GPS to find its way, and it seems likely that the Iranians broadcast a fake GPS signal for it. Clive "Scary Commenter" Robinson explains how to go about spoofing GPS in some detail in Bruce Schneier's comments, and points out that the hardware involved is cheap and available.

Although the military version would require you to break the encryption in order to prepare your own GPS signal, it's possible that the Iranians either jammed it and forced the drone to fall back on the civilian GPS signal, and spoofed that, or else picked up the real signal at the location they wanted to spoof and re-broadcast it somewhere else, an attack known as "meaconing" during the second world war when the RAF Y-Service did it to German radio navigation. We would now call it a replay attack with a fairly small time window. (In fact, it's still called meaconing.) Because GPS is based on timing, there would be a limit to how far off course they could put it this way without either producing impossible data or messages that failed the crypto validation, but this is a question of degree.

It's been suggested that Russian hackers have a valid exploit of the RSA cipher, although the credibility of this suggestion is unknown.

The last link is from Charlie Stross, who basically outlined a conceptual GPS-spoofing attack in my old Enetation comments back in 2006, as a way of subverting Alistair Darling's national road-pricing scheme.

Anyway, whether they cracked the RSA key or forced a roll-back to the cleartext GPS signal or replayed the real GPS signal from somewhere else, I think we can all agree it was a pretty neat trick. But what is the upshot? In the next post, I'm going to have a go at that...

Reflections on a HOWTO

I have been reading Curzio Malaparte's Technique of the Coup d'état this weekend. It's a fascinating document - the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. It was already fairly well-known at the time that Russia in 1917 really wasn't the environment Marxists imagined would lead to a revolution and that Lenin had essentially retconned the whole thing to provide for giving history a little push. Malaparte's unique contribution was to argue that it was more fundamental than that - the Bolshevik seizure of power could in reality have been carried out almost anywhere, for whatever reason. It wasn't a strategic or ideological question, but one of operational art and tactics.

So, what's this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important - you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything's shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don't, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings - get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.

Ideally, you do this by just floaking in through the front door as if you were in the railway station to catch a train rather than to seize the signalling centre. You'll probably need, once you've got control of the real instruments of power, to stage some sort of symbolic overthrow of the government, but this is really only in order to get the message across to everybody else. Then, induce whatever authority is meant to be in charge after the head of government has been incapacitated to legitimise your action after the fact. It doesn't matter much what state it's in - a pro tip is to keep the parliament but get rid of enough opposition members to rig the vote.

Bada bing, bada boom, you are now the dictator.

From the other side, Malaparte argues that the worst thing that can go wrong is a general strike. There's no point occupying key points if you can't make the machine work yourself, as you'll just be master of a lot of dark, cold buildings. The second worst thing that can go wrong is that you start to fall behind schedule. The whole trick relies on missing out as many people as possible, and the longer it takes, the more people have time to recover their orientation and get angry.

Interestingly, he comes up with something very like the 70s "historic compromise" concept in relation to this.

So you need either to get the support or at least the neutrality of the unions, or else render them unable to act in advance, which will mean fighting a civil war before you get to bring off the coup. And once you start, you've got to move quickly and keep moving.

Interestingly, he doesn't say much about how you're going to keep power once you've got it, if you can't rely on calling everyone out on strike. After all, two can play at this game. This is a weakness in the whole concept, and quite an illuminating one.

Malaparte was a deeply odd character, a border-nationalist of German origins, an Italian first world war hero, later a diplomat and journalist and a fascist of the first hour who went on to fall out with fascism and get locked up. This is probably why he is read at all now. Having been released, he reported the Eastern Front of 1941 for the Italian papers until he fell out with the Germans, covered the Finnish sector until something similar happened, ended up back in Italy in time to take part in his second Italian coup (he had already managed to invade Russia twice, once as an attaché with the Poles in 1920 and again with the Germans as a journo in 1941, and live to tell the tale), served in the pro-Allied Italian army, and claimed to have become a communist.

He was also an almost joyously unreliable source, a self-mythologising war junkie who made Hemingway look sensible, and to be frank, if he fell out with the fascists it wasn't because he was going soft or anything. I've read his dispatches from the Eastern Front (The Volga Rises in Europe) and found it hard to make out what the Germans objected to - obviously my standards aren't those of a Wehrmacht press officer, but there's a lot of hardboiled combat reporting, quite a bit of gratuitous fine writing, and nothing much critical of the war or Germany.

He also had an Ernst Röhm gay-fascist streak you could have landed a fleet of Savoia-Marchetti flying boats on, across it. Or at least his style did. The Volga... is just full of dashing blond Finnish officers and casually hunky, rough-trade Nazi recovery mechanics track-bashing in the Ukrainian sun, although there are a fair few fair country girls whose hearts and minds don't seem to need much winning in there as well. (By the time it all got stuck in a ditch outside Rostov-on-Don he'd long since been ghosted by the German spin doctors.)

Anyway, a fascinating, utterly mad, and often deeply creepy writer. Back to the steps of the telephone exchange.

I think his coup technique is quite telling. Fascism always had an odd central contradiction in that it insisted it believed in hardcore political realism but also in romantic activism. Power, and specifically either firepower or horsepower, was all that mattered, but with enough will it would always be possible to change the power realities. Marxists offered inevitability; fascists opportunity. Rapid shock action directed at the key installations will give us the state, and that will give us everything else. Speed, style, ruthlessness, and cheek are everything. It's the hope of audacity - get the right people together and a list of oil refineries, and everything is possible.

This may not sound very convincing, but it's certainly true that many, many coups have been carried out following this rough plan.

Malaparte makes a complex distinction between the seizure of power in a parliamentary state and just using the parliamentary institutions to go legit later. He's agin the first. I'm not so sure - two of the most successful coups of the 20th century were carried out in France, Petain's parliamentary coup and de Gaulle's rather less parliamentary one in 1958.

I think what's happening here is that his residual fascist is showing.

Another thing that runs through the book is the idea, very common in extreme politics since 1918, that the military tactics of the late first world war - infiltration, independent action, surprise attack - can just be ported straight into politics. Malaparte actually goes so far as to make this explicit. It's a great historical irony that the world experts of decentralised command were the Prussians, of course.

As always, though, it all makes for great tactics but lousy strategy.

MGIs for cleaner skies, and Power Tool of the Week

Swinging off a discussion at Jamie Kenny's of climate deniers, I wonder what Jamie thinks about Steve Levine's thesis here that China's emerging culture of mass protest, the famous Mass-Group Incidents or MGIs, may have major and positive consequences for Chinese energy policy and therefore for the world.

It's surely time we started calling the MGIs a movement; they are big, they are angry, they are common and increasingly so. Also, they seem to be getting more simultaneous as well as more frequent. The range of issues involved is enormous, from pay to police violence via public corruption and land appropriation. And they're effective - the Chinese Communist Party, although it has more than enough brute force to crush them, often seems to semi-tolerate mass protests by trimming policy or sacking discredited officials. I've suggested before that the top level of the Party may actually see them as a useful force in disciplining the industrial bosses and territorial proconsuls who rule below it. The emperor may be far and the mountains may be high, but that's the last thing you want when an enraged mob is trying to burn down the Public Security Bureau offices.

Beyond that, it's conventional to say that the Party wants stability above all and that the organising principle of Chinese politics is Hobbesian fear of chaos. JK would probably point out that they're damn right - if you had China's history, you'd be obsessed by chaos because there's been so much of it and it was so fucking chaotic. Anyway, Jamie is the blogosphere's MGI expert and therefore I'd like his opinion.

Levine's argument is that forecasts of China's economic and energy future tend to arrive at an enormous and prolonged boom in coal-fired generation. They do this by projecting current rates of growth into the future. This scares the shit out of everyone with any sense, as it's this huge, epochal belch of CO2 (and a lot of other stuff besides) that will eventually fuck us all up. Of course, if the CAGRs for coal consumption were wrong quite a few assumptions would need to be reviewed.

Levine argues that it's the other stuff you get with coal, especially the low grade brown coal China uses a lot of, that will intervene. Basically, he reckons, air pollution, power-plant development, and mining will become a major and rising source of serious MGIs and will result in the Party restraining the coal industry before the mob does it for them. L

Levine points out that Chinese interests were quite restrained during last year's rush of coal-related mergers and acquisitions - which is interesting when you think that if the Party wanted them to, they could bid almost without limit thanks to SAFE's enormous foreign exchange reserves.

Further, and I seem to remember James Hansen making this point, there are real constraints on how much coal the Chinese economy can get through, in that moving that much coal from mines and ports to power stations will fairly soon use up most of the State Railways' freight capacity. As most of this coal is going to drive the machine tools in all those export processing factories...well, either the bulk haul trainload of coal moves or the intermodal linertrain of containers of exports moves. Are you feeling lucky, punk? Building a completely new railway is of course the sort of thing that gets people in an MGI mood.

From a technocratic perspective, as Joe Romm explains here, restrictions on all the other stuff coal-fired power stations shit into the atmosphere are basically as good as a ban on them.

The question is therefore whether "green MGIs" are a serious possibility. It's not actually necessary that the MGIs be specifically about what Greenpeace would call a green issue, of course. Rioting over pay or safety down the mines, over ethnic resentment in the coalfields, or over land appropriation for new power stations or railway lines would do as well. But it's worth noting that environmental protests happened in the 1980s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and acted as a sort of gateway drug to dissidence more broadly. Not that people who are willing to burn down the police headquarters and run the mayor out of town when they feel their interests are insufficiently recognised need one.

Relatedly, and also via LeVine, meet the Unitec Model 5 pneumatic hacksaw, guaranteed by the manufacturer to slice through a 24" pipeline in one blow and only 16lbs dead weight to tote away from the scene of the crime. And it's nothing but good American workmanship, too. Mesh wireless is so pre-Iraq by comparison, don't you think?

declare independence. don't let them do that to you!

Alliance Géostrategique is having a month on the theme of independence.

Some thoughts: First of all, we're constantly exhorted to act as individuals but also to be aware of interdependence. "Interdependence" seems to be the neoliberal mirror image of "solidarity" - rather than being a force that makes for positive liberty, it seems to be a negative one. You never here of anything good coming of it - rather, it's always about financial crises, viruses spreading on the airlines, cascade failures in supply chains and Internet routing, terrorists and organised criminal networks. We are asked to fork out in the name of interdependence, while individuals profit.

Of course, this is where the similarity with "solidarity" turns up. The supposed virtues of "solidarity" or "community" are often, even usually, indistinguishable from stifling conservatism, Nosey Parker, and the sort of family ethic where everyone knows the worst about everyone else but some people are never held responsible for it. To be really cynical, you know it's solidarity (or interdependence) when someone's rattling their tin under your nose.

Getting back to the point, in the world of "interdependence", why would anyone want independence? If even major powers are constrained by rules, what's the point? Between the 1980s and the great financial crisis, there was a fashion for a sort of soft nationalism, especially in Europe, in which it was argued that small states were worth having precisely because so many of the big questions of peace and war and fundamental economics had been reserved by institutions like the EU, NATO, the Bretton Woods structures, the WTO, and the less formal systems of the international community. Although there was not much point in having a Scottish Army, by the same token, it didn't matter. Therefore things like "Europe of the regions" and friends were a valid proposition.

One of the most dangerous toys left to a small state (or autonomous province) was its financial system. If you couldn't have a Ruritanian foreign policy, you could decide to be a freewheeling sin city of a financial centre, which would give your ruling elite the sort of self-importance the dance of diplomacy did in the Edwardian era. And, in the years when the financial sector itself was exploding in size, it meant real money. Importantly, the same slice in absolute terms means a lot more in relative terms to a small state. So, everyone and their dog wanted to be their regional money centre. In much the same way as the Edwardian small powers insisted on having a battleship or two of their own, they all insisted on having a bank of sorts and building up whatever local financial institutions were available into investment banks. This could be on the grand scale (RBS, WestLB) or on a much smaller one, like some of the Spanish cajas or the Hypo Alpe-Adria in Jörg Haider's fief. (As Winston Churchill said about the proliferation of battleships, it is sport to them, it is death to us.)

It's better that people should play with banks rather than battleships, of course - J.K. Galbraith said that one of the great things about a crash was that although it was a fine opportunity to observe all that was worst in human nature, nothing more important was being lost than money. (He may have been wrong - Chris Dillow observes that financial crises seem to destroy wealth more effectively and for longer than natural disasters.)

But I think the hilarious stories of Icesave, RBS, Hypo Alpe-Adria, that caja that was managed by the Church, and so on do tell us something about the value of formal independence, even limited formal independence like that of Scotland or Catalonia, in the era of "interdependence".

Essentially, I think, the one product that any degree of legal independence lets you produce is impunity. The legal status of independence is important here - without it, you're limited to hawking the bonds of the Serbian Republic of Northern Krajina to unusually dim marks, but with it, you can be of service to the world's plutocrats. Some features of independence that always sell include:

1. Financial regulation


2. Tax


3. Shipping and aviation registries


4. Corporate registries


5. Criminal and civil jurisdiction


6. An Internet top-level domain


7. A direct dialling prefix


8. Diplomatic privileges


9. Passports

Criminal and civil jurisdiction, as impunity services go, have lost some value over the years as extradition treaties proliferate, legal norms are internationalised, and contracts come with arbitration clauses. Further, ever since the US Marshals hauled off Noriega, it's been at least conceivable that an extradition request may be delivered by 1,000lb air courier, in a vertical fashion and without warning. But facilitating tax evasion, the concealment of ownership, and the registration of ships and aircraft without taking responsibility for them are all highly valuable services.

Similarly, being able to register a horde of spammy websites is a good business to be in, especially if your own laws provide for genuinely bullet proof hosting. Unfortunately, many small island states are vulnerable to vigilante action by the Internet operations community as they only have direct access to one transit provider. Lending your direct dial prefix to anyone who wants to originate a mass of sales or propaganda phone calls is also a good business, especially if it involves callbacks and their attendant termination fees.

Finally, selling diplomatic privileges is the individualised version of the state's impunity. Holding an Angolan diplomatic passport kept Pierre Falcone out of jail for 10 years.

Arguably, turning the libertarian view of the state on its head, it is precisely the minimal state that is the closest to the status of one of John Robb's "gangs of black globalisation". Fascinatingly, some valuable criminal functions persist even in the absence of the canonical monopoly of force. It is probably no accident that the neoliberal era has coexisted with an unprecedented proliferation of ostensibly independent states.

We've not had a Thursday music link this week....



Because if anywhere made full use of the fraudulent possibilities of sovereign status, of course...

And it's one jet airliner, for ten prisoners...

One thing that is perhaps being overlooked by people discussing whether or not it would be wise to impose a no-fly zone over Libya is exactly what such a zone would set out to prevent. When it was first suggested, it was inspired by the general horror that the Libyan government was having crowds of civilians strafed by its Sukhoi 22 close-support aircraft. However, especially since several Libyan Air Force crews defected to Malta and to the revolution, air activity has turned out to be much less significant in what is beginning to look like a classical West- or Central-African civil war, based around Toyota pickups and 23mm Russian anti-aircraft guns and mercenaries paid with the money from exporting some mineral or other. You know the one.

It's fairly well known that Libya sponsored several of the key warlords of 90s West Africa - Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, and several others originally met up in Libyan-funded training camps. Interestingly, not only did one of the versions of Jetline International base itself in Tripoli and trade aircraft back and forth with two of Viktor Bout's companies, but Gaddafi's government maintains an impressive airlift capacity. As well as the two flag-carrier airlines, Libyan Arab and Afriqiyah, whose names track the changing priorities of foreign policy, the Air Force operates a semi-commercial cargo wing, Libyan Arab Air Cargo, with a fleet of Ilyushin 76 and even two enormous Antonov-124s, some of very few such aircraft owned outside the former Soviet Union.

I've put together a Google spreadsheet of transport-type aircraft with Libyan operators, sorted so that currently active aircraft are at the top, and generated URIs to look them up on Aerotransport.org, for subscribers, and on JetPhotos.net, in the two right hand columns.



There are a total of 180 airframes, of which 118 are active. It's probably worth noting that there was a report that top managers at Afriqiyah had resigned rather than take part in Gaddafi's war effort, and constant rumours of mercenaries being lifted into airfields in the southern deserts.

The upshot of this is that logistics, rather than tactical air power, might be the most important factor in Gaddafi's efforts to defeat the Libyan revolution/win the Libyan civil war. Rather than engaging in combat, the aim might instead be blockade, as a complement to the international financial sanctions already in place. (A ship has recently been stopped in British waters carrying large quantities of freshly printed Libyan currency.)

On the other hand, it also adds complexity and risk to the whole issue. There are still plenty of people who want to leave Libya, and British government-chartered airliners are ferrying some of them from Tunisia to Egypt. It would be a bad business, to say the least, to shoot down an Il-76 full of refugees. It could be better to try to cut off the supply chain at source by grounding Libyan aircraft elsewhere in the world, although this requires the cooperation of those states who are still willing to let them recruit on their territory. Further, imposing a blockade also implies a responsibility for the survival of the civilian population. Sending aid to eastern Libya has already been suggested, of course.

For a little extra, the Russian Demography blog, venturing well out of its usual beat, notes that the Libyan Government's Dassault Falcon 900EX business jet, 5A-DCN, took a trip to Minsk recently. Its ICAO identifier, useful with virtual-radar sites, is 018019. There are various things the regime might find useful in Belarus - mercenaries, again, small arms (although they don't appear to be short of them), and perhaps least disturbingly, impunity. (Hat tip.)

the CIA decided they wanted Roland dead, so that son of a bitch Van Owen cut off Roland's head

Sultan al-Qassemi kicks in a data point to the ArseDex. Apparently Libyan agents are distributing flyers in Guinea and Nigeria calling for mercenaries to fight for $2,000 a day. Yesterday, loyalist thugs cost $500 a day in Libya. Even with the huge supply of potential thugs in sub-Saharan Africa's demobilised militias being available, the ArseDex has gone non-linear - it's risen by a factor of four in 24 hours. Arseholes now command a premium of four hundred times the average wage. Surely Gadhafi must be doomed now.

The data's pretty sparse, but here's a spreadsheet. The edit link is here.

Moulded from birth. Forged by hatred. Honed in ignorance.

I'm beginning to worry seriously about Korea. There's the wikileaked cable suggesting that Chinese tolerance is running out. There's more recent confirmation. This after the initial non-reaction. Even if Peter Foster is right that the Chinese position hasn't changed that much, it still looks like something has changed in the deterrent balance.

On the other side, Joint STARS has been deployed. You know to start worrying when the ugly grey kit comes out. The US Navy has put 2 carriers and their reinforced task groups off Korea, including a ballistic-missile defence destroyer (USS Paul Hamilton) and four Ticonderoga class cruisers. In all there are something over 900 vertical launch missile tubes on surface ships alone, as well as 70 or so F/A-18s. The Jimmy Carter is in the area, but we don't know which other submarines are, or what percentage of the cruisers' VLS tubes are full of Tomahawks as opposed to SM-3 air defence missiles, Harpoon ship-to-ship missiles, or ASROC antisubmarine ones. And the US Navy has chosen this moment to send 30,000 tonnes of jet fuel to Korea. They do move this stuff around, but it's surely an odd moment to move the jet fuel if you weren't preparing for war. There are also two Marine groups in the area, so chuck in 16 Harriers and a bit shy of a brigade of Marines.

Unlike, say, Iran in 2007, US carrier availability is currently high. They have more ships to send if required.

The South Koreans have been as good as promising to retaliate hugely if there is another attack. They've sacked the defence minister and replaced him with a serving general. People are throwing D'Annunzio-style demonstrations for war. General upcranking is going on. So you can probably see why I'm worried. The whole Japanese navy is at sea, probably in part to get their Aegis missile destroyers deployed on their anti-missile radar picket patrol line early. And there's that unexpected uranium enrichment.

So it's probably high time to worry. Here's more worry: an excellent piece in the Small Wars Journal by US Army Colonel David S. Maxwell, on the problems of either occupying North Korea or just coping with the upshot of a collapse. I hadn't been aware of the degree to which the state ideology is based on the anti-Japanese guerrilla years. In comments, Maxwell says that what worries him more than the prospect of guerrilla war in post-North Korea is a warlord scenario, more Afghanistan than Iraq. Rather, it would be more like the worse-case scenarios for the end of the Soviet Union, given some of the kit that would available.

Maxwell's policy recommendation is to start at once with a propaganda drive to persuade the middle levels of the North Korean state not to go guerrilla and not to sell any highly enriched uranium they may have hanging around, and to come up with a plan for reunification led by Koreans and secured by all-party talks. That's all very sane, but it's not going to be of much help if someone fires artillery into Seoul tomorrow night. So from a British point of view, the best advice I could give would be "get on a plane and go and do an Attlee".

There are also PowerPoint slides to go with that. Hence the title - it could almost be a motto for the blog.

a slight return from 2004...

Two things: brief piece about the Toyota Hilux, preferred transport to the world guerrilla, and a fatwa against mobile money transfer. You know you've made it when you've been fatwa'd.

More seriously, this huge Guardian piece on Iranian policy in Iraq is well worth reading. It's interesting, to say the least, that the people Sadr wanted to see as guarantors of Iranian good faith were Hezbollah - it would seem they've got a foreign policy these days. Also, there's a sort of disguised alliance between the Iranians and the US. The Americans fought hard to stabilise al-Maliki's government and to build it up as a credible force. It's hard to imagine they really want rid of him now.

And there's this:

It is understood that the full withdrawal of all US troops after a security agreement signed between Baghdad and Washington at the end of 2011 was also sought by Sheikh Nasrallah.

"Maliki told them he will never extend, or renew [any bases] or give any facilities to the Americans or British after the end of next year," a source said....US officials have strongly suggested they would scale back their involvement in Iraq if the Sadrists, who have been a key foe throughout the years of war, were to emerge as a significant player in any government.

But it's their policy to leave:

On the 2011 December withdrawal date, the official said: "Any follow-up engagement with Iraq in relation to troops would be at the request of the government of Iraq. There are no plans to keep troops after December 2011. We are drawing down and all will be out of Iraq."

The piece seems to be heavily influenced by sources in Al Baathi Allawi's entourage. You do wonder if Allawi was only fetched out of the deep freeze in order to press Maliki into making a deal with the Sadrists.

Logistics!

So, the raids on NATO trucks held up when Pakistan suspended the border crossing. A good point is made in comments at Adam Elkus's blog - what about the people who own the trucks?

What indeed. The so-called "transport mafia" played a critical role in the creation of the Taliban in the early 1990s, according to Ahmed Rashid. Back in the 1980s, one of the ways the Soviet-Afghan war transformed Pakistani politics was that an economy grew up to service it. Famously, this is what Osama bin Laden actually did for the mujahedin - his construction firm built the roads up to the border, his organisation received new recruits in Pakistan and passed them on. Logistics. Another element of this war economy was a network of transport firms that trucked the war material the Americans were supplying and the Saudis paying for up from Karachi to the border.

Most of these were close to the politicians who also benefited from the war - the NWFP Islamist parties and the feudal landowners who made up the right of the PPP. In fact, very often, they were actually owned by politicians, or by their proxies. To make sure the money fell in the right places and the trucks went to the right places, the Pakistani army created a new agency, the national logistics cell, which was responsible for divvying up the contracts and organising the operation.

After the war was over, the system stayed in place and became part of the general berserk vision of extending Pakistani and Saudi influence into Central Asia. The military would get to implement the strategic depth concept, and keep recruiting jihadis to use in Kashmir. The jihadis would get to continue their never-ending tour. The Saudis could spread Wahabism and dispose of their malcontents. The ISI would reinforce its special role in politics. And the transport mafia would benefit from what appeared to be enormous economic opportunities trading through Afghanistan into what had been the Soviet Union.

In fact, when the Pakistanis came to pick a proxy in Afghanistan after 1992, the choice was between Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the project of creating a new movement. The ISI wanted to stick with Hekmatyar, who they had originally sent into Afghanistan in the mid-70s. However, the other beneficiaries of the war weren't satisfied with him - in the first Bhutto government, the logistics mafia and its friends were very powerful indeed. The key figure was the Interior Minister, the former chief of the Frontier Corps who had recruited the first generation of mujahedin in the 70s.

From a left-wing point of view, a crucial factor here was that the whole imperialist vision of caravans of trucks trading across the Hindu Kush as far as Siberia was a form of economic development that went straight to the traditional powers in Sindh via their new investments in the war economy. A stereotype view might be to say that the PPP was a mixture of Benazir and Bhutto - mass protest politics, and the feudal world. It was this intersection between internal Pakistani class and regional politics, grand strategic visions, and tactical opportunism that led them to support a group of Afghans based in Spin Boldak. Later, during the wars of the 90s, the Taliban repeatedly benefited from transport supplied by the NLC.

So you've got to wonder if setting fire to a load of trucks isn't overreaching a bit. The role of transport and route security just can't be overstated here; the irony in this McClatchy piece is intense.

For nearly a decade, the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cut off the remote, high altitude mountain trails Taliban forces use to smuggle weapons and fighters into Afghanistan. Now, the U.S. military is turning its attention to the border crossing.

"More and more we've realized that they are not coming through the passes, they're just coming through the . . . gate," said one U.S. government official in Afghanistan who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could candidly discuss the unfolding plan to focus on the border crossing.

On the other side of the border, here's the guy who charges $1,200 a truck for safe passage. People are starting to notice; the US Host Nation Trucking contract amounts to 10% of Afghan GDP, paid to companies controlled by the Afghan government's relatives.

Obviously, there are a lot of people in Pakistan who would be delighted to set fire to trucks owned by a Northern Alliance defence minister's son, but as far as I know a major dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan is precisely about whether cargo can move through Pakistan in foreign-owned vehicles. This strongly suggests the movement on the Pakistani side is controlled by the same old, same old people. Key quote:

Until now, the diplomat said, protection of the route had not been needed because the delivery rate had been remarkably efficient given the length and rough nature of the route from the port of Karachi.

I suspect that if they want it delivered, it will be delivered. I've even heard it suggested that some of the cargo burned was insured in advanced, which if true would be impressively sick - it's not often you get to have your own foreign policy and pull off an insurance fire at the same time.

the frontier

Am I right in thinking this is a form of "superempowerment", of the NATO forces on the border, the Taliban, and the Pakistani Frontier Corps on the other side?

Pakistani authorities say that the checkpoint guards tried to alert the US helicopters that they had strayed into Pakistani territory by firing in the air, but the US pilots mistook this action for a hostile attack and blew away the checkpoint.

Any one of them can trigger a violent response from the other, which rapidly flips the whole situation into a higher energy state, with consequences at least up to the operational level. Of course, the FATA are only sovereign territory in a very special and restricted sense of the word "sovereign" - but arguably, optional sovereignty is a useful political tool, permitting the Pakistani state to a) tolerate the jihadis in some parts of the country when that is useful, b) tolerate the Americans in the same places when useful, and also c) assert sovereignty to push back on the Americans when useful, in the light of this.

This is actually roughly what Gallagher and Robinson meant with the "crumbling frontier" 50 odd years ago - zones of ambiguous sovereignty were important because they provided reasons for imperial expansion, reasons against it, and a way for peripheral political actors to use the empire for their own ends.

now you tell us

This Clinton person is making sense, on Israeli politics, on settlements, and on this:

Moreover, Clinton said, Hamas militants will soon have military technology that will allow their relatively low-damage attacks on Israeli population centers to have greater accuracy and lethality.

"It's just a matter of time before the rockets have a GPS system on ‘em and a few rockets will kill a whole lot of people. Netanyahu understands that," said Clinton.

2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrong

Adam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn't defeat the Israelis and hold a victory parade in Tel Aviv, but then nobody least of all them expected or aimed for that. The outcome of 2006 can only be understood in the light of a realistic assessment of the conflict parties' capabilities, interests, and priorities. A score draw is a much better result for Stoke City against Manchester United than it is for Manchester United against Barcelona.

For Hezbollah, the first and overriding goal was surely survival - as it is for everyone, it's even the title of the IISS Journal - followed closely by survival as a force in Lebanese politics, survival of their capability to maintain their self-declared insecurity zone in northern Israel, and finally, inflicting casualties and costs on the Israelis in order to create a deterrent effect. In that light, the result of 2006 was surely just as good from their point of view as they made out - they came away still in the field, still firing rockets, and with their status in Lebanese politics enhanced.

For Israel, well, perhaps one day they'll work out what their strategic aims were.

Elkus argues that the tactical situation at the point when the UN ceasefire went into effect was favourable for Israel, and that had the war gone on they might have done better. This is possible. However, it's also very common for wars to end like this. The Israelis' campaign in 1967 was designed, once they got the upper hand, to get to the Canal and onto the Golan before the UN blew the whistle - one of Ariel Sharon's frequent blind-eye manoeuvres in 1973 was also intended to complete the encirclement of the Egyptian 3rd Army before the UN ceasefire went into effect. The Indian plan for the 1971 war was explicitly intended to take Dhaka before a ceasefire was imposed. More recently, the Russian operation in Georgia was subject to a similar deadline. International intervention is part of the environment, and only fools wouldn't take it into account as a planning assumption.

An interesting sidelight on this, also from Elkus, came up in a parallel blog debate about "network-centric warfare" - he pointed to this gung-ho but good piece about the action in northern Iraq in which John Simpson was blown up. What struck me about it, however, was more that it was an example of this kind of thing - which should certainly make you think about 2006, especially in the light of this.

Tangentially, Sean Lawson's essay on the history of "network centric warfare" is well worth reading, especially for the way so many US officials in 2001-2006 seem to have been competing to see who could validate all the most extreme stereotypes of themselves the fastest, and more broadly on the way a basically sensible idea can become a sort of gateway drug to really insane strategic fantasies.

Cebrowski talked of a “booming export market for…security” and warned those who would resist, “If you are fighting globalization, if you reject the rules, if you reject connectivity, you are probably going to be of interest to the United States Department of Defense” (Cebrowski, 2003c).

Measured against the sort of capabilities the NCW thinkers knew they had, and the kind of goals they dreamed on the basis of them, what possible results wouldn't look like failure? Compared with the enormous arrogance of this vision - they really did want everyone who thinks the CIA wants them dead, dead - what resistance wouldn't look like success?

cutting down on your mercenary miles

Here's something interesting.

We must also consider the alternative that many of the most prominent and powerful Afghans are in fact motivated by greed and opportunism. [harrowell: ya think?] It is therefore in their interest to maintain the status quo of massive US and international spending that fuels the Afghan "rentier state" economy.

This isn't just recreational cynicism; they argue that the latest announcement of a clampdown on private security companies in Afghanistan is to be taken more seriously than the last six, and that this actually represents an effort to integrate them into the Afghan government's forces or at least its allies. Importantly, and very differently from Iraq, the main players are local rather than foreign - like the 24,000-strong Watan Group. (Check out their Corporate Social Responsibility page.) Rather than just being part of the ISAF baggage train, they're a significant nonstate actor in Afghan politics.

If you were feeling optimistic, you might consider this as being similar to the various political fixes the Soviets arranged in 1988 to keep the roads open for the Afghan government post-withdrawal. If you've been reading this since at least 2007, you'll know that I think the absolute best that could happen in Afghanistan would be to get back to something like the 1989-1992 period, just without the continuing US/Pakistan/Saudi destabilisation and the cut-off of Russian aid that kicked off the civil war (and the destruction of Kabul, the invention of the Taliban, and so on). I agree this is pessimistic, but then, well, I wouldn't start from here.

In Iraq, understanding the business/organised crime environment may have played a bigger role than is publicly acknowledged in getting the US Army out of town. For example, here's a Joel Wing piece on the history of oil-smuggling (you'll note that the Baiji refinery comes up. party like it's 2005!). Interestingly, the initial Awakening Council leader Sheikh Abu Risha was an important oil smuggler, and you can bet those networks were of use.

Leaving aside the obvious Afghan export, the analogous business is probably selling stuff to ISAF. Bagram now has its own cement plant, inside the perimeter, but that's a Turkish construction firm.

probably a robbery

Here's an interesting follow-up on the recent raid on the Iraqi central bank, from Joel Wing. You may recall that the attack, a classic NOIA multi-layered assault using suicide bombers, snipers, and infantry, successfully took over the building and held off the Iraqi army for some time before disengaging, and that although a large quantity of documents and computers were destroyed, no money was taken.

I read that as being an insurgent effort to project incorruptibility, in the style both Tomas Masaryk and Mao advised their followers to adopt, in the context of an operation designed to wreck the bank as an institution. Wing's follow-up suggests that there may have been other motives at work - the fire began in the office of the Inspector-General, and the files destroyed include the records of an inquiry into a huge fake-cheque fraud ($711 million - a reminder that frauds in Iraq grow to enormous size). Further, there was a previous unexplained fire in the bank's archives in 2008 which destroyed evidence in a corruption case.

Wing's sources speculate that employees at the bank might have taken the opportunity of the raid to start the fire, that the attackers were involved in the original fraud, or that those behind the fraud hired the attackers to destroy the evidence.

Fascinatingly, almost a year ago, The Guardian reported that similar motives might have played a role in the kidnapping of British IT consultant Peter Moore and the murder of his bodyguards. Moore was working on a new accounting system for the Finance Ministry, that would track all the Iraqi government's income and expenditure in detail, when he was kidnapped from the Ministry's data centre by a platoon-sized force of gunmen posing as Ministry of the Interior forces. It is rarely obvious in Iraq whether the fake policemen are fake policemen, or real policemen posing as fakes, but several different kinds of insurgents had the capability to manoeuvre forces that size in central Baghdad at the time.

Among other things, this is a reminder that the recent history of Iraq cannot be written without paying serious attention to its aspect as the biggest robbery in human history, a fat city for every crook in the Middle East and far beyond.

their law

Ackerman links to an interesting piece from Antonio Giustozzi (direct here); one of the things that comes over strongly is the degree to which the expansion of the Taliban hasn't been driven by the acquisition of public support, still less by conquest, but rather by branding, co-option, and freelancing by significant leaders in Afghan society. Arguably, the picture he draws is one in which deciding that your followers are now the Taliban is an option in politics, rather like deciding to block a road, to accept or resist a particular district chief, to tax, molest, or ignore one or the other heroin smuggler.

As a result, their specialness as a movement is being eroded even as they survive as a power. Their opposition to education and to the education of girls is being dropped as unpopular (and presumably, not supported by new recruits to the federal network); similarly, their opposition to tribal and customary law is going the same way.

Interestingly, the chief selling-point of Taliban government, rather than just tactical arrangements, seems to be that they offer basic justice and dispute resolution; this rather reinforces the view that for much of Afghanistan, they are more of an intermediary institution than a revolutionary movement. Of course, the Pakistan-based leadership may not see it that way, and may well not welcome this development. It's also interesting that Taliban judges are accepted, but aren't particularly popular - it's the absence of alternatives that makes them an attractive option.

Another very important point is the primacy of personality - it really is an environment where specific individual leaders deliver their followers to one allegiance or the other.

This interrelates, of course, with the regional politics; rather like a miniature version of Europe in the 1600s, the war is being fought over whether particular princes accept one of several particular versions of Islamic law or some hybrid of the old Afghan civil code and customary law, all of which are supported by major powers for their own political ends. David Ignatius has a sensible take on this:

The recent Washington debate over Af-Pak strategy has had it backward: This war is less about trying to defeat the Taliban militarily in Afghanistan than it is about reaching an understanding with Pakistan that closes Taliban havens there and allows a political reconciliation among the warring Afghan parties. It's a Pak-Af problem, not the other way around

Which, of course, makes it a Pak-Af-Ind-Iran-Russian problem. There's also an interesting piece on the various regional actors' plans for railways in Afghanistan.

Now, what can we say about this? The story is from Gizab, which is one of the places Giustozzi describes as having accepted a Taliban judge. The people are now dissatisfied with him and have taken the shortest way, as they would have said in the English civil war. Of course, the Americans are delighted and are dreaming of Anbar. And this is good news - it demonstrates the thinness of Taliban control, and their dependence on local affiliates of doubtful loyalty. But without attention to the wider politics - a second Geneva Accords, this time with feeling - it won't change anything.

re-re-wind....

Shia rage in Basra, over electricity that goes north to Baghdad. Joel Wing has more, including that the trouble spread to Nasiriyah. He also provides a short history of the Iraqi grid since 1991, including the fact that the first Gulf War reduced capacity to the level of 1920. A few years ago, even suggesting that 1991 damaged anything marked you out as an extremist.

From the same source, details of the raid on the Iraqi Central Bank. Central banking is not a trade that usually demands physical courage; Ahmed Rashid documents a rare example of the contrary with the Taliban governor of the Afghan central bank who was summoned to the front and eventually killed.

On this occasion, the interesting thing is that it's a complex, integrated attack. Suicide bombers exploded at the entry checkpoints. Infantry charged the breaches and stormed the building. Snipers established themselves on the roof, and other infantry may have created stop-groups in the streets, all in order to block the response.

The attackers destroyed files and computers and killed people. But they didn't take any money. As Masaryk said and Mao quoted, don't lie, don't steal.

writing about Afghanistan, rather than about Brunssum or Qatar

I've finally got around to reading Ahmed Rashid's Taliban and Descent into Chaos. They are as good as everyone says. Specifically, there are perhaps three things that set Rashid apart as a writer on Central Asia. (His contacts book is outstanding, but then, he's not the only one.)

First of all, he writes about Central Asia, rather than about American politics as expressed through the foreign-policy establishment. He writes about Central Asia in the sense that he places the complex regional politics, the competition for power among Pakistan, Iran, and Russia, at the centre of the story. In fact, you could make a case that the Taliban as a phenomenon is almost irrelevant; if it didn't exist, and the political situation was otherwise unchanged, something else would be playing the role of Durrani Pashtun caucus, drugs logistical system, sink for Saudi malcontents, and Pakistani proxy.

He also writes about Central Asia in the sense that he emphasises the intelligent agency of the regional powers, the Afghans of all allegiances, the Pakistani political parties, and the intelligence agencies. This implies taking a very calm view of the actual extent to which the Americans ever controlled anything in the area - in fact, one of his key points is that the current chaos is largely due to the absence of a US policy in the 1990s, and in many ways, its continued absence up to 2005 and even now.

Rashid also provides an interesting view of Taliban sociology - his version of them is essentially another of the child-soldier and refugee camp movements of the 90s, strongly mutually similar across an arc of suffering from Afghanistan to Liberia. He suggests that their ideology is more of a substitute for Islam and for Afghan culture than anything else - a cut-down set of tropes for people brutally removed from the real things.

Of course, there are certain functions that any good tyranny needs to fulfil. You have to have outward signs, so that it is possible to enforce conformity and identify a hated target-group; it may actually be better if they are content-free, so as not to limit flexibility. You have to have exemplary violence, and again, it may help if it isn't actually directed towards victory. Eliminating people for no reason is the ultimate costly signal that anyone could be a target. No tyranny can function without denunciation - arguably, it's more important than all the other functions. And you need the possibility of competitive observance, in order to get individual initiative on your side. "Working towards the Führer" is the classic example. This may actually be a more useful view of the Talibs of the 90s - a sort of minimal dictatorship.

Finally, he provides an integrated systems view of the politics, economics, and societies involved. The creation of the Taliban, in his view, involved many overlaid political networks, those of the Pakistani trucking industry and its partners in organised crime, those of the Sindhi feudal landlords who were frequently investors in the trucking and smuggling business and also powers in the PPP, the Saudi-financed system through which international jihadis were recruited, fetched to the training camps, supplied, and sent out as cannon fodder to pursue Pakistani aspirations in central Asia, and the ISI.

From a purely Anglo-British point of view, it's worth noting that he is very hard on the Americans about the intelligence picture available to the NATO powers in 2005 when Rumsfeld finally dropped his opposition to ISAF deploying outside Kabul. He strongly supports the line that, having maintained practically no presence there and diverted their satellite and other reconnaissance resources to Iraq, the Americans let 16th Air Assault Brigade deploy into a zone of the unknown, which in the way of these things turned out to be full of the enemy. If true, this is the second occasion on which they've welshed on the agreement under which the UK doesn't operate its own imagery satellites. Rashid argues that there was a vital window of opportunity to get a broad-based political settlement in 2002-2003, which the Cheney administration* squandered in the interests of invading Iraq and pleasing the ISI/Saudi intelligence services.

In general, I can't escape the conclusion that Kashmir is still the issue.


(* - Rashid's view of the last US administration is very much a Cheney administration)

Pyramid schemes in Darfur

I briefly touched on South Sudan's new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there's been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud? In the wilds of western Sudan?

Seriously. It seems that someone in El Fasher ran a classic Ponzi burn on a large number of people. They paid in money or goods and received "certificates"; to begin with some of them actually received payouts; then, as always, the curve went exponential, the inevitable crash arrived, and they lost it all. And then they went looking for the guy who burned them, with a view to burning him.

The weirdest bit of this is that you can actually promote a Ponzi fraud there; Charles Ponzi invented his eponymous scam in the hyperurban world of Italian Boston in the 1920s. How many people would you expect to be even vaguely familiar with the concept of investing money in securities in a Darfuri refugee camp? A few years ago, there would have been no chance.

The Sudanese government's own peculiarly vicious take on counter-insurgency, which bears a similarity to the Soviet strategy in mid-80s Afghanistan, was to bomb and raid them until they flee to the big city (in relative terms), where they are thought to be easier to keep an eye on. Samuel Huntington - for it is he! - thought something similar was happening in South Vietnam in the 1960s. In an odd symmetry, the logistics of international humanitarian aid reinforced this - aid is delivered to the refugee camp, because it's where refugees are, and it's near an airfield.

The result has been a form of instant urbanisation; interestingly, however, there is little evidence that the strategy was successful in its own terms. The population has become an urban one, but that doesn't mean its opinions are any different, and the problems of policing an instant city are hardly any easier than those of patrolling a vast wilderness; the guerrilla base area still exists, but rather than being the desert, now it's the urban wall of silence - a fortification in software.

In other news, you may consider this a contribution to Daniel Davies' ongoing international symposium on "The Geneva Conventions - Actually Pretty Good When You Really Think About It".