Center for a New American Security

This blog long ago established a tradition of announcing the identities of its writers to mass yawns and mumblings of "yeah, so?"

Today, it's Londonstani's turn.

As many of you already know and a few have probably worked out with a little cross referencing via google, my name is Amil Khan.

And that's me.

After a few cameo appearances as AM's "violent Pashtun flatmate", I first wrote for this blog nearly two years ago after returning from a trip to Lebanon that was actually supposed to be a holiday. I used to work as a Middle East correspondent for Reuters. After six years abroad, I left to come back to London and work on documentaries. Since then, I've had the privilege of working for the likes of Channel 4 and the BBC on topical foreign and domestic projects. My speciality is looking into why people do bad stuff. Mostly, I looked at Islamist extremism but I've also spent time investigating the kinds of extremism we see more often, such as racism.

Towards the end of 2009, I moved away from the world of day-to-day journalism and cast my net further a field. This blog had a lot to do with that decision. Some of the stuff I'm proudest of having written came about following conversations in Walthamstow with Abu Muqawama that started with the words, "OK, so I saw [insert strange occurrence]. Weird or what??." To which, AM's reply often was, "why don't you blog on it?"

Presently, I am working on a project in Pakistan that aims to challenge the religious legitimacy claimed by extremists operating there. And since I am what a friend calls a "recovering journalist", I exorcise my demons on this blog whenever time permits. I usually restrict my writing to this blog, however, my latest thoughts ended up on the Guardian's Comment is Free site.

I intend to continue writing for this blog. I haven't yet figured out why AM himself is on Twitter, but I might even give that a go some day. In the meantime, I'll be posting here whenever I get the chance. The intention will be, as always, to provide readers with the context behind the news rather than the news itself (this is done far better than we can manage by the likes of Reuters, BBC, AP and AFP). And as always, expect to find many references to things that have no broader intellectual interest whatsoever and are only there for amusement value.

Hell, at the very least, everyone can rest assured that in keeping with the house style of this blog, Londonstani will not be referring to himself in the third person.

I am crashing on some writing assignments, so I do not have much time to blog. Or to read much, alas. But I figured I would share with you the books that I am currently reading and those that are on my shortlist, competing for my attention.

Currently Reading:

1. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World; I have thus far really enjoyed this book and am almost done with it. Very readable financial history, much like Ferguson's The House of Rothschild.

2. War and Punishment; Really impressive. Thus far, he has cited sources in three different languages and has a thorough understanding and incisive criticism of the literature he is challenging. No wonder people think highly of this dude.

Competing For My Attention:

1. Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home; How sick am I that this is the book I am most excited about reading? A book on budgets! But there had been no good book on the subject prior to this one, and I think very highly of both co-authors.

2. Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations; I have heard great things about the research this active-duty officer has been doing on the values and political allegiances of the U.S. military's officer corps.

3. Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War; Megan graciously hosted me for Christmas dinner at her apartment in Cairo in 2005. I look forward to reading this book, based on her experiences reporting the Middle East for the Los Angeles Times. An advance copy landed on my desk yesterday.

4. The Iraq Effect: The Middle East After the Iraq War; I got a briefing from both co-authors yesterday. Had a few quibbles with some observations, but their analysis on stuff I know a little about, like Lebanon, largely matched my own. Solid, necessary work.

Ugh. This is a sad day for this blog. As many of you know, I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to free speech. I have always supported an open comments policy on the grounds that it is better for ugly and offensive language to be exposed to the light of day than to employ some bound-to-be-arbitrary standard for moderating comments. And that policy worked for over three years. But some of my co-workers have recently complained, with justification, about the comments that were on this post, resulting in us deleting a few comments. Sadly, the comments threads on this blog have featured a lot of offensive, nonsensical language recently. What the heck is wrong with some of you people?

I have come to the conclusion that tasking a few CNAS interns with moderating the comments on this blog will not be too great an offense to the marketplace of ideas. A policy regarding offensive language in the comments is being drafted and will soon be posted. If you want to be ugly and write offensive comments using racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and/or anti-gay language, that's fine -- just do it someplace else. From today on, you will no longer be allowed to write them on this website and expect them to remain published in the comments section.

Again, this really makes me frustrated. We shouldn't have to do this, gang.

Update: Okay, here it is. I hate having to do this.

CNAS retains the right to delete comments that include words that incite violence; are predatory, hateful, or intended to intimidate or harass; or degrade people on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In summary, don’t be a jerk.

I'm just back from a great conference at Wilton Park in the UK on how we can assess the effect of aid and development on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. I'll have much more to say about this later. But depite my well-documented and mischevous antagonism toward those doing quantitative analysis in the field of security studies, allow me to once again highlight the work being done by Eli Berman, Jason Lyall, Jacob Shapiro, Joe Felter and Company. Eli's presentation on the effectiveness of CERP funding in Iraq was, for me, one of the highlights of the conference. And although the conference was governed by Chatham House rules, you can read the paper behind Eli's presentation here (.pdf). Again, I will have much more to say about this later.

For now, though, one thing that caught my eye was this report by Mark Perry (prolific author, father of Cal) in Foreign Policy on the case CENTCOM is apparently making to bring Israel into its area of responsibility. Briefly, there has always been a good argument for keeping Israel a part of EUCOM: what is the optic we send when a senior commander of U.S. troops in the region makes a visit to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt ... and then caps his trip off with a visit to Israel? Does that cause more suspicion among our allies -- Arab and Israeli alike -- than it is worth? And we can safely assume that EUCOM would resist such a move outright. With the establishment of AFRICOM, EUCOM's relevance has already been diminished. What would taking away Israel do?

But putting Israel in CENTCOM probably makes sense. Issues relating to Israel and the Palestinians affect quite a lot of CENTCOM's activities already, and it doesn't make sense to decouple what's going on with respect to the Middle East Peace Process and the command in charge of the Middle East. I worked on a review of CENTCOM strategy last year, focusing on the Levant and Egypt, and I confess -- and I am only speaking for myself here -- to having been frustrated in reviewing U.S. strategy concerning Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon without looking comprehensively at U.S. strategy toward Israel and the Palestinians. It doesn't make sense, right? So moving Israel and the Palestinian Territories over to CENTCOM is probably a wise decision, but I confess to not having fully thought out what the second- and third-order political effects would be.

So a typical cycle for this blogger is to get annoyed by some criticism, write something snarky and mischievous, and then get all Presbyterian about it and feel guilty for having written something snarky and mischievous. I wrote something snarky and mischievous about Dan Drezner yesterday and now feel kinda bad about it because it's really not cricket to write such things. And since I don't really know the guy and can't apologize directly, allow me to both reference what I wrote and honor his particular field of research by recommending a brief reading list on the political economy of the Middle East. (I'm not sure if Drezner would define himself as a political economist, actually, but close enough.) When I was a graduate student at the American University of Beirut, the Department of Political Science there was briefly blessed with two of the finest political economists to have worked on the Middle East in recent memory. The first was then-president of AUB, John Waterbury, and the second was a mentor of mine named Yahya Sadowski. The key thing about both of these guys is that they are both first-class political scientists specializing in political economy who have also spent decades in the Middle East living and researching. This allows them to write with both rigor and intimacy with their subject matter. Accordingly, if you're looking to start some research on the subject, you could do a lot worse than:

Waterbury's (with Richards) A Political Economy of the Middle East: Third Edition

and

Sadowski's Scuds or Butter?: The Political Economy of Arms Control in the Middle East

Okay, I feel better now for having done that. I'll be gone for a week or so, so allow those books to tide you over. What will I be reading while I'm gone? Why, none other than my main man Hein Goemans! Drink some beer, Hein! The royalty check is in the mail!

"The Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier's valor; no heaven will receive him. The Iliad's words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful: dark night covers the dying warrior, hateful darkness claims him; he is robbed of sweet life, his soul goes down to Hades bewailing its fate. Again and again, relentlessly, the Iliad hammers this fact: the death of any warrior is tragic and full of horror. Even in war, death is regrettable."

- Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles

Much to my amusement, this post on the utlity of quantitative analysis caused quite a stir in the international relations blogosphere. I don't know if folks in security studies just don't have a sense of humor or if it's true what Kissinger said about how university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. But what I think happened is that Stephen Walt read my post, chuckled, and his chuckling did two things: 1) it brought a lot of people to this site who were not aware that the posts on this blog are meant to be light and irreverent, and 2) it opened up an old fault line in security studies between traditionalists like Walt who aren't so impressed by quantitative analysis and the Young Turks and political economists who have pushed to make it ascendent in political science departments across the United States. I have about as much interest getting involved in these scholarly disputes as I do catching the Ebola virus. But I did find some of the reaction pretty amusing. Like the fact that Hein Goemans, a brilliant scholar at the University of Rochester, was writing comments on my blog at 5:17 on a Friday afternoon. (Hein, buddy, it's happy hour. Put down the TI-89, get off the internets and go drink a beer.) Or the fact that Cranky Dan Drezner was left in a cursing, sputtering rage over at his Foreign Policy blog. (I was particularly hurt that Drezner didn't see the humor in my post, as I have always found his willingness to hold forth on the peoples and politics of the Arabic-speaking world and Iran without any time spent in the region or training in its languages to be hilarious.)

In the end, though, I commissioned one of this blog's regular readers, "Scott Wedman", to write a response to what I had written. What follows is good stuff. I am sorry that folks got their proverbial panties in a twist about a post that was meant to be funny, so hopefully this will make up for things. (Though curses to you all for making me publish something serious minded.)

Plenty of people have already weighed in on AM’s “Quantitative Manifesto”, including Drezner, Walt, Farrell, and others (including but not limited to Drew Conway, Justin Logan, and Kindred Winecoff).

 

Since others have covered many of the specifics in depth, I’ll limit myself to four broad points that I think those even vaguely interested in these issues should consider (and feel free to disagree with). Just so you know where I’m coming from, I’m an assistant professor of political science at a research university who primarily publishes on international conflict and security issues. I use both qualitative and quantitative research methods. I have also done some work that is better defined as policy relevant or even policy analysis.

 

First, good research is good research, regardless of method. Just criticizing one method or another out of hand is short-sighted because the more important thing is encouraging good research methods overall. While that sounds trite, it’s true. Good work asks an interesting question, utilizes new evidence or methods to answer the question, and is appropriately modest in its conclusions. Good work can be qualitative, quantitative, or game theoretic. Frankly, lots of research isn’t good work, but there’s quite a bit of good stuff out there. And much good work follows a lot of AM’s manifesto, though not all of it. What’s important is that people from across the methodological spectrum be open to sources of evidence and argumentation that fall outside what they may utilize in their research, but that may shed light on a topic of interest. Of course, that’s easier to say in theory than in practice.

 

Second, there is a difference between empirical social science research and policy analysis. Social science research, which lays out theories/hypotheses and then (mostly) uses evidence to test those theories/hypotheses, is potentially a useful input for those interested in specific policy recommendations. Good social science research suggests what is most likely to happen in a certain situation, based on what has happened before in similar situations. But that’s not a substitute for specific, in-depth information on the question of the day, whether it’s the consequences of implementing new sanctions on Iran, whether or not Obama’s surge in Afghanistan is likely to succeed, or something else. Social science research is one tool in the policy maker’s toolkit. And perhaps, as Drezner and others have argued, it should be used more often. But it’s not, and it shouldn’t be, the only tool.

 

Third, there are important benefits to using quantitative methods in international relations/security studies. The simplest is just that there are often competing theories or arguments drawn from qualitative studies on topics like the effectiveness of economic sanctions or the link between different types of political regimes and success on the battlefield. Quantitative analysis helps scholars systematically evaluate those competing claims by seeing how they fare when tested on dozens or hundreds or thousands of cases instead of just a handful or fewer (quantitative scholars will argue among themselves as well, but you get the drift). Of course that doesn’t mean a political science professor knows more about how to take a hill or how to secure a village than someone in, you know, the military, but it does mean those scholars are (hopefully) producing valuable knowledge that is based on more than their (or any one person’s) personal experience.

 

Fourth, international relations and security studies were traditionally very hostile to quantitative methods and formal models (the old security studies = realist = qualitative idea used to rule the day), but most of the best scholars these days use multiple methods, usually meaning qualitative analysis and either quantitative analysis or formal models. Sometimes they use all three. However, the move to multiple methods is generally not a crass ploy to get published or get tenure (and I don’t think AM meant to imply that it was). It’s a genuine recognition on the part of many scholars, and especially younger scholars, that the more tools you have in the box, or clubs in the bag, or whatever the analogy, the more evidence you can bring to bear to answer a question. And there’s no reason to exclude a type of evidence when it can help give you a new perspective on a question. There are also some questions better answered through qualitative analysis, some through quantitative analysis, and some through formal models. So the more methods you know and can use, the more interesting and varied questions you can answer. That’s just smart.

Today we have a special interview with NPR's Deborah Amos. Deb is a longtime reader of this blog and an even longer-time student and observer of the Arabic-speaking world. I asked her to discuss, for the benefit of the readership, her quite lovely new book on Iraqi refugees and some of the regional dynamics set in motion by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

1. Let me start off by saying that I really enjoyed this book. For a journalist who has spent most of her time in radio and television, you are an exceptionally eloquent writer. But I want to talk about the tone with which you wrote your book as opposed to your diction. It strikes me that you can write a critical essay on the Arabic-speaking world with contempt, or you can write an equally critical essay on the Arabic-speaking world with compassion. I can't help but notice that at the same time Max Rodenbeck has been taking Lee Smith to task for apparently doing the former, you have done the latter.* But then, you have spent most of your professional life working in or on the Middle East, haven't you? Your love for the cultures and peoples of the region shines through your narrative, and even when you pass judgment, you pass it with a high degree of sympathy and self-awareness. Tell us a bit about how you first came to the Arabic-speaking world and how your long engagement with the region set the stage for this book.

Thank you for recognizing that broadcast journalists can write complex sentences. In some ways, this book represents a long journey. I first arrived in the Arabic speaking world in 1982. I landed at the port of Jounieh to report on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. My first image of a Middle East war zone was a woman water skiing off the waters of Christian east Beirut as Israeli jets were pounding Muslim West Beirut. It was my first lesson in sectarian fault lines. I also had the best meals of my life that summer; it is Beirut, after all. Over the next three decades I reported from almost every corner of the Middle East. Iraq had been off-limits in Saddam’s time. I could get a visa to travel there, but it was illegal for Iraqi’s to talk to foreigners. When I arrived in Baghdad in 2003 I could talk to everybody. They all had plenty to say and in some ways that opening conversation in this formerly closed country set the stage for this book.

2. I want to ask you about the Iraqi refugee crisis in just a minute, but your book is about more than that. As eloquent as I found the prose inside the cover of your book, the title is a rather blunt, inelegant "Eclipse of the Sunnis". On the other hand, maybe that title says all that needs to be said. Is that the theme of this book? Are we seeing a seismic shift in power relations in the Arabic-speaking world? And how can that be so when Sunni Muslims still constitute such an overwhelming majority of the Arabic-speaking peoples?

When I first started writing the book I had a different title in mind. I was interested in the experience of exile and I wanted to use the opening line from a poem by Dante that expressed the pain of political banishment. “You shall leave everything you love most,” wrote Dante and it seemed to capture the complicated emotions of Iraqis who hated Saddam but were deeply tied to their culture and community. The title changed as I understood that the sectarian cleansing in Iraq had a wider implication. The majority of exiles and refugees are Sunni Arabs. Baghdad has had a demographic shift that is historic and seismic. Baghdad is now a Shiite capital which has an impact on the way power relations work in the country. Iraq’s Shiites won the sectarian war, the Sunnis lost. However, Iraq is not an island. As you correctly point out, Sunni Muslims still constitute an overwhelming majority in the region. Iraq’s Sunni neighbors see the resolution of the exile crisis as an indicator of Iraqi’s identity. An eclipse implies a phase. There will be no stability in Iraq until there is political reconciliation and power sharing. To quote an Iraqi political analyst, “The Kurds are only 20% of the population without a friend in the region, and they’ve managed to destabilize Iraq for 80 years. The Sunnis have friends in almost every neighboring capital.”

3. About a year ago, The Gamble by Tom Ricks came out and seemed to have as many detractors as admirers. I was one of the people who liked it, taking it for what it was, largely because I knew it was just one of many books that would be written about the events known as the "Surge" and that other books would soon be published telling the story of Iraq from the perspective of grunts, insurgents, and ordinary Iraqis. Tom Ricks has told me that he himself looks forward to reading those books. I think your book is, in some ways, a "Surge" book in that it speaks to the effects the war and especially the U.S.-led offensive of 2007 has had on ordinary Iraqis -- and especially those who came to be refugees. What do you think about the idea that your book -- meant to be a broader narrative of the region -- is in some ways also a book about the Iraq War and the Surge?

While the “Surge” is not the major focus of the book, I write about the Iraq war and the events that surround the surge from an Iraqi point of view. I felt it was a view missing from the war literature. I couldn’t be on the ground in Baghdad in 2007, but I was in Damascus during the troop build up. There were more Iraqis fleeing the country in 2007 than had left in 2006. In Damascus, the UN refugee center was packed each day. By interviewing the newcomers I could document the explosion of sectarian cleansing that took place as additional U.S. moved into Baghdad neighborhoods. For many Iraqis, the price of the surge was quite high and some are still paying. Tactically, the surge contributed to the dramatic drop in violence, strategically, the surge failed to spark a political reconciliation in Iraq. Which means the refugee crisis could be with us for some time to come.

4. You write, in your chapter on Lebanon, how the Palestinian refugee problem in that country is proof positive of what happens when refugee crises go unresolved. What do you see as the long-term effects of the Iraqi refugee crisis on the region?

First, I want to talk about important indicators. I believe the March 7th parliamentary elections will play a role in the refugee crisis. The outcome will determine whether there are wide spread returns. The Iraqi election commission expects that more than 160 thousand Iraqis to vote in the voting centers across Syria. Arab League poll watchers are going to be dispatched to monitor the vote. The refugee neighborhoods are papered with campaign posters and Iraq’s Sunni politicians are courting the exile vote including Tarek al Hashimi, Iraq’s Vice President. This is an unprecedented event. The exiles are part of a ‘virtual’ Iraq that exists beyond the borders. The election outcome could determine whether Iraqis remain in exile, a destabilizing population in the region, or return home. They will be watching for the signals of power-sharing and what the vote reveals about the strength of the sectarian fault lines.

5. What concrete steps should policy-makers -- U.S., international, regional, Iraqi -- take to address the refugee crisis?

A few years ago, when I started interviewing refugees and NGO’s in the region, a U.N. official estimated there would be about 100 thousand Iraqis that would not go back. The number has probably grown larger since then, but the list reflects the legacy of the past few years: those too traumatized to return, religious minorities still threatened, female headed households, and Iraqis who worked for the U.S. military. While the U.S. resettlement program has made great strides, the specific program for military translators is a failure. The number of Iraqis granted special visas is dismally low. The program needs some serious attention. As for the larger picture, donor fatigue is hampering UN programs that support refugees. The International community still has a role to play in funding programs in Jordan and Syria. The latest U.S. government report portrays an Iraqi population that has no hope of employment or integration in exile; their children are largely outside the education system. This is not good news for Iraq’s future. The Iraqi government’s policy towards exiles and the internally displaced seems to be one of willful neglect. The Obama administration must use any remaining clout to get the next Iraqi government to focus attention on this population.

6. I usually end these interviews with a booze-related question, asking my interviewees to name their five favorite bars in their far-flung corners of the globe. Your book, though, reflects your love affair with the cuisine of the Middle East. You're always writing about food, and although I think we've dined together a couple of times, I remember with especial fondness a big dinner we enjoyed at Abdul Wahab al-Inglizi in Beirut with Leena, Oliver and several others. What, then, are your five favorite restaurants in the Arabic-speaking world? And your answers don't have to be all haute cuisine experiences -- what are the best places, for example, for fuul or kabob?

Thanks for letting me off the hook on the booze question. I’m not much of a bar girl, but I have done my share of sampling Arak around the region. However, the cuisines of the Middle East are my favorite topic. I would have to place Abdul Wahab al-Inglizi at the top of the list because I’ve spent many enjoyable evenings there, including the dinner you mention. Many of my favorite dinner memories include the company as much as the food. A meal at al-Mayass, an Armenian restaurant in Ashrafieh, a Beirut neighborhood, was all the more remarkable because Sami Zubaida, the “cuisine sociologist,“ was a guest. There is no better place to eat Ful than Abu Abdo’s in Aleppo, Syria. The restaurant is a “hole in the wall”, serving ful for more than 70 years. The dash of Aleppo pepper makes it all worthwhile. And while I’m on this great food city, I have to nominate a meal at Aleppo’s private food club located above Yasmeen d’Alep Hotel. You have to make friend with a member to get an invitation, but you have 600 people to choose from. And finally, the kabob. This is sure to get me in deep trouble, but I nominate the Iraqi kabob as the finest in the region. Iraqi refugees have opened more than a dozen restaurants in Damascus. My favorite is Qassim al Kassam Abdul Guss. You’ve pointed out a much better translation than the one I used in my book, “slave of grilled lamb,” which says all you need to know about the Iraqi obsession with grilled meat.

Thanks, Deb! Interested readers can buy her book here.

*I have not yet read Lee's book, I should say, so I cannot pass judgment on it. I plan on reading it, though, and will ask Lee to do a similar Q&A for the blog if the readership is interested and Lee is willing.

I just found this via Arabist. This is Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middle East correspondent for the New York Times (and the Boston Globe and Washington Post before that), speaking at my alma mater.

The David Brooks love letter to the people of Norway in today's New York Times is worth reading. A true profile in courage from the nation of 4.7m people that has won more medals than any other nation in the history of the Winter Olympics:

He was hunted by about 50 Germans and left a trail in the deep snow. He’d lost one boot and sock, and he was bleeding from where his big toe had been shot off. He scrambled across the island and swam successively across the icy sound to two other islands. On the second, he lay dying of cold and exhaustion on the beach. ...

 

A 72-year-old man rowed him the final 10 miles to the mainland, past German positions, and gave him skis. Up in the mountains, he skied through severe winter storms. One night, he started an avalanche. He fell at least 300 feet, smashed his skis and suffered a severe concussion. His body was buried in snow, but his head was sticking out. He lost sense of time and self-possession. He was blind, the snow having scorched the retinas of his eyes.

But I couldn't read the op-ed without thinking about Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset, who, when asked about his team's second place finish in the cross-country relay in this year's Olympics, delivered what is surely the greatest quote in Olympic history and perhaps the greatest quote by an athlete to the media since Eric Cantona's famous "seagull" speech:

My name is Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset. I skied the second lap and I f---ed up today. I think I have seen too much porn in the last 14 days. I have the room next to Petter Northug and every day there is noise in there. So I think that is the reason I f---ed up. By the way Tiger Woods is a really good man.

Skål!

Also, I liked what Bob Baer had to say about this affair in last weekend's Wall Street Journal.

I have not seen the Hurt Locker. My only opinion of the director, Katherine Bigelow, is based on Point Break, which we can all agree is the greatest movie ever featuring Keanu Reeves shooting a gun up in the air while screaming. But I do not understand my fellow Iraq veterans complaining the Hurt Locker isn't realistic enough. When did war movies suddenly have to be realistic? Did Blackhawk Down start this? Was it the bank robbery scene in Heat? The reason I say this is that one of my best childhood friends was walking through a Walgreens in Nashville, passed a $9 DVD Double Feature of Kelly's Heroes and the Dirty Dozen and immediately thought, correctly, "Oh, man, this would make Ex's year if I bought this and sent it to him." Now there is very little that is realistic about either movie, but c'mon, they are surely two of the greatest war movies ever. And they both star Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland, the latter of whom is high as a kite in both.

A lot of us have deployed to war and been in a few firefights, but surely we can all appreciate the tripped-out genius of this opening scene, right?

Oh, man, this is another classic scene.

You all know how much I love reading lists. I have been looking over the suggested reading list for the U.S. Army War College (.pdf), and it is mostly excellent. Some may snigger over the inclusion of Tom Friedman's latest book and scratch their heads over why Jimmy Carter's book on Israel and the Palestinians has been included, but overall, the selections are quite good.

More reading lists can be found here (.pdf).

We have touched in this blog on developments that seem to suggest the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups have started working ever-more closely together. This article by David Rohde of the New York Times makes spells out the case more explicitly by drawing on Antonio Giustozzi's latest book - Decoding the New Taliban: Insights form the Afghan Field.

"The Taliban and their cause have moved effortlessly across national, ethnic, and tribal boundaries. Claudio Franco describes how Pakistan's tribal areas have served as a base for the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. In December 2007, the Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was able to create an alliance of Pakistani jihadi groups, which ranged from Sunni hard-liners eager to kill Shia, to Punjabi militants eager to kill Indian forces in Kashmir, to Pashtuns eager to topple American-backed leaders in Kabul and Islamabad. Mehsud, who was killed in an American drone strike in August 2009*, blocked Pakistani government efforts to split the Pakistani Taliban along tribal lines.

"Baitullah's masterstroke was his involvement in the creation of the TTP in December 2007," Franco writes, using the acronym for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or Taliban Movement of Pakistan. "Treating the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] like a section of the Muslim Ummah, and tribals as a single community of believers, the brains behind the TTP were able to introduce a mutual assistance mechanism designed to break the government's strategy."

Franco writes that the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban both operate under a loose Taliban command structure headed by the longtime Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Omar. Broad directives are issued by Mullah Omar, but local Taliban ground commanders in both countries carry out local operations as they see fit. He concludes that the Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban are wings of the same broad Taliban movement. "The Afghan Taliban never appear as an external actor," he writes. "They direct the Pakistanis as if they were another of their regional Wilayat, or governorates."

Another important point to look at in the article is how the "semi wild men of the tribal lands" (as a starry-eyed aid worker in Islamabad once said) have become pretty clever at the old technology thing:

"In her essay, "Reading the Taliban," in the Giustozzi volume, Joanna Nathan marvels at the Taliban's haphazard, yet sophisticated and extremely effective p.r. strategy. A movement that seemed to reject modernity in the 1990s is now adept at using technology to monitor its enemy, disseminate its message, and shape its image. One Taliban commander operating just south of Kabul in Wardak Province, for example, recognized the publicity value of carrying out attacks near Kabul. "Being near Kabul allows the news and military events that happen here to reach all the international media outlets," he told Al Somood, the Taliban's official magazine, in 2008. "For instance, when we destroyed 54 logistics vehicles in July, local and international journalists rushed to report the event."

The idea that Taliban leaders think of informational influence as an integral part of their operational planning actually puts them a few steps ahead of their ISAF and Pakistani opponents.

Rohde makes two very nail-on-the-head conclusions.

1. All this talk of talking to the Taliban seems a little too hopeful if you consider that the Taliban (whichever branch) sees itself as doing pretty well at the moment. Why start thinking about negotiating when you feel you are winning (ie managing to stay in the fight) and your opponent is talking about leaving in a year and a bit?

2. An Afghan surge is unlikely to work while the Afghan Taliban is drawing on support from its now integrated branch on the other side of the Durand Line. However, this article was probably written before news emerged of the arrests made by Pakistan, which we talked about here and here.

But, considering the mystery surrounding Pakistan's intentions in relation to those arrests and their possible repercussions<!--EndFragment-->, it's worth keeping Rohde's final words in mind.

"Another scenario is more likely, and arguably more frightening. There is one prospect worse than Pakistani influence over the Afghan Taliban, and that is the Afghan Taliban’s immunity to Pakistani influence. Pakistan’s generals may find that in fact they now do not have the influence over the hard-line Afghan Taliban that they believe. A new generation of Afghan Taliban might remain unwaveringly committed to the jihad that they are waging with their Arab, Uzbek, and Pakistani brethren. They could hunker down in their tribal area strongholds and dare the Pakistani army to dislodge them. What then? As the American troop presence in the region shrinks in 2011 and 2012, the Afghan Taliban could re-emerge with a vengeance."

I have written a little about the utility of quantitative analysis in the field of security studies here and here. Last week, though, I finished Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson's book on how quantitative hedge funds -- as opposed to "fundamental" investors like Warren Buffett -- contributed to the Wall Street collapse of 2008. Patterson ends his book with the efforts of some quants to get their analysis to abide by a code of conduct. The resulting manifesto -- written by Paul Wilmott and Emanuel Derman -- can be read here. There are some useful passages, highlighted below, which address the uncomfortable reality that elegant mathmatical formulae don't always describe messy human endeavors like the behavior of the markets -- or war, for that matter.

Physics, because of its astonishing success at predicting the future behavior of material objects from their present state, has inspired most financial modeling. Physicists study the world by repeating the same experiments over and over again to discover forces and their almost magical mathematical laws. Galileo dropped balls off the leaning tower, giant teams in Geneva collide protons on protons, over and over again. If a law is proposed and its predictions contradict experiments, it's back to the drawing board. The method works. The laws of atomic physics are accurate to more than ten decimal places.

 

It's a different story with finance and economics, which are concerned with the mental world of monetary value. Financial theory has tried hard to emulate the style and elegance of physics in order to discover its own laws. But markets are made of people, who are influenced by events, by their ephemeral feelings about events and by their expectations of other people's feelings. The truth is that there are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them. ...

 

The Modelers' Hippocratic Oath

 

~ I will remember that I didn't make the world, and it doesn't satisfy my equations.

 

~ Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.

 

~ I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so.

 

~ Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.

 

~ I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

I found the humility in this manifesto to be really refreshing. What might a similar manifesto look like for those using quantitative analysis to study war? And should the U.S. graduate programs in political science (and subsets of the field, like international relations and security studies) pushing their students toward quantitative analysis be more up-front about the explanatory limits of such analysis? Anyway, borrowing liberally (read: plagiarizing) from Wilmott and Derman, here is what I think a Hippocratic Oath for Quantitative Analysis in Security Studies should look like:

• War is a human endeavor. I recognize that it is a phenomenon that does not conform to neat mathematical equations.
• I will use quantitative analysis in conjunction with theory and qualitative analysis to describe what I see as phenomena in war and peace. I will be honest about the limits of both my theory and my analysis.
• In war and peace, the variables are infinite, and not everything can be measured or assigned a numerical value.
• I will not use numbers to signify what are fundamentally qualitative assessments without acknowledging to my reader that I have done so in order to satisfy a departmental requirement, gain tenure, or get published in the APSR. Or because I have been in graduate school for so long that I have forgotten how to effectively write in prose.
• I recognize there are no mathematical equations in Vom Kriege and that it is nonetheless unlikely that my legacy will transcend that of Clausewitz.
• I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do. 

A just-published news report has prodded Londonstani out of a work-enduced coma:

The Christian Science Monitor reports today (24th) that the Pakistani authorities have moved against the Afghan Taliban leadership based in Pakistan (dubbed the Quetta Shura)

"In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Western and Pakistani media had previously reported the arrest of three of the 15, but this is the first confirmation of the wider scale of the Pakistan crackdown on the Taliban leadership, something the US has sought."

As the CSM rightly asks; 1 Why is Pakistan doing this now, and 2 Does it significantly damage the Afghan Taliban?

"The crackdown may to be related to efforts by some Taliban leaders to explore talks with Western and Afghan authorities independently of Pakistan, the UN official said"

There has already been much reporting of the politic-ing behind efforts to talk to the Taliban - including the use of the good offices of former Afghan Jihadis who have long since hung up their AKs (like Abdullah Anas). But this changes the game. The Pakistani on-going operation in Waziristan was delayed as the Pakistani army cut deals with Afghan Taliban leaders (among others) so as to limit the fronts it would have to fight on. Might these arrests, which look to be more than a cosmetic exercise, basically equal a declaration of war against the people it built up and then protected for so long. That is a pretty serious shift in policy.

A recent article in The New Republic about General Keyani, the Pakistani army's chief of staff, comes to mind. Michael Crowley thinks Keyani sees that American and Pakistani interests (as viewed by Keyani) are aligned and suggests that Keyani was just getting round to this move all along. But Pakistan's key interest in Afghanistan centres on making sure the people who run the place like Islamabad more than New Dehli. The only Afghanis likely to feel that way are the Taliban. How does arresting their leadership sheltering in Pakistan make them feel warm and fuzzy about Keyani's men? And how does it make them want to conduct any future potential talks with the allies through Pakistan?

As for damaging the Taliban:

“This really hurts the Taliban in the short run,” says Wahid Muzjda, a former Taliban official turned political analyst, based in Kabul.

"You can arrest Mullah Baradar, but there are many Mullah Baradars out there,” says Mr. Zaif. “The commanders are replaceable. The fighters on the ground will keep fighting.”

Seems the jury is out on that one.

UPDATE: Fixing The New Republic writer's name first name and updating headline

Anand Gopal, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now with the Christian Science Monitor, has a scoop.

Pakistan has arrested nearly half of the Afghanistan Taliban’s leadership in recent days, Pakistani officials told the Monitor Wednesday, dealing what could be a crucial blow to the insurgent movement.

In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Western and Pakistani media had previously reported the arrest of three of the 15, but this is the first confirmation of the wider scale of the Pakistan crackdown on the Taliban leadership, something the US has sought.

“This really hurts the Taliban in the short run,” says Wahid Muzjda, a former Taliban official turned political analyst, based in Kabul. Whether it will have an effect in the long run will depend on what kind of new leaders take the reins, he says.

News of the sweep emerged over the past week, with reports that Pakistani authorities had netted Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the movement’s second in command, as well as Maulavi Abdul Kabir, a prominent commander in charge of insurgent operations in eastern Afghanistan, and Mullah Muhammad Younis.

Pakistan has also captured several other Afghan members of the leadership council, called the Quetta Shura, two officials with the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau, and a United Nations official in Kabul told the Monitor.

These include: Mullah Abdul Qayoum Zakir, who oversees the movement’s military affairs, Mullah Muhammad Hassan, Mullah Ahmed Jan Akhunzada, , and Mullah Abdul Raouf.

At least two Taliban shadow provincial governors, who are part of the movement’s parallel government in Afghanistan, have also been captured.

A Taliban spokesman denied the arrests, saying that they were meant to hide the difficulties that United States and NATO forces were having in Afghanistan.

Why Pakistan’s sudden crackdown?

The crackdown may to be related to efforts by some Taliban leaders to explore talks with Western and Afghan authorities independently of Pakistan, the UN official said. Pakistan is widely suspected of backing the Afghan Taliban in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, a charge Islamabad has long denied. But Pakistan may also be wary of Taliban attempts to initiate talks without its involvement or sanction.

And you people wonder why I never blog or write about Israel and the Palestinians? How the hell am I supposed to make sense of this?

The son of a leading Hamas figure, who famously converted to Christianity, served for over a decade as the Shin Bet security service's most valuable source in the militant organization's leadership, Haaretz has learned.

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder and one of its leaders in the West Bank. The intelligence he supplied Israel led to the exposure of a number of terrorist cells, and to the prevention of dozens of suicide bombings and assassination attempts on Israeli figures.

The exclusive story will appear in this Friday's Haaretz Magazine, and Yousef's memoir, "Son of Hamas" (written with Ron Brackin) will be released next week in the United States. Yousef, 32, became a devout Christian 10 years ago and now lives in California after fleeing the West Bank in 2007 and going public with his conversion.

Yes, this is in fact World Bank honcho Robert Zoellick. And Shakira. No, this is not photoshopped.

Una loba en el armario
Tiene ganas de salir (Zoellick: A-ooooh!)
Deja que se coma el barrio
Antes de irte a dormir

...this one, sure to be under the pillow of every USMA cadet from now until infinity, is out in paperback starting today.

Col. (Ret.) Bob Killebrew just told me that Col. Bob Howard was interred today in Arlington. Who was Bob Howard? Maybe the finest warrior ever produced by the U.S. military. 

While home in Tennessee this weekend, I finished (and enjoyed) this book and this book. More on both later. But as soon as I started Matt Gallagher's new memoir, Kaboom, while waiting on my plane to depart from the airport in Chattanooga, I was hooked. This may well be the best memoir to have been written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Because it captures something I have never really seen captured all that well in memoirs -- how the constant suck of war is intertwined with the never-ended stream of hilarity that takes place in a tight-knit combat arms platoon. Kaboom is laugh-out-loud funny. And brutal. Buy it.

From Mark Helprin in today's Wall Street Journal:

Cancelling the F-22 Raptor, the most capable fighter plane ever produced, is yet another act in the tragedy of a nation that, bankrupting itself, embracing moral decline, and apologizing to its enemies, is losing the will to prevail.

I mean, I do not even know where to begin with this one aside from laugh at how over-the-top that sentence is. I guess I could point out that the Department of Defense's base budget grew, in a time of tremendous financial pressure, 2.8% last year. (1.4% if you adjust for inflation.) I could also point out that since 2001, even if you do not include spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the DOD base budget has increased 40%. (And 70% if you include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan.) You and Mark Helprin can both read about this in Travis Sharp's helpful primer on the QDR and FY11 defense budget.

Lamenting a reduced U.S. Air Force presence in Europe, Helprin writes that "while it declined but before it burned, Rome kept only a shadow of legions upon the Rhine and the Danube." He actually wrote that sentence. In a newspaper. A quick Wikipedia search tells me the U.S. military currently has 369,000 military personnel deployed in 150 countries. Hardly a shadow, those 369,000 troops. And maybe -- just maybe -- we have a reduced presence in Europe because it makes sense to stage elsewhere. Or does Helprin think the Visigoths might mount a comeback and threaten Rome anew?

Helprin points out that three successive U.S. administrations before Obama have down-sized the F-22 program, which, come to think of it, should have told Helprin something. Instead he cites the late Sen. Kennedy's support for the F-22, ignoring the fact that the F-22 was manufactured in 48 different states, meaning Helprin could have found a quote from 95 other senators if he had wanted to do so. 

Oh, and he never mentions the word "drones". Not once. He never once takes on the inconvenient reality that the era of manned flight may be reaching its terminus and that remotely piloted aircraft might render manned aircraft irrelevant in the next generation. You would have thought he would have wanted to have at least challenged that idea as he mounted a lusty defense for the F-22, no?

The pity of all this is that I was talking with Fick just a few weeks ago about what a great book A Soldier of the Great War is. You should read that, and Helprin should stick to writing novels.

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...this video, released by the police in Dubai, of the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is just amazing. Like watching Munich. But for real.