Center for a New American Security

Through the divine miracle that is the internets machine, I have found the greatest blog ever. Please go visit this site and help this clown's hit count so he'll continue blogging, for our amusement.

Abu Muqawama will be offline all tomorrow as we take part in the annual CNAS conference, kicked off by General David Petraeus and expected to attract a ridiculous 1500 guests. YOU can watch the conference LIVE at the comfort of your desk.

http://www.cnas.org/live

Nate Fick and I take the stage with our paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan around 1100.

On a somewhat related note, I apologize to all whose emails have gone unanswered over the past few days. I count over 700 unanswered emails on my Blackberry alone. I promise my schedule will slow down a bit after this week.

So we've been tweaking the blog design all day. It's better, no? What's still missing? Let us know in the comments.

A quick word to the readers:

1. The gang of internet elves working on this website has been really responsive to requests and is working hard to immediately fix both the comments and the RSS feed. Many thanks to Jason and his crew.
2. I should have noted earlier that one of the reasons we moved the blog to this site off of Blogspot was so that active-duty military personnel and government employees whose computers are not allowed to access Blogspot could now read us. So the temporary discomfort you, the reader, are now experiencing will all be worth it. That is, unless you hate America and do not support the troops. Why do you hate freedom?

I am going to try and iron out some of the kinks in this new design this week. As far as I can see it, the things that need to be fixed are:

1. The RSS Feed: it needs to show the entire post and not just an excerpt.
2. The Comments: what, specifically, needs to be fixed here? The log-in?
3. The Blogroll: You would prefer it back on the right instead of the left, no?

Write a comment and let me know what I need to fix.

First off, I apologize for not yet posting anything today. I spent the morning running the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure with some guys from my rugby team. We raised $430, so many thanks to the readers who donated. The race was not terribly fun, though. They kept us standing around for an hour while everyone from Joe Biden to some Eastern European monarch spoke, and when Joe Biden is the one who speaks for the least amount of time, that's not good. You know what else isn't good? When the pre-match ceremony is longer than the race itself. Still, a good cause is a good cause.

Second, thanks for your patience with the new blog design. I'm getting used to it myself, and we have a lot of kinks to still work out, mainly with the comments and the RSS feeds. I promise you we'll be on that like white on rice come Monday morning, but again, please have patience.

Finally, if you, like me, will be attending some barbecues later today, be sure to remember to raise a glass for the boys of Pointe du Hoc. (I noticed a few tan berets in the audience behind the president today in France. A few years ago, one of my old squad leaders brought me back a vial of sand from Omaha Beach that sits on my bookshelf in Tennessee.) The readers of this blog, meanwhile, might be interested in these cool maps and documents from the D-Day landings.

So are we bitter that our boss John Nagl nominated Small Wars Journal to Rolling Stone's "Hot List" instead of us? Naw. I'm pretty sure no one under 40 years of age reads Rolling Stone anymore, so it makes sense that my pleated pants-wearing boss would turn down Frampton Comes Alive! long enough to speak to some geriatric Rolling Stone journalist about the latest "hot" thing.

No, no, in all seriousness, congrats to Dave and the gang at SWJ. We'll be out behind the cafeteria dumpster smoking with the cool kids if anyone needs us.

Us. Nagl.

Dave Kasten, a longtime reader of this blog, is asking over at Attackerman whether or not we have lost our academic focus.

But I'm not sure that the same hunger exists for reading cutting-edge political science works and bringing them to the fight. Exum's list includes few works that couldn't have been added in 2006, to be frank, with additions such as Weinstein's Inside Rebellion that were published years ago. (Kilcullen is a notable exception, but I'd argue his book is one such practical work) Where're the links to exciting working papers from colloquia like Yale's Order, Conflict, and Violence program? What's the new samizdat that gets passed around like The Logic of Violence in Civil Warwas? If the MacChrystal era is supposed to be the era of innovative thinking in Afghanistan, why aren't we looking more outside of the box?

It's a fair question, honestly. Most of the counterinsurgency literature I have read, I read between 2006 and 2008. Since 2007, meanwhile, there has been an explosion of journal articles and papers presented at APSA and ISA on counterinsurgency -- the majority of which I have missed. And honestly, since this blog has been a more-or-less one-man operation recently, I don't have much spare capacity to sift through the latest hotness.

Which is why I need a co-blogger in a bad way, preferably someone with either serious academic rigor or lots of time on their hands to stay current on the literature. Suggestions?

The first rule for success in both Afghanistan and in blogging is to find yourself some dependable local Pashtun allies. So many thanks go out to Londonstani for covering for me these past few days. Back in DC, I am scrambling to get prepared for a meeting later this morning. On the ride to the meeting, though, I'll be reading two things:

1. David Betz and Anthony Cormack on the British Army in Afghanistan and Iraq (Orbis -- password protected)
2. Nadia Schadlow on Mexico in Small Wars Journal.

David and Anthony are friends/mentors from the UK, while Nadia and the Smith Richardson Foundation are generous patrons of many of your favorite security studies geeks.

And if you're really bored this morning, here's Bill Roggio, Bill Nagle and I talking about the new media and contemporary conflicts at the 2009 MilBlog Conference a few weekends back. (Thanks to Greyhawk for putting a fun panel together.)

Panel #4 - 2009 Milblog Conference from Nathan Long on Vimeo.

For those who are interested and in the Washington, DC area, I will be speaking -- along with Bill Roggio and the folks from Small Wars Journal -- at three o'clock tomorrow at the 2009 MilBlog Conference. We'll be talking about the role of the new media in the current operating environment. Ought to be a fun discussion -- I am only upset that work requirements tomorrow will keep me from fully participating in the morning sessions.