What's in a Name?

In the 1967 James Bond parody movie, Casino Royale, a number of the British agents decide to re-name themselves "James Bond" in an attempt to confuse the enemy. To that end, we have David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and even Ursula Andress all playing characters who have changed their names to "James Bond". It sounds like a ridiculous plot point--after all, who would be confused simply by giving a whole bunch of agents similar names?

Most of you should be raising your hand right now.

(H/T SWJ's daily roundup) Today's New York Times ran an interesting article regarding the confusion even within the major policy think-tanks regarding the vast number of groups in Afghanistan who refer to themselves as the "Taliban". (As the author notes, "Taliban" is not so much a proper noun as it is a word for "students" in Arabic). Note that the points the author makes about the all-encompassing term "Taliban" can also be applied to the all-encompassing term "al Qaeda" (e.g., al Qaeda, al Qaeda in Iraq, etc). Take a look:

[A]s it devises a new Afghanistan policy, the Obama administration confronts a complex geopolitical puzzle: two embattled governments, in Afghanistan and Pakistan; numerous militias aligned with overlapping Islamist factions; and hidden in the factions’ midst, the foe that brought the United States to the region eight years ago, Al Qaeda.

But at the core of the tangle are the two Taliban movements, Afghan and Pakistani. They share an ideology and a dominant Pashtun ethnicity, but they have such different histories, structures and goals that the common name may be more misleading than illuminating, some regional specialists say.

“The fact that they have the same name causes all kinds of confusion,” said Gilles Dorronsoro, a French scholar of South Asia currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

This week, Mr. Dorronsoro said, as the Pakistani Armybegan a major offensive against the Pakistani Taliban, many Americans thought incorrectly that the assault was against the Afghan Taliban, the force that is causing Washington to consider sending more troops to Afghanistan...

...“To be honest, the Taliban commanders and groups on the ground in Afghanistan couldn’t care less what’s happening to their Pakistani brothers across the border,” said Mr. Strick van Linschoten, who has interviewed many current and former members of the Afghan Taliban.

In fact, the recent attacks of the Pakistani Taliban against Pakistan’s government, military and police, in anticipation of the army’s current campaign into the Pakistani Taliban’s base in South Waziristan, may have strained relations with the Afghan Taliban, saidRichard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer who tracks Al Qaeda and the Taliban for the United Nations.

The Afghan Taliban have always had a close relationship with Pakistani intelligence agencies, Mr. Barrett said recently. “They don’t like the way that the Pakistan Taliban has been fighting the Pakistan government and causing a whole load of problems there,” he said...

...Before 9/11, the Afghan Taliban hosted Osama bin Laden and the other leaders of Al Qaeda, but the groups are now separated geographically, their leaders under pressure from intensive manhunts. On jihadist Web sites, analysts have detected recent tensions between Al Qaeda, whose proclaimed goals are global, and the Afghan Taliban, which have recently claimed that their interests lie solely in Afghanistan.

Mr. Dorronsoro, the French scholar, said the Afghan Taliban were a “genuine national movement” incorporating not only a broad network of fighters, but also a shadow government-in-waiting in many provinces.

By comparison, he said, the Pakistani Taliban were a far looser coalition, united mainly by their enmity toward the Pakistani government. They emerged formally only in 2007 as a separate force led by Baitullah Mehsud under the name Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or Students’ Movement of Pakistan....

...Polls show that Americans, frustrated by the United States’ supposed allies and confused by the conflict, are losing their fervor for the fight. “The complexity of all this is hard enough for experts to understand,” said Paul R. Pillar, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at Georgetown University. “It’s not surprising if it baffles a lot of ordinary people.”

I've made this analogy before, although I stole it from my Middle Eastern history professor some ten years ago, but it's worth making again: the vast number of groups with similar-sounding names but vastly different agendas bears a striking similarity to the various Palestinian liberation groups in Monty Python and the Life of Bryan (all COINdinistas should probably find that link amusing).

As David Kilcullen points out in The Accidental Guerrilla, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are hybrid wars--fights against multiple insurgent groups, numerous terror networks, various competing sectarian and tribal groups, criminal syndicates, and so forth. This is common among many "small wars". Indeed, during the Hejaz War of 1916, Lawrence could not convince many of the Arab groups to join together to fight the Turks. Rather, he was able to get one tribe to lay an explosive device on the railway on one day of the week, then another tribe to mount a small attack somewhere on another day of the week, and so forth. It drove the Turks mad, as they were unable to discern any larger pattern to the operation. As Lawrence quipped, "maximum disorder was our equilibrium".

Small Wars are increasingly frustrating for the populations of Western countries. In addition to the factors frequently cited--namely, the length of time needed to conduct a successful counterinsurgency--the complexity of these operations is sometimes too much for the public to comprehend. In conventional wars, we find it easy to follow the success or failure of our forces. In many ways, it resembles a game of football--we watch our forces move increasingly closer to the "goal line", we face lines of battle which are generally similar to our own, and there's clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys". Insurgencies and hybrid wars, on the other hand, are difficult to relate to--there are often many enemies, their numbers can grow or dwindle at will, they remain hidden and seek battle on their own terms, and success is difficult, if not impossible, to measure.

But this is the future of warfare--it's increasingly confusing, complex and muddled. And that's why we need to train leaders capable of dealing with these environments.

(Additional Reading: See "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence", which has some great passages dedicated to military leaders' aversion to ambiguous situations)

Bond did it first...

In the 007 film "Tomorrow Never Dies", James Bond has a social encounter with yet another millionaire megalomaniac with aspirations of world domination. The villian later sits down with his henchman, a computer hacker, and they try to discern what they can about James Bond's (or his alias') past. As they run the background check, they find that Bond's false identity (I think a stockbroker) has never gotten a speeding ticket, has never been late to work, and has never been in any sort of trouble whatsoever.

In short, the hacker concludes, he's a government agent masquerading as a stockbroker.

The people at Haft of the Spear wrote something along those lines today, noting the distinct electronic electronic tail that our social networking sites give us.

[quoting an article in Computer Weekly] National security advisors are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit people who do not have an online trail, according to Rob Cotton, chief executive of NCC Group.

Anyone with a Facebook account automatically has images in the public domain and is associated with a variety of organisations and other people, making it difficult to keep a low profile, he said.

"Having a Facebook profile, you are opening up a Pandora's box of online traceability that you can't ever truly close, which extends to close associates too," said Cotton.

[Haft of the Spear chimes in] Your name is Alice and you're a "student" on extended holiday in some 2nd world garden spot and the local service looks you up on Facebook and finds . . . nothing. Myspace . . . nothing. LinkedIn . . . nothing. Twitter . . . nothing. Guess what they're thinking? "WTF kind of 20-something doesn't have a social networking trail a mile long?" Guess how long before Alice gets rolled up and PNG'ed? If anything, backstopping someone online is faster, cheaper and easier than doing it in meat-space, but then that would require someone who makes such decisions to know that the IBM Selectric isn't the preferred technology of the day.

The impact of social networking sites on background security checks is one which has been in the news considerably in the past week, with Britain's future head of MI6 drawing considerable fire for having pictures of himself on Facebook.

Focus question: Work and Facebook...do they mix?

Sisyphus

After a few months in Iraq, Soldiers tend to gradually lose track of what day of the week it is. With no true weekends, and most days having the same repetitive grind, many Soldiers joke that it’s like the movie “Groundhog Day”, in which Bill Murray wakes up and discovers that he is reliving the same day over and over again.

A few of us, though, have compared the daily life in Iraq to that of a mythological character named Sisyphus. Sisyphus was doomed to Hades and forced to spend eternity rolling a rock up a hill, only to have the rock roll back to the bottom of the hill, causing him to repeat the act for eternity.

But even this doesn’t perfectly the boredom of the current temp job. Nay, I would say the level of boredom roughly equates to that of Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, who apparently supervised Sisyphus as he pushed the boulder up the hill*. How asinine is that? Did she monitor Sisyphus’ lunch breaks for all eternity? Did she endlessly surf the Internet while Sisyphus worked? Did she fill out risk assessments and file OSHA complaints in case Sisyphus rolled the boulder over his foot? It sounds completely asinine. (If my replacement is reading this, please come back from leave soon)

Fortunately, to kill the boredom, I’ve found a few links for you to enjoy today. This took some work, since apparently it’s Sunday (I often lose track of days of the week), and no one posts good links on Sunday.

Link #1: If you liked the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, you’ll probably like “Devil May Care”, the latest entry in the 007 novel series by the new author, Sebastian Faulks. In this book, which takes place back in the 1960s, Bond’s investigates strange claims of a “Caspian Sea Monster” in the Caspian Sea off of Iran. (The “Department of Recycled 007 Plots” tells me that this is just like the “dragon” in Dr. No)

Bond discovers that the “Caspian Sea Monster” is actually an advanced piece of Soviet weaponry known as an Ekranoplan, a hovercraft which can cross the sea at over 300 knots (550 kph) and carry missiles--in this case, of course, nuclear missiles.

The “Caspian Sea Monster”, interestingly enough, was actually real. The Soviets actually did have a missile-carrying hovercraft capable of traveling at 300 knots, and tested it in the Caspian Sea. Operating at night, many thought that the craft was simply a “sea monster” and constructed legends around it, thus concealing its true purpose. Today, English Russia (where website surf you) carried a special on the 400-ton Soviet ekranoplan program, which is well worth a look.

Link #2 is about me. Yeah, I'm biased.

I've gotten a mention from the writers at a blog entitled “Omnivoracious”, which is a blog for people who like to read and like to talk about what they are reading. They creators of the blog appear to like my, erm, eclectic reading taste, which ranges from T.E. Lawrence to Tucker Max, Thucydides to Huge Titties (I swear that pun works better when read aloud).

One of the questions the author of the post poses is what book on my bookshelf begins with “RAIS”. The answer is “Raising the Bar”, an excellent book on military leadership by Don Vandergriff.

Omnivoracious is definitely going into my RSS reader, along with another other great blog about the Amazon Kindle, The Kindle Chronicles, which features a weekly podcast with interviews and all sorts of tech tips to improve the Kindle experience.

And, as a final note, I had my official US Army Birthday cake yesterday to celebrate the 234th birthday of the US Army. Did you?

*-Well, according to Wikipedia, Persephone supervised Sisyphus, but I have my doubts. I decided to leave it, as my entire three-line joke would have fallen apart if it was proven otherwise.

If our demands are not met, we will kill these bunnies...

I’ve been filling in for someone for the last week or so, doing a job that occupies a great deal of time, but involves very little actual work. This has given me some time to pop in a DVD or two, read, and work on catching up on some miscellaneous administrative things.

One of the DVDs I watched recently was the old James Bond film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, circa 1969. The film had always been one of my favorites, and was based on one of Ian Fleming’s best 007 books. In the book, Bond uncovers his arch-nemesis Blofeld hiding in the Alps and running an allergy research institute. Unbeknownst to the world, Blofeld (and his cat) are using the research institute as a cover to develop biological weapons, which they will use to blackmail the world in exchange for…

…One million dollars! Or something like that.

Anyway, after capturing 007, Blofeld decides to do two things. First, he (naturally) decides to keep James Bond alive for...um...some reason or another. I have to give the writers credit, as Blofeld actually says he has some motive for keeping James Bond alive (unlike his actions in a number of other films). Secondly, Blofeld also decides to broadcast his dastardly threat to the United Nations, naturally prefacing the statement with “if our demands are not met” (wonderfully parodied using a sock puppet in the 1960s Bond spoof video game "No One Lives Forever"). This is in keeping with the modus operandi of James Bond villains throughout the Cold War—whether it be threats broadcast to the UN in New York or to NATO headquarters in Brussels (the nuclear weapons threat in Thunderball).

I find it interesting that, today, you never see the villains broadcasting their threats to the UN or NATO headquarters—they usually just direct their threats toward the American government itself, and more often than not, the US President (Air Force One, Independence Day) or the Secretary of Defense (Transformers) has to fight off the terrorists or Decepticons or Aliens or whatever we’re fighting in that particular movie. I wonder if either a.) This reflects the US' decreased involvement in the UN, or b.) Hollywood thinks that most Americans are unfamiliar with the UN and NATO, hence resort to having the Secretary of Defense battle Decepticons.

Now I can make fun of Quantum of Solace

I actually had to buy a bootleg copy of Quantum of Solace so I could finally find out what Maddox was ranting about on The Best Page in the Universe.  I think I can honestly say that this is one of the worst James Bond movies of all time, as it combines the worst of a whole host of bad Bond movies.

1.) Forget plot and just string together a bunch of action sequences.  I call this the "Moonraker" approach, due to the fact that the "plot" of the movie is just a thinly-veiled attempt to get James Bond to different locations, different women, and different modes of transportation so that he can have some sort of chase sequence.  A clue leads him to Venice where he has a gondola chase, another clue leads him to the Amazon where he has another motorboat chase, finally leading him into space where he has a giant "laser" battle.  Quantum of Solace, for the first hour, has EXACTLY this same plot.  It didn't work for Roger Moore, and it didn't work here either.

2.) If your evil organization is so insidious and so secret that it is everywhere, then why does every member of your organization wear a "Q" on their lapel?  I'm just saying.

3.) I get that Casino Royale (one of the best Bonds ever, due to the fact that it had a great plot) was a reboot, so we didn't see Q, Moneypenny, or the gadgets.  But by the second Daniel Craig movie, we need a better gadget than a Sony Ericson phone and a first aid kit in the Aston Martin.   We need to bring Q and Moneypenny back just like every other Bond movie.

4.) We need a villian with a dastardly plan.  In this movie, a terrorist organization known as Quantum agrees to start a coup in Bolivia in order to allow a military dictator to seize power.  That's the plot.  A military coup in a Latin American country.  You know why Sean Connery, and Roger Moore never had to deal with this?  Because this happened every other week in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  (I was going to make some smart comment about who was usually behind these coups, but I don't want people breaking down my door).

5.) Maddox actually pointed this out, but I will go over it for your sake.  The dastardly terrorist organization, in exchange for initiating the coup, has agreed to a piece of land which secretly contains most of the water in Bolivia.  They then intend to...sell the water to Bolivia at twice the cost, generating cprofits in excess of (EXTREME CLOSE UP, RAISE PINKY) ONE MILLION DOLLARS!  

What's actually sad is that someone actually DID do this in Bolivia, but they sold the water for triple the cost.  So yeah, why don't you come up with a better scheme like, you know, hijacking nuclear missiles or something.  

Jesus Christ, just when I thought that the Daniel Craig movies were an improvement over the last Pierce Brosnan movie (where 007 has to wind-surf over the ice as a giant space "laser" melts the ice behind him, while he tries to get to his Aston Martin, which is equipped with a cloaking device), they come up with this.

Seriously, WTF.  

The great thing about lax international copyright laws

The great thing about lax international copyright laws is that you can buy DVDs of movies that were just recently released in the US.  Some may call this bootlegging, but hey, most truths that we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view.  I was able to snatch up the new 007 movie, Quantum of Solace (just when you thought they'd run out of Fleming titles to turn into movies).  

I went to the Arab market armed with at $20 bill, hoping to purchase two movies.  I thought that I would have to be a shrewd haggler to make this work.  Well, I was wrong.  I picked up both DVDs for $2 each.

I'd been waiting to see Quantum of Solace for a while, not only because I'm a James Bond fan, but also because I need to watch the movie in order to understand what Maddox is complaining about on his most excellent website, The Best Page in the Universe.  

Starbuck's Coffee

One of my favorite books is From Russia, With Love by Ian Fleming. In that particular adventure of ultra-suave British secret agent James Bond, we find 007 traveling to Istanbul to steal a Russian decoding machine. He teams up with a Turkish agent in the employ of the British named Darko Kerim Bey. In his first meeting with Darko Kerim, Ian Fleming painstakingly describes the cup of Turkish coffee that Kerim Bey and 007 and Bond share. Being a coffee lover, I’d always kind of wondered if Turkish coffee was as rich, sweet and strong as Fleming described.

Ten years after reading From Russia, With Love, I wasn’t disappointed.

One of my many additional duties, in addition to flying and blogging, is to initiate various construction projects throughout our area. Lately, the United States has been depending on local Iraqi contractors and businesses, in an effort to attract Iraqi expatriates to settle back in Iraq and resume their businesses. The influx of businesses should revitalize the dilapidated economic infrastructure of the country, and improve at least the economic security situation of the country. Insurgencies prey on those with no other economic options, especially the ones in Iraq, which are fond of offering $20 USD, a considerable sum for Iraqis, to plant roadside bombs. Those with prospective economic security, however, suddenly have something to lose if they join the insurgencies. In a very real sense, the prospect of a real job attracted people towards legitimate business and away from the business of planting bombs.

With that said, we’re currently in the market to build a Crossfit Gym, and I figured that consulting a local Iraqi construction firm located on the base might be a good first step. I had previously made contact with and received a business card from this particular company's team chif.  I noted that his name wasn’t Arabic, but rather, Turkish. I remembered to study up on Turkish greetings before I went into the yard, lest I commit a social faux pas by greeting him in the Arab way. Walking in to the building, I noted that a number of icons were actually dedicated to Paul of Tarsus, the original apostle who hailed from a region in Turkey, and that the local newspapers were printed with Latin characters instead of Arabic, further confirming my belief that the men were, in fact, Turks.

I entered the team chief’s office and greeted him with the Turkish title "effendi", roughly meaning "sir", and we sat down for business. After exchanging pleasantries, I explained to him my situation and gave him specifications for the gym we wanted to build. Roughly eighty feet wide by fifty feet high. Of course, we would want power and air conditioning to compete with the 130F Iraqi summers. We had initially wanted a fifteen foot rope inside the building for climbing, but as the chief and I discussed this, we dismissed the idea, based on the viability of the support structures of the building, and rather settled for a rope hung from a beam outside.

With the crux of the matter done, he explained that it would take a day to do some calculations and then come up with an estimate. At that point, we were joined by two of his collegues, who asked if I would like to join them for Turkish coffee. Remembering the description of the Turkish coffee in Ian Fleming’s masterful novel, and being the coffee glutton I am, I eagerly agreed, noting that I had heard about the merits of Turkish coffee in From Russia With Love, explaining that it took place in Istanbul.

“Have you been to Istanbul?”, asked one of the men, a burly fellow with blue-grey eyes who did not look in the least bit Arabic, but rather Kurdish perhaps?

“No, but I have seen pictures…the Saint Sophia Mosque is very beautiful, one of the wonders of the world”, I replied.

“A very beautiful city” said the man, “In some places Istanbul has remained the same for six hundred years.”

“Well, except for the name, my friend” I quipped, eliciting some laughter from the men. 

I asked for the man's name and explained that his name was Sulemein, a common name in the Middle East.

“As in 'Sulemein the Magnificent'”, I asked, referring to the great Ottoman Emperor.

“You know your history well”, he replied. He explained that he was from Irbil in Iraq, which is part of Kurdistan. Another gentleman, an Iraqi expatriate to Sweden, was originally from Suleimaniya, also in Kurdistan, near the Iranian border.

While the men might have lived in Turkey, it was now apparent they were Iraqi and Turkish Kurds—the third man was born in Turkey and later moved to Irbil in Kurdistan.

They explained that they were part of a construction company hired by the Americans after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their claim to fame was that they had developed the T-barrier, a concrete structure ubiquitous to Iraq. Baghdad and most major cities are ringed with thousands of these barriers. During General David Petraeus’ first day as the commander of American forces in Iraq, he walked the streets of Baghdad and ordered that hundreds of the T-barriers be emplaced around the buildings to provide protection for the local Iraqis. By all accounts, this, along with many other efforts at securing the population, was highly successful.

One of the workers shows me a sales brochure for various cement construction projects they have been working on. The brochure notes various projects that “are built in our country, Kurdistan”. The brochure also features such interesting language, such as “Kurdistan and Iraq”, implying that the Kurds viewed the Kurdistan as being completely seperate from Iraq. 

With Kurdistan having its own flag, governing body, and having operated autonomously for almost thirty years, it is easy to see how might actually consider themselves to be their own independent nation.

By this time, one of the workers had brought out cups of Turkish coffee for all of us. While drinking coffee is popular the world over, in the Middle East, it is almost a ritual. T.E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”, noted in his famous account of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks during World War One, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that the local Bedouin were “gluttons for coffee”. He writes of the Bedouin tribesmen stopping during the middle of the day to drink coffee even while crossing the scorching Nefudh Desert, a desert thought to be impassible even by Bedouin standards.

Turkish coffee is served in a small cup scarsely larger than a thimble. Thick, rich and strong, you don’t even sip the coffee, so much as you touch the cup to your lips and lick a tiny drop at a time.

The chief explained to me that he moved from Turkey to Irbil to go to a university to study civil engineering, and Suleiman adds that Iraqis are among the most well-educated of the Arabs. I asked if it was true that there was now an American University in Kurdistan (Irbil), to which they all replied that yes, the American University in Kurdistan had been open for a few years now, and was quickly expanding.  

They then decided to drop the bomb on me, “Do you think American troops will really withdraw by the end of 2011”, one of them asked, referring to the recently-signed Status of Forces Agreement between the US and the Iraqi government.

To be honest, I wasn’t certain. Although the prospect of a troop withdrawal according to the timetable seems realistic, the Iraq War has been a conflict filled with unexpected twists and turns, with the dramatic improvement in security being the most recent. However, the withdrawal of forces from Iraq and the proposed “surge” in Afghanistan, which I could not see as entailing more than three or four brigades, seemed to largely fit with what I believed President-Elect Obama’s immediate military strategy seemed to be. 

We discussed the complex demographics of Afghanistan. I thought it was difficult enough as it was to learn a few Arabic words to prepare for duty among the three major ethnic groups in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, there are some 400 ethnic groups and tribes, speaking any one of almost a dozen languages, from Uzbek, Farsi, Dari and Pashtu. Add the complex demographics to the isolated, mountainous terrain and throw in a booming opium trade to finance an insurgency, and you have a far different surge than the surge in Iraq.

With the bomb dropped on me, it was time to drop the bomb on them.

“What do you think will happen to Kurdistan in the next fifty years? Do you think it will be its own independent nation?”

A chuckle that emerged from the group.  The chief paused for a second, choosing his words with care, “We know it is better to be part of Iraq than separate”.

“Besides", the Sweedish ex-patriate added, "We Kurds practically own Iraq”. 

A bold claim? Possibly, but only just so. The men noted that Iraqi president Jalal Al-Talabani is Kurdish, as well as many well-placed advisors within the Maliki government.  But only time will tell whether or not that will exist through the next round of elections.

I had reached the end of my coffee.  I looked at the bottom of the cup and noticed that there was a thick layer of sludge.   I asked if I should try to drink the sludge.

The chief stopped me. He demonstrated turning his cup upside down on the saucer, letting the sludge ooze out from underneath the cup onto the saucer. He explained that an old custom is to read one’s fortune in the sludge at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee. He jokeed that hopefully, the cup of coffee will tell me which way I turn to return to my portion of the FOB.  I hope it does, as the FOB is a large place and it's easy to get lost.  

I followed suit, waited a few seconds and turned my cup back over.  Showing him the remaining coffee grinds in my cup, I asked him what my future held.  

The chief looked at the cup carefully, as if studying it intently, for a few seconds. Finally, he smiled and slapped me on the back.

“My friend, this tells me that you will be here for a year”

I can only hope.