War links
On longbows. On arrowheads. On bows.
Performance tests of a Japanese WWII tank.
Wondering why victory in the Cold War is not talked about more. (The 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolutions is coming up.)
What do you get for winning a quiz in Somalia?
The winners -- a team from Farjano district -- were given a first prize consisting of one AK-47 assault rifle, two hand grenades, an anti-tank landmine and office supplies at a ceremony attended by hundreds of residents.
"The team in the first place gets the weapons and office equipment worth upward of 1,000 dollars," Sheikh Abdullahi Alhaq said, sparking cheers and applause in the crowd.
"It was a wonderful event because I have never seen students being rewarded with weapons as a result of an education competition", Mohamed Hersi, a Kismayo trader who attended the ceremony, told AFP.
Noting a bombing attack on Pakistani students is similar to a bombing attach on Israeli students.
Iran is facing a violent insurgency in Baluchistan:
The Baluchi insurgent group Jundallah - or Soldiers of God - took responsibility for the bombings, which included a suicide attack on a community meeting led by Revolutionary Guards and a roadside attack on a car full of Guards, both in the area of the city of Pishin.
Iranian officials blamed the US, of course.
Study of nuclear war possibilities (pdf) in the Middle East. Summary.
Arguing that South Asia is currently the most important front against jihadism. Apparent worries in the US intelligence community that the Obama Administration is downplaying dangers in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Arguing the US is in trouble in Afghanistan because in Karzai the US picked its preferred weakman. Holding Afghanistan to be hard, but not impossible. A failed electrification effort in Afghanistan.
Two large suicide bombs explode in Baghdad killing scores, but the wider pattern is a return to normality.
The problem in the Middle East: force is what works. Arguing that Israel should seek victory:
One cannot "make peace with one's enemy," as he imagined. Rather, one makes peace with one's former enemy. Peace nearly always requires one side in a conflict to be defeated and thus give up its goals.
On being a captive of the Taliban part one:
Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.
… I knew Pakistan turned a blind eye to many of their activities. But I was astonished by what I encountered firsthand: a Taliban mini-state that flourished openly and with impunity.
The Taliban government that had supposedly been eliminated by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was alive and thriving. …
And I found the tribal areas - widely perceived as impoverished and isolated - to have superior roads, electricity and infrastructure compared with what exists in much of Afghanistan. …
But they viewed me - a nonobservant Christian - as religiously unclean and demanded that I use a separate drinking glass to protect them from the diseases they believed festered inside nonbelievers. …
As the months dragged on, I grew to detest our captors. I saw the Haqqanis as a criminal gang masquerading as a pious religious movement. They described themselves as the true followers of Islam but displayed an astounding capacity for dishonesty and greed.
Part two:
… how Al Qaeda and the Taliban had turned the tribal areas into their new stronghold after being driven from Afghanistan in 2001. I had watched the Pakistani government, then led by President Pervez Musharraf, largely stand by as the Taliban murdered tribal elders and seized control of the area.
Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to enslave the Muslim world. They said the United States was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases.
Part three:
He explained that under a cease-fire agreement between the Taliban and the army, all civilians were required to get out of their cars when an army convoy approached. For Taliban vehicles, though, only the driver had to get out. The practice, I realized, allowed the Taliban to hide kidnapping victims and foreign militants from the Pakistani Army.
… Conversations were dominated by their unwavering belief that the United States was waging a war against Islam.
It was a universe filled with contradictions. My captors assailed the West for killing civilians, but they celebrated suicide attacks orchestrated by the Taliban that killed scores of Muslim bystanders. They bitterly denounced missionaries, but they pressed me to convert to their faith. They complained about innocent Muslims being imprisoned by the United States, even as they continued to hold us captive.
One evening, Abu Tayyeb declared that the Taliban treated women better than Americans did. He said women in the United States were forced to wear revealing clothes and define themselves solely as sex objects. The Taliban protected women’s honor by not allowing them to appear in public with their faces unveiled.
My captors saw me - and seemingly all Westerners - as morally corrupt and fixated on pursuing the pleasures of this world. Americans invaded Afghanistan to enrich themselves, they argued, not to help Afghans.
They ignored the fact that the United States helped build hundreds of miles of paved roads in Afghanistan and more than a thousand schools and health clinics. My captors denied widespread news reports that the Taliban burned down scores of newly built schools to prevent girls from getting an education. …
When I asked him why he wanted to die, he replied that living in this world was a burden for any true Muslim. Heaven was his goal, he said. Earthly relationships with his parents and siblings did not matter. …
My captors railed against the evils of a secular society. In March, they celebrated a suicide attack in a mosque in the Pakistani town of Jamrud that killed as many as 50 worshipers as they prayed to God. Those living under Pakistan’s apostate government, they said, deserved it.
One commander declared that no true Muslim could live in a state where Islam was not the official religion. He flatly rejected my compromise suggestion that strict Islamic law be enacted in Afghanistan’s conservative rural south, while milder forms of Islam be followed in the comparatively liberal north.
Citing the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam, he said it was every Muslim’s duty to try to stop others from sinning. If one person in a village commits a sin, those who witness it and do not stop him will also be punished by God.
After we had been held for months in captivity, my kidnappers demanded that I stop washing the group’s dishes because they did not want to catch my diseases. They believed that problems I was having with my stomach stemmed from my being an inherently unclean non-Muslim, not from unhygienic water.
Part four:
The Taliban assailed the drone attacks, and my captors expressed more hatred for President Obama than for President Bush. They bitterly criticized the Obama administration for increasing the missile attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the number of American troops in Afghanistan.
A stalemate between the United States and the Taliban seemed to unfold before me. The drones killed many senior commanders and hindered their operations. Yet the Taliban were able to garner recruits in their aftermath by exaggerating the number of civilian casualties.
The strikes also created a paranoia among the Taliban. They believed that a network of local informants guided the missiles. Innocent civilians were rounded up, accused of working as American spies and then executed. …
The videos were not limited to the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Images of dead Palestinian, Kashmiri and Iraqi civilians delivered the message that vast numbers of Muslims were being slaughtered across the globe.
Part five:
In December, Tahir and Asad expressed fury at me for exaggerating what our captors could receive for us in ransom. After being told that crews were on their way to film our beheadings, I had blurted out that our captors could receive prisoners and millions of dollars if we were kept alive.
I repeatedly apologized to Tahir and Asad, saying I had been trying to save us. But they called me a fool.
Epilogue:
My suspicions about the relationship between the Haqqanis and the Pakistani military proved to be true. Some American officials told my colleagues at The Times that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, turns a blind eye to the Haqqanis’ activities. Others went further and said the ISI provided money, supplies and strategic planning to the Haqqanis and other Taliban groups.
Pakistani officials told my colleagues that the contacts were part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan to prevent India, Pakistan’s archenemy, from gaining a foothold. One Pakistani official called the Taliban “proxy forces to preserve our interests.”
As the work of Paul Collier has shown, it is a mistake to analyse civil conflicts in terms of grievance: it is the ability to sustain the conflict that is crucial. The lack of analytical utility in grievance-talk is shown particularly clearly in the above pieces, given the blatant self-contradiction in the Taliban grievances. In the case of al-Qaeda/Taliban, the key income sources sustaining the conflict are oil (funding donations and Wahhabist missionary work) and opium.
Performance tests of a Japanese WWII tank.
Wondering why victory in the Cold War is not talked about more. (The 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolutions is coming up.)
What do you get for winning a quiz in Somalia?
The winners -- a team from Farjano district -- were given a first prize consisting of one AK-47 assault rifle, two hand grenades, an anti-tank landmine and office supplies at a ceremony attended by hundreds of residents.
"The team in the first place gets the weapons and office equipment worth upward of 1,000 dollars," Sheikh Abdullahi Alhaq said, sparking cheers and applause in the crowd.
"It was a wonderful event because I have never seen students being rewarded with weapons as a result of an education competition", Mohamed Hersi, a Kismayo trader who attended the ceremony, told AFP.
Noting a bombing attack on Pakistani students is similar to a bombing attach on Israeli students.
Iran is facing a violent insurgency in Baluchistan:
The Baluchi insurgent group Jundallah - or Soldiers of God - took responsibility for the bombings, which included a suicide attack on a community meeting led by Revolutionary Guards and a roadside attack on a car full of Guards, both in the area of the city of Pishin.
Iranian officials blamed the US, of course.
Study of nuclear war possibilities (pdf) in the Middle East. Summary.
Arguing that South Asia is currently the most important front against jihadism. Apparent worries in the US intelligence community that the Obama Administration is downplaying dangers in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Arguing the US is in trouble in Afghanistan because in Karzai the US picked its preferred weakman. Holding Afghanistan to be hard, but not impossible. A failed electrification effort in Afghanistan.
Two large suicide bombs explode in Baghdad killing scores, but the wider pattern is a return to normality.
The problem in the Middle East: force is what works. Arguing that Israel should seek victory:
One cannot "make peace with one's enemy," as he imagined. Rather, one makes peace with one's former enemy. Peace nearly always requires one side in a conflict to be defeated and thus give up its goals.
On being a captive of the Taliban part one:
Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.
… I knew Pakistan turned a blind eye to many of their activities. But I was astonished by what I encountered firsthand: a Taliban mini-state that flourished openly and with impunity.
The Taliban government that had supposedly been eliminated by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was alive and thriving. …
And I found the tribal areas - widely perceived as impoverished and isolated - to have superior roads, electricity and infrastructure compared with what exists in much of Afghanistan. …
But they viewed me - a nonobservant Christian - as religiously unclean and demanded that I use a separate drinking glass to protect them from the diseases they believed festered inside nonbelievers. …
As the months dragged on, I grew to detest our captors. I saw the Haqqanis as a criminal gang masquerading as a pious religious movement. They described themselves as the true followers of Islam but displayed an astounding capacity for dishonesty and greed.
Part two:
… how Al Qaeda and the Taliban had turned the tribal areas into their new stronghold after being driven from Afghanistan in 2001. I had watched the Pakistani government, then led by President Pervez Musharraf, largely stand by as the Taliban murdered tribal elders and seized control of the area.
Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to enslave the Muslim world. They said the United States was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases.
Part three:
He explained that under a cease-fire agreement between the Taliban and the army, all civilians were required to get out of their cars when an army convoy approached. For Taliban vehicles, though, only the driver had to get out. The practice, I realized, allowed the Taliban to hide kidnapping victims and foreign militants from the Pakistani Army.
… Conversations were dominated by their unwavering belief that the United States was waging a war against Islam.
It was a universe filled with contradictions. My captors assailed the West for killing civilians, but they celebrated suicide attacks orchestrated by the Taliban that killed scores of Muslim bystanders. They bitterly denounced missionaries, but they pressed me to convert to their faith. They complained about innocent Muslims being imprisoned by the United States, even as they continued to hold us captive.
One evening, Abu Tayyeb declared that the Taliban treated women better than Americans did. He said women in the United States were forced to wear revealing clothes and define themselves solely as sex objects. The Taliban protected women’s honor by not allowing them to appear in public with their faces unveiled.
My captors saw me - and seemingly all Westerners - as morally corrupt and fixated on pursuing the pleasures of this world. Americans invaded Afghanistan to enrich themselves, they argued, not to help Afghans.
They ignored the fact that the United States helped build hundreds of miles of paved roads in Afghanistan and more than a thousand schools and health clinics. My captors denied widespread news reports that the Taliban burned down scores of newly built schools to prevent girls from getting an education. …
When I asked him why he wanted to die, he replied that living in this world was a burden for any true Muslim. Heaven was his goal, he said. Earthly relationships with his parents and siblings did not matter. …
My captors railed against the evils of a secular society. In March, they celebrated a suicide attack in a mosque in the Pakistani town of Jamrud that killed as many as 50 worshipers as they prayed to God. Those living under Pakistan’s apostate government, they said, deserved it.
One commander declared that no true Muslim could live in a state where Islam was not the official religion. He flatly rejected my compromise suggestion that strict Islamic law be enacted in Afghanistan’s conservative rural south, while milder forms of Islam be followed in the comparatively liberal north.
Citing the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam, he said it was every Muslim’s duty to try to stop others from sinning. If one person in a village commits a sin, those who witness it and do not stop him will also be punished by God.
After we had been held for months in captivity, my kidnappers demanded that I stop washing the group’s dishes because they did not want to catch my diseases. They believed that problems I was having with my stomach stemmed from my being an inherently unclean non-Muslim, not from unhygienic water.
Part four:
The Taliban assailed the drone attacks, and my captors expressed more hatred for President Obama than for President Bush. They bitterly criticized the Obama administration for increasing the missile attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the number of American troops in Afghanistan.
A stalemate between the United States and the Taliban seemed to unfold before me. The drones killed many senior commanders and hindered their operations. Yet the Taliban were able to garner recruits in their aftermath by exaggerating the number of civilian casualties.
The strikes also created a paranoia among the Taliban. They believed that a network of local informants guided the missiles. Innocent civilians were rounded up, accused of working as American spies and then executed. …
The videos were not limited to the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Images of dead Palestinian, Kashmiri and Iraqi civilians delivered the message that vast numbers of Muslims were being slaughtered across the globe.
Part five:
In December, Tahir and Asad expressed fury at me for exaggerating what our captors could receive for us in ransom. After being told that crews were on their way to film our beheadings, I had blurted out that our captors could receive prisoners and millions of dollars if we were kept alive.
I repeatedly apologized to Tahir and Asad, saying I had been trying to save us. But they called me a fool.
Epilogue:
My suspicions about the relationship between the Haqqanis and the Pakistani military proved to be true. Some American officials told my colleagues at The Times that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, turns a blind eye to the Haqqanis’ activities. Others went further and said the ISI provided money, supplies and strategic planning to the Haqqanis and other Taliban groups.
Pakistani officials told my colleagues that the contacts were part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan to prevent India, Pakistan’s archenemy, from gaining a foothold. One Pakistani official called the Taliban “proxy forces to preserve our interests.”
As the work of Paul Collier has shown, it is a mistake to analyse civil conflicts in terms of grievance: it is the ability to sustain the conflict that is crucial. The lack of analytical utility in grievance-talk is shown particularly clearly in the above pieces, given the blatant self-contradiction in the Taliban grievances. In the case of al-Qaeda/Taliban, the key income sources sustaining the conflict are oil (funding donations and Wahhabist missionary work) and opium.