One of the unsung heroes of this corner of the blogosphere, Ghosts of Alexander, has an excellent post on Russian use of social science in their 19th-century expeditions to Turkestan. In Russia’s Human Terrain System GOA contrasts the investigations into local cultures by the Russians with the current HTS and social science techniques deployed by the US in Afghanistan. And concludes that … bah, why trump the man? Read the article instead.

[Cross-posted at CTLab]

I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab:

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 the Frontline Club in London hosted a discussion evening, Media Talk: Assassination and Insurgency - Are the Taliban Winning? Moderated by Nazanine Moshiri of Al Jazeera, the panel brought together Alastair Leithead (BBC), James Fergusson (journalist and author), James Appathurai (NATO spokesman), John D. McHugh (photojournalist) and, via Skype from Kandahar, Mawlavi Abdulsalam Zaeef (ex-Taliban ambassador to Pakistan).

Read the full article here.

Joseph Stiglitz has recently been much in the news, with the February 2008 publication of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (with Linda Bilmes). On Friday 13 June, Stiglitz was in London at the Frontline Club, in conversation with Stephanie Flanders, Economics Editor of the BBC.

Read the rest of my article at Complex Terrain Lab.

Update: Some feeds may have a broken link - use this one if that’s the case.

The folks at RAND have been busy, with another COIN report out today: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones, the fourth volume in the RAND Counterinsurgency series [research brief here]. The tone of the report partly reflects what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days about operations in Afghanistan - “comprehensive organisational dysfunction” sticks in my mind - although Jones concentrates more on capacity-building and security security reform:

This study explores the nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan, the key challenges and successes of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign, and the capabilities necessary to wage effective counterinsurgency operations. By examining the key lessons from all insurgencies since World War II, it finds that most policymakers repeatedly underestimate the importance of indigenous actors to counterinsurgency efforts. The U.S. should focus its resources on helping improve the capacity of the indigenous government and indigenous security forces to wage counterinsurgency. It has not always done this well. The U.S. military - along with U.S. civilian agencies and other coalition partners - is more likely to be successful in counterinsurgency warfare the more capable and legitimate the indigenous security forces (especially the police), the better the governance capacity of the local state, and the less external support that insurgents receive.

Kent Harris in Stars and Stripes, First Rock tries new intel approach in Afghanistan:

ORGUN-E, Afghanistan — Gathering intelligence about the enemy is good. Getting the time to analyze that information is even better.

That’s the basic concept of the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment’s Battalion Intelligence Team.

First Rock has expanded the number of troops analyzing intelligence it picks up from various sources around Paktika province, according to Capt. Tim Culpepper, the team leader. Instead of having six or seven soldiers perform that task, the team has 42 analysts.

“We are gathering more information, but the real benefit is our ability to go through it all,” Culpepper said. “If I had a normal S2 (intelligence) shop, I wouldn’t get through 10 percent of what we’re getting.”

Read the rest here.

In the meantime, physics professor Faheem Hussain at Counterpunch asks What is NATO doing in Afghanistan? and concludes that it’s time for the evil empire to withdraw. Everyone’s an expert now.

I’m not exactly partisan, particularly with respect to military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this article by Eric Walberg at Australia.TO News is an example of chronically poor journalism. I’d already decided to flag up this piece about Afghanistan before noticing that Fabius Maximus has also had a go in the comments. It’s so bad that the editors even challenged Walberg on substantive grounds, let alone his baseless bias. Awful piece of writing, at every level.

Prepare to be amazed at how bad journalism can be.

Everyone should have a favourite architect, which Mrs. Ubiwar finds slightly disturbing, and mine is Lebbeus Woods. Principally famous for never having built anything, he is for my money the most significant architect of a generation. This is Woods on Woods:

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no ’sacred and primordial site’. I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then ‘melt into air’. I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhoutte against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city. [via Motel de Moka]

Having mentioned Paul Virilio and the Accident yesterday, I was pleased to see that Woods also had Virilio in mind when he decided to blog Junk:

I was immediately drawn to the large metal scrap piles that lay near the tracks. Looking back on that attraction, I can understand it as a reflection of sensibilities deeply felt. Complexity. Richness of form. Accident. Undesigned design (they are entirely of human origin). The extraordinary in the ordinary. But also, the mystery of objects, in our apprehension of them, and in their origins, their originality (every scrap pile is different, even if, at first glance, they all look the same). How does their sameness/ difference call the reality of memory into question? And, it occurred to me then and still occurs to me, what that I cannot see is inside the junk pile? Are there different things piled inside, or only more of what is outside? In either case, what does light and darkness matter to them? Then, of course, there is the question of space. Space is created by objects, between and around them. What is the nature of these spaces? Do they have any meaning? For sure, they are a-systematic - or are they the products of a new system? Or, are they just meaningless accidents, the products of a randomness that human beings cannot devise, except (as Paul Virilio claims) indirectly, by creating the technological products that end up as scrap thrown into piles along railroad tracks? Is this, in fact, their meaning for us? Clearly, the scrap pile is loaded with meaning as the detritus of human striving, but is its meaning something more? Is it a model for a human future, in both negative and positive senses? Are they piles simply waiting to be recovered and converted into new objects, or, can we somehow inhabit them, and why would we?

About the last thing we need is either Iraq or Afghanistan becoming the ‘detritus of human striving’ but I think the implication is clear. Get your act together, or that’s exactly what we risk.

[Lebbeus Woods, Injection Parasite, Sarajevo, 1992-93]

Read two superb interviews with Lebbeus Woods by Geoff Manaugh and Bryan Finoki.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

SecDef Gates gets it, and the US House of Representatives does too. The 2009 Defence Authorization Bill

authorizes $90.6 million to continue to fund Human Terrain Teams to meet CENTCOM’s requirement for 26 teams in Iraq and Afghanistan [via Ares]

And the Society for Applied Anthropology has approved this motion regarding the HTS (via AAA News):

“The board of the SFAA expresses grave concerns about the potential harmful use of social science knowledge and skills in the HTS project. The SFAA believes that social scientists can be helpful to the military by offering training, analysis, and evaluation so long as these activities are compatible with this organization’s code of ethics.”

The vote on this motion was:

Yes: 13
No: 0
Abstain: 0

Andrew Exum has an excellent article over at Arab Media & Society, The Spectacle of War: Insurgent video propaganda and Western response [also as .pdf].

… while the ponderous American defense bureaucracy has been slow off the mark, the enemy – the insurgent groups against which the U.S. has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan – have proved more than proficient at the art of propaganda, media manipulation and shaping the way operations and events are perceived by enemy, friendly and neutral populations. In the same way, though the U.S. and its allies talk of the “comprehensive approach”, it is more often than not groups like Hizbullah and Jaish al-Mahdi who best understand military operations as part of a combined effort incorporating “political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication” efforts.

To a large degree, though, the U.S. military cannot be blamed for being caught off-guard by their enemy’s sophistication in managing the way battles and campaigns are perceived. In the past two decades, insurgent, terrorist, and guerrilla groups in the Middle East have grown exponentially more sophisticated in the way they use the media available to them in order to affect the way battles are perceived. From the perspective of someone who studies military innovation, it is a remarkable achievement.

This paper focuses on the evolution of insurgent media operations in support of political-military objectives. Groups like the Taliban and Hizbullah did not start off, from the beginning, as sophisticated manipulators of popular perception. They learned, over time, how to shape the way in which military operations are perceived, and in the process, have taught Western militaries a valuable lesson in the nature of war itself.

Read the rest of the article here.

Similarly, Brigitte L. Nacos writes on Media Power and Terrorists at Complex Terrain Lab, with particular emphasis on Hezbollah:

… modern-day terrorist organizations’ impact on domestic and/or international spheres depends to a large extent on their ability to establish their own means of communications or find alternative modes to communicate their messages directly to friend and foe.

Without taking the centrality of communication in the terrorist calculus into account, counterterrorism cannot succeed.

The burning of TV stations in Beirut (Counterterrorism Blog)