Serendipity. I just stumbled across this post on En Verite, a blog on cointerinsurgency in Iraq. It’s put together by a scholar and French reserve officer, Stéphane Taillat, who’s also a member of the Insurgency Research Group at King’s College London. I’m pasting it in here in full, because of its relevance to CTLab and because it makes some excellent points.

En Verite notes in two separate posts the use of geospatial intelligence in COIN. One places it in the context of Counterinsurgency and the Colonial Legacy; the other addresses it specifically in Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) in COIN (the item below). I’ve noted geospatial issues in a prior post (here); I’ll come back to this with some discussion of geospatial intelligence vs. complex spatial dynamics.

Read on:

Intelligence is a crucial issue in COIN because it provides the way to hit insurgency with precision raids and to sever its links with local populace.

What is largely ignored in the Iraq’s COIN Campaign of the last year is the use of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). Provided by embedded teams of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), data have proved valuable both in the “clear” phase of the campaign and the actual “build” phase since the recent shift of MultiNational Division North and MultiNational Division Center to reconstruction and assistance missions.

The latter area of operations has seen NGA’s teams working with Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) collecting data to map rural and urban areas where TF MARNE’s Units operated. Indeed, most of theses villages and small communities have not seen sustained Coalition presence for years.

More accurately, GEOINT’s role in COIN can be depicted as a powerful analysis and collaborative tool to identify trends in insurgent activity, both by mapping significant acts (SIGACTS) and by locating weapons caches or IED factories. By the medium of geographical map and graphics, GEOINT has been of great use to assess progress and to locate the various waypoints needed to achieve lines of operations/lines of efforts. On the tactical level, geospatial imagery analysis allowed MND-C units to target insurgents that were trying to hide with an accurate precision.

Furthermore, on the stabilization side of insurgency, GEOINT can be useful in depicting and monitoring the current state of soils for agricultural purpose and the status of various network (especially irrigation) as well.

GEOINT can be considered as the technological counterpart of political anthropology because it helps counter-insurgents to link physical terrain and human terrain.

"A war born in spin," observes Steve Coll, "has now reached its Lewis Carroll period." His comment, in this week’s New Yorker, takes a swipe at White House treatment of free-speaking senior military officers. He cites the impending retirement of U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff William Cody as context, following his brief last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he suggested that the health of US forces is less than vibrant. Cody, who at the end of his career may have felt freer than most to provide an honest assessment, quoted by Coll:

The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . . Soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed. . . . Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.

Coll notes that "Flag officers in the Bush Administration’s military have learned that they can be marginalized or retired if they speak out too boldly. The Administration does not romanticize the role of the loyal opposition." This does not bode well for Gen David Petraeus, who though "a loyal Army man… has distinctive views about military doctrine." Coll suggests that the suppression of public dissent from professional military officers "is depriving American voters of an election-year debate " on critical defence issues.  "In the long run," he points out, "success or failure for the United States in Iraq will not hinge on who wins the argument about the surge; it will depend on whether it proves possible to change the subject."

‘T was brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe…

Coll, Steve. "Military Conflict." New Yorker (14 April 2008).

The April 2008 issue of Prospect has an intriguing story of Hugh Miles’ (best personal website I’ve ever seen) voluntary conversion to Islam. "I moved to Cairo and fell in love with a beautiful Egyptian doctor," he writes. "We decided to marry, but first I had to convert to Islam. It didn’t take long." I couldn’t figure whether he was being cynical – or rather, just how cynical he was being. You decide.

Miles, Hugh. "A Cairo Conversion." Prospect (April 2008).

The recent 26 March 08 RUSI conference, "Countering Asymmetric Taliban Strategies in Afghanistan", covered some interesting ground. Normally it wouldn’t take me so long to generate a post-event write-up, but events, as always, conspire. I’d also usually do a much more thorough job of it, but in this case, I spent more time listening than taking notes, and I missed the last session of the day. The speakers were all interesting, but I thought the briefs given by Antonio Giustozzi, Dave Sloggett, Ian Tunnicliffe, and Laura Winter were especially fascinating.

As with all RUSI events, the best parts were in the off-the-record discussions (which I won’t get into), and I think I learned as much from audience comments as I did from the speakers. The key messages that I took away from the day were that the Taliban are doing it better than we are, and that while all politics might not necessarily be local, the details needed to defeat certain types of problems certainly are. That might sound trite, but obviously the need is being felt to drive home the message – references to ground-level perspectives, granularity of information, and human terrain certainly reinforced the point.

Tropes of torture afloat in the 24 March 2008 issue of the New Yorker. An opening essay by George Saunders, who teaches English at Syracuse University, starts off dark, becomes  flip and cruel in the best neo-con tradition, remains generally tongue-in-cheek, and then signs off with a hard right hook. On the artistic merits of washboarding:

I myself have been washboarded. It’s true. I used to live downstairs from an oldtime jug band. And, believe me, it was not torture. It was torturous, yes—especially at three in the morning, what with the banjo and the jug and the high, whiny singing and (horror of horrors) the occasional harmonica—but torture?

Please.

Was it annoying? Yes, it was. Was it maddening? It was to me. Did it disgust with its ostentatious “embracing” of the faux nostalgic? Oh, big-time.

But was it torture?

At this time, I would like to decline to say. I do not want to give our enemies aid and . . . and that other thing we’re not supposed to give them. Comfort stations. I would like to deny our enemies comfort stations.

Huh.

Well, it couldn’t hurt. After all, it’s a war. Do not threaten my culture, then ask to use our comfort stations.

Not going to happen.

Saunders’ message is quite serious, and you’ll need to read straight through to get just how serious he is. The same issue of the magazine features a brilliant expose on Sabrina Harman, the young U.S. Army reservist cum Abu Ghraib pictoriographer. Co-written by Phillip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, the report focuses on the essentially kind-hearted young woman who couldn’t hurt a fly (although she didn’t mind posing for glory shots with its corpse). The narrative offers a sensitive and balanced exploration of the moral ins and outs of survival at Abu Ghraib, somewhere between Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt in its scrutiny of the human condition. Well worth reading.

Saunders, George. "Y’All Torture Me Home." The New Yorker (28 March 2008): 28-29.

Gourevitch, Phillip  and Morris, Errol . "Exposure: The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib." The New Yorker (28 March 2008): 44-57.