This report was found on the website of the Centre for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), University of Maryland School of Public Policy:

Ungoverned Areas and Threats from Safe Havens

Final Report of the Ungoverned Areas Project

Prepared for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

by Robert D. Lamb

Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning

 

Abstract

"Individuals and groups who use violence in ways that threaten the United States, its allies, or its partners habitually find or create ways to operate with impunity or without detection. Whether for private financial gain (e.g., by narcotics and arms traffickers) or for harmful political aims (e.g., by insurgents, terrorists, and other violent extremists), these illicit operations are most successful — and most dangerous — when their perpetrators have a place or situation that can provide refuge from efforts to combat or counter them. Such places and situations are often called safe havens, and potential safe havens are sometimes called ungoverned areas. A key component of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, stabilization, peacekeeping, and other such efforts is to reduce the size and effectiveness of the safe havens that protect illicit actors. Agencies in defense, diplomacy, development, law enforcement, and other areas all have capabilities that can be applied to countering such threats and building the capacity and legitimacy of U.S. partners to prevent ungoverned, under-governed, misgoverned, contested, and exploitable areas from becoming safe havens. To do this effectively requires careful consideration of all the geographical, political, civil, and resource factors that make safe havens possible; a sober appreciation of the complex ways those factors interact; and deeper collaboration among U.S. government offices and units that address such problems — whether operating openly, discreetly, or covertly — to ensure unity of effort. This report offers a framework that can be used to systematically account for these considerations in relevant strategies, capabilities, and doctrines/best practices."

Full report available at http://cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/ugash_report_final.pdf. Accessed 5 April 2008.

According to the New Yorker, anyway, and its reviewer, James Wood. Wood does something interesting in his review of two recent bits of fiction, Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self (Knopf) and Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions (Dutton) – "both set in the radical underground of late-sixties and and early-seventies agitation," both featuring characters "who find themselves politically trapped" in the same kind of "sticky web of accident" that trumped the pornographer Verloc of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Wood notes that "recent American fiction dealing with Islamic terrorists has shown more interest in the fanatic than in the failure, in resolution than in irresolution, and a certain human complexity has been sacrificed." He references the liminal banality (banal liminality?) of Conrad’s Victorian anarchist underground to suggest "necessary novelistic transferences, displacements from contemporary ideological radicalism" are at play:  neither book "is by an American – Carey is Australian and Kunzru British – and neither is about Islamic terrorists". More, "The novels share an interest in the slow rotting of the ideological harvest, and in the way that eventual political failure was birthed by the very exaggeration of political success."

Wood, James. "Notes From the Underground: Fugitive Lives by Peter Carey and Hari Kunzru." New Yorker (3 March 2008), p. 79.

The full version of Arithmetic on the Frontier, courtesy of the Kipling Society webpages.

A GREAT and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe –
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: " All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre".
And after?- Ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ‘ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow.
Strike hard who cares – shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

The Kipling Society @ http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm

And this one, too, in last week’s Economist. Discussing NATO’s role in Afghanistan, the newspaper notes "The old truth of counter-insurgency still holds: armies can win every battle, yet lose the will to fight an intractable war." Lord Ashdown, "the British politician and ex-commando who was nearly appointed as the United Nations’ envoy to Kabul," is cited for his entirely apropos reference to Kipling, (right, so that’s me, quoting the Economist’s anonymous correspondent, quoting Ashdown, quoting Kipling), who in his poem Arithmetic on the Frontier, "describ[ed] the British empire’s troubles fighting Afghan tribesmen armed with the jezail, a home-made musket:

A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.

The Economist’s correspondent writes "In such a fight against a weaker but elusive enemy, says Kipling, ‘the odds are on the cheaper man’." 

"The State of NATO: A Ray of Light in the Dark Defile." The Economist (27 May 2008).

Stumbled over this pearl while doing some desktop research. Paul Brians, a literature professor at Washington State University, has online study notes for, among other topics, Dostoyeksy’s Notes From the Underground. On NFTU’s protagonist, the Underground Man: “Consider the UM as a complex portrait, lacking surface appeal, but filled with fascinating detail which reveals itself only upon close examination.”

Brians, Paul. Study Guide for Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground  N.D.