In the category of circular book reviews (I know, this is undergraduate short-cutting at its worst, but there’s more to the story), from Barnett R. Rubin, on Ahmed Rashid’s new book Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of National Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Penguin, 2008). 

[This] is as far as I know, the first attempt at a comprehensive account of international policy toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia since 9/11, and as such is utterly indispensable. (I should note that Ahmed says some nice things about me in the acknowledgments and cites me a few times.

That’s right. Me, citing an author, who’s reviewing another author, both of whom cite each other.  Whatever, not the point. Rubin points out an interesting discrepancy in the way Rashid’s book has been promoted – or rather, not promoted, depending on where in the world he found himself on his book tour.

The book came out in the U.S. on June 3, and Ahmed spent most of the next three weeks touring the U.S. to promote it. For whatever reason, Ahmed’s publicist could not manage to get him on Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, or Oprah, but he did put in appearances on Charlie Rose (video below) and CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.

Ahmed has since gone on to Canada and the U.K., where his book was reviewed by both the Sunday Times and the Times of London. He was profiled by the New York Times‘ Jane Perlez for the International Herald Tribune, but as far as I can see this interview never appeared in print on this side of the Atlantic.

Hmmm. Curioser and curioser. Rubin: 

I find it strange that this first ever comprehensive account of the Bush administration’s failure in Afghanistan and the complicity with the Taliban of Pakistan’s military regime, written by the author of a former New York Times #1 best-seller, did not receive a single major review in the U.S. The Obama campaign really should mine it — the book has plenty of evidence to support — and extend — the Democratic candidate’s criticisms of the Bush administration’s failure to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But most of all, anyone even remotely concerned with this region should buy and read it, and then recommend it to any friends and relatives who think they are not concerned with it.

Well OK then. Will do. 

Christian Bleuer, the formerly anonymous author of the Ghosts of Alexander blog, has self-outed. Bleuer writes “I have come to the realization that there is nothing controversial or confrontational about this blog. I therefore have no need to continue with my pseudo-anonymity.” A PhD student in the research phase of his degree at The Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (The Middle East and Central Asia), he states his blog is “about conflict related issues in Afghanistan: politics, culture, society, reconstruction, civil-military relations and insurgency.” Other qualifications:

I received my MA from Indiana University’s Central Eurasian Studies Department. My BA is also from IU with a major in political science and a minor from the Russian and East European Institute. I am a graduate of Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Saskatchewan, Canada.

I focus on rural and peripheral social, political and military dynamics in Afghanistan and Southern Central Asia. Of particular interest to me are local solidarity groups, identity and loyalty, especially how these factors affect survival strategies during conflict and competition. At the moment I am finding anthropological writings to be quite useful. But I steal liberally from most of the social sciences.

I have studied Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajiki and Russian during my time at Indiana University and I highly recommend their intensive summer language program (which includes Pashto). I am currently studying Farsi.

I am also the creator/editor of The Afghanistan Analyst, an online research portal for Afghanistan.

 Excellent. We’re hoping Christian will consider joining us here at the CTLab blog, as well.

By Bobby Chesney via the National Security Law List-Serve

SCOTUSBLOG’s Lyle Denniston offers the following update on developments in the Hamdan prosecution, where the parties now are focused on whether Boumediene compels the conclusion that detainees are entitled to constitutional rights beyond just the right to habeas itself. Captain Allred, the judge in Hamdan’s commission proceeding, has given the parties until July 2^nd to brief the issue.

Debate over Boumediene’s meaning

Lawyers for the Pentagon and for detainees now held at Guantanamo Bay have already engaged in a debate — at least in summary form — over the meaning of the Supreme Court’s June 12 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195). In short, the military lawyers contend that the detainees are now protected by only a single constitutional right, while the prisoners’ attorneys claim at least nine.

Mainly by coincidence, the constitutional dispute is playing out in the Pentagon’s war crimes case against a Yemeni national, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. He is the same detainee who won an earlier Supreme Court decision that the detainees had some legal right to challenge their detention — rights that Congress then moved to sharply curtail, an effort that the Supreme Court partly overturned in Boumediene .

The new phase of the constitutional disagreement will unfold in July when Hamdan’s trial resumes on charges of providing support to the Al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan. Hamdan’s trial before a military commission was postponed on May 16 by the presiding judge, to await the Court’s ruling in Boumediene .

Under a ruling Thursday by the judge, Navy Captain Keith J. Allred, Hamdan’s defense lawyers are to file their motions making constitutional claims by July 2, and, depending on how those motions fare, the trial could start on July 21 — the first criminal trial growing out of the “war on terrorism.”

Allred rejected the plea of the detainees’ defense team to delay the trial until Sept. 22 to give them more time to prepare their constitutional claims in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. The motion for a continuance summarized what at least some of those claims will be. The Pentagon’s opposition filing gave its view of the very limited scope of Boumediene . The judge said that the time up to July 2 will give the defense enough time to prepare their constitutional motions.

The judge’s ruling can be downloaded here. (Attached to the two-page ruling are the defense motion for continuance and the prosecutors’ response. Thanks to Howard Bashman of How Appealing blog for providing a link to the Miami Herald file on these papers.)

The defense, in its motion filed one week after Boumediene was decided, argued: “ Boumediene was decided in a manner sharply adverse to the Government, rejecting numerous positions advanced, and authorities relied upon, by the Government in this case….The Boumediene holding that substantive and structural constitutional protections extend to Guantanamo has major implications for this case.”

The motion asserted that “a large array of constitutional rights and protections now must be considered, affecting all aspects of the substantive and procedural law that must be applied in this case.” It indicated that the defense team would offer, “at a minimum,” motions to apply nine specifically enumerated constitutional rights.

Here are the constitutional claims to be advanced:

1. A constitutional right to equal legal treatment, allegedly violated by any trial before a military commission (equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment).

2. A constitutional right not to be forced to give evidence against himself, presumably based on alleged evidence obtained in interrogations (Fifth Amendment ban on self-incriminaton).

3. A constitutional right to due process, based on alleged use of testimony obtained by coercion or torture and denial of access to documents about the conditions at Guantanamo (Due Process Clause of Fifth Amendment).

4. A constitutional right to call witnesses who may aid the defense, based on claims of too-limited access so far to “high-value detainees” at Guantanamo — including some key Al Qaeda leaders (Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process).

5. A constitutional right to the aid of a lawyer, allegedly frustrated by conditions at Guantanamo that inhibit lawyer-client relationships (Sixth Amendment).

6. A constitutional right to confront adverse witnesses, based on a claimed prosecution plan to offer “50 items of hearsay evidence” at trial (Sixth Amendment).

7. A constitutional right to a speedy and public trial, allegedly violated by the mode and scheduling of military commission trials (Sixth Amendment).

8. A constitutional right to be charged by a grand jury, allegedly violated by the charges leveled here only by Pentagon prosecutors (Fifth Amendment).

9. A constitutional right not to be accused of a crime for actions that were not criminal at the time, a test of whether a military commission has jurisdiction because the accusations are not violations of the law of war (Ex Post Factor Clause in Article II, limiting Congress’ authorize to create new crimes after the fact).

Several of those, if granted, would result in dismissal outright of the case against Hamdan. He would have to remain at Guantanamo, at least until a federal civilian court ruled on his habeas challenge to detention.

The Pentagon, in opposing the defense motion for more time to prepare challenges, argued that the Boumediene decision “is of little relevance” to a military commission trial. There was only “a narrow holding” by the Supreme Court, that detainees have a constitutional right to pursue a habeas claim in District Court. The decision, the prosecutors said, turned only on “the Suspension Clause” — that is, Congress’s violation of that Clause by seeking to bar habeas claims.

The detainees involved in the case, the prosecutors added, were not charged with any crime. Hamdan, by contrast, faces charges and will “receive a full and fair adversary process.”

The opposition also said: “If the court takes anything from the Boumediene decision, it should recognize the importance in preventing any further delay in the matter presently before it and deny the defense request.”

Judge Allred, while denying the motion to delay further, did not hint how he would react to any constitutional claims. He wrote: “The Commission is particularly interested in the parties’ views on what principles govern whether other constitutional provisions, such as those the defense intends to raise, apply in Guantanamo Bay.”

Nicole Suveges was killed in yesterday’s Sadr City bombing.

From Noah Shachtman at Wired’s Danger Room blog:

For the second time in seven weeks, a social scientist embedded with the U.S. military has been killed on the battlefield. Nicole Suveges, a political scientist serving with the Army’s controversial Human Terrain System, was slain Tuesday in a bombing in Sadr City, Baghdad. Early last month, social scientist Michael Batia suffered a similar fate in Afghanistan.

For nearly a year, American combat deaths have been on a slow, uneven decline in Afghanistan and Iraq. Which makes the slayings of these two social scientists stand out all the more. The Human Terrain System placed researchers into combat units, in an attempt to lower the levels of violence in their districts; instead, these two social scientists have become its victims. Critics of the project claimed that the researchers might help the U.S. military in its warzone targeting; instead, its the social scientists themselves who have been killed. Ironically, these civilian academics, in their attempts to promote cultural understanding, are spending more time outside the protective walls of the American military enclaves than many soldiers.

From BAE Systems:

BAE Systems Statement Regarding the Loss of Employee in Iraq

June 25, 2008 01:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time 

ROCKVILLE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nicole Suveges, a BAE Systems political scientist, was killed Tuesday in a bombing in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq. She was supporting the U.S. Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 4th Infantry Division, as part of the Human Terrain System (HTS) program.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of Nicole Suveges,” said Doug Belair, president of the company’s Technology Solutions & Services (TSS) line of business. “She came to us to give freely of herself in an effort to make a better world. Nicole was a leading academic who studied for years on how to improve conditions for others. She also believed in translating what she learned into action. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family, friends and colleagues.”

Suveges began her current tour in Iraq in April of this year. Before joining BAE Systems, she had worked in Iraq for one year as a civilian contractor. Previously, Suveges served as a U.S. Army reservist in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, supporting the multinational SFOR/NATO Combined Joint Psychological Operations Task Force.

She held a Master of Arts in political science from The George Washington University. Suveges was soon to complete her Ph.D. in political science with an emphasis on international relations from Johns Hopkins University, where she also served as managing editor for the “Review of International Political Economy.” Her dissertation was on “Markets & Mullahs: Global Networks, Transnational Ideas and the Deep Play of Political Culture.” She presented numerous papers to international relations organizations and served as a graduate teaching assistant.

During her time with the 3rd BCT, she brought a wealth of skill and knowledge to support the mission in Iraq. Her experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina, coupled with her academic credentials contributed materially to the success of the brigade in reducing the level of violence in the local community and in improving critical infrastructure. She worked closely with her HTS team members to help Iraqis achieve peace, stability and prosperity.

These statements might come across as a bit more human if the companies that issued them didn’t also seize upon the opportunity to promote their offerings in the same breath that they note the loss of a staffer. For anyone who gives a rat’s ass about how special BAE Systems is and all the wonderful things it does, go read the original statement on the death of Suveges in full, which concludes with just such detail. I’m not gonna promote that kind of B.S. here. Sorry. Sue me. Also, anyone interested in dialing up BAE to commend it on its sensitivity, points of contact are provided.

I didn’t know Nicole. Not directly. She would have been one of the many soldiers that rotated through SFOR. CJPOTF was right down the street from the HQ, so I have no doubt she’s a familiar face.

The CTLab’s Review is very much a bloggers’ blog, as opposed to the op-ed and think-type pieces in the Notebook blog, or the various other media formats with which we’re planning on experimenting. It’s built around contributors who are and remain accomplished bloggers in their own rights, the point of it all being that it extends the conceptual tether beyond what CTLab might ordinally attempt as a university-based research unit (which is necessarily broad to begin with). I haven’t written about or addressed the idea of the complex terrain network (CT-NET? TCTN?) before. But if one were to think of the external and independent vehicles of CTLab’s contributors as nodes in an eclectic, elaborate, distributed architecture of percolating concepts, then we’re getting somewhere. I’ll suggest here that CTLab’s citizen media experiments constitute a nexus of sorts for what might eventually morph into a full blown CT-NET/TCTN, made up of  much wider range or contributors and thinkers. What follows in this post is the first of what should become a weekly selection and summary of CT-NET offerings.

CTLab editor Tim Stevens has a brilliant piece of relevant historical color at Ubiwar entitled “Frank Lloyd Wright, Visions of Baghdad“,  on the late architect’s “Plan for a Greater Baghdad”. An excerpt:

It’s a little known fact that the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was involved in plans to modernise the Iraqi capital Baghdad. He visited the city in May 1957, as an old man nearing his 90th birthday and, inspired by both Arab and Persian art and architecture, began to draft a series of blueprints for a new city.

Then monarch King Faisal II invited several prominent architects to contribute ideas to establish Baghdad as a modern world city. This included Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti and Walter Gropius. Faisal was assassinated in 1958, after which a military junta seized power, setting the scene for the modern history of Iraq with which we are depressingly familiar. None of Wright’s buildings were ever constructed, the new revolutionary government deeming them “too grandiose”, although some of the other plans were later implemented: Gropius’ Baghdad University (1960), Ponti’s Ministry of Planning building (1958), and a Le Corbusier sports hall (the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium, erected in 1981).

Lloyd Wright’s “Plan for Greater Baghdad” was drawn up over the course of several months following his visit, and his romantic vision drew heavily on the myth and memory of Harun al-Rashid, the 8th century caliph under whom Baghdad rose to pre-eminence as the regional cultural and political capital in the Islamic period. That Baghdad was destroyed in 1258 by the Mongols, but has remained alive in the Arab memory ever since.

In “Beyond Nihilism, the Bloggable Future,” Tim notes that “As someone who is both employed in internet research and writes for two blogs, I often feel like a slave to the screen.” We know he’s not suggesting the consequence of this is an emergent radicalization against his oppressors – we’re truly grateful, albeit in a non-fiduciary sort of way…

More:

The seduction of the mutual hyperlink, Technorati, traffic reports and Alexa rankings. The panic that comes of finding two thousand unread posts in your RSS reader, the perception that you are falling behind in your responsbilities to your Feedburner fans. And all the while not producing anything of original worth, merely reproducing the tired and, in the zero-time of the internet, old? I’ve always thought that ‘adding value’ to every link posted was one way of mitigating for lack of originality , and I’ve tried to adhere to that vague formula. I confess to feeling uncomfortable when not linking to something, which is perhaps an academic failing – the necessity to scrupulously cite one’s sources lest you be accused of plagiarism. But when the whole world is hyperlinked, who’s to say what is plagiarism and what is coincidence?

Matt Armstrong’s got a thick list of offerings this week at his public diplomacy blog, MountainRunner. Don’t neglect the radio show The Sound of Science that features Matt as a guest expert on robots in war, as well as a post on how the U.S. election is portrayed to the rest of the world. Kudos also to Matt, who shares something that he calls shameless self-promotion, but that others might suggest is a valuable lesson learned (where’s Drezner on this one?) – on the value of some blogs, and of subject matter experts and scholars who blog despite a pervasive and stifling anti-blog mentality that treats it as an untoward thing for serious people to be doing… here it is: a note of thanks sent to Matt from an individual who relied on the MountainRunner blog as a study aid for his successful application to become a Foreign Service Officer:

I have recently received a conditional offer of employment from the Foreign Service in the Public Diplomacy career track, and am undergoing the clearance process (ugh!).  Your site was a HUGE help in my prep for the oral assessment, not only as a research resource, but also to broaden, stimulate and challenge my thinking about PD.  I know it must not be easy to keep posting while you’re busy with other things, but I want you to know how much I appreciate your efforts.  One of these days I’d like to thank you in person, hopefully as a colleague.

At Zenpundit, con
tributor Mark Safranski notes a number of issues, including Barrack Obama’s “national security working group,”  the “Spread of 5GW Terminology,” and “Mao Zedong and 4GW.” He also comments on a forthcoming RUSI journal review essay by LTC John Nagl. Excerpt:

Fielding first rate conventional militaries of local or regional “reach” are inordinately expensive propositions and only the United States maintains one with global power projection capabilities and a logistical tail that can fight wars that are both far away and of long duration.  Economics, nuclear weapons, asymmetrical disparities in conventional firepower, globalization and the revolution in information technology that permits open-source warfare have incentivized warfare on the cheap and stealthy at the expense of classic state on state warfare. The predictions of Martin van Creveld in The Transformation of War are coming to pass – war has ratcheted downward from armies to networks and blurs into crime and tribalism. In this scenario, kinetics can no longer be neatly divorced from politics – or economics, sociology, history and culture. “Legitimacy”, stemming from getting actions on the mental and moral levels of war right, matter tremendously.

Go read the whole thing – and don’t miss the extended discussion that follows.

Now, if I could only get something out of HOTS.