As if there weren’t enough problems in the neighborhood… after years of moribund existence, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is in the news. See these two items in The Economist: Unrest in Uzbekistan: Fata Fergana and The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan: Here Comes Trouble. CTlab friend and Jihadica frontman Thomas Hegghammer has also pointed out a new Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) report on an IMU successor organization of sorts, the Islamic Jihad Union, authored by FFI Fellow Einar Wigen. Go read. 

An interesting byte on CTlab friend Tom Johnson, of the Naval Postgraduate School, and his involvement with Canadian COIN approaches in RC South. I had the opportunity to meet up with Tom briefly when he blew through Kabul on his way to Kandahar; his work on Taliban messaging is second to none.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — International forces have failed to quash the insurgency in Afghanistan because they have failed to understand the Taliban’s common-touch campaign, a key architect of Canada’s bold new “model village” strategy said Sunday. At its heart, Prof. Thomas Johnson said, the counter-insurgency is “essentially an information war” the Taliban have been winning hands down. “We need a change in strategy,” said Johnson, the director of the Program for Culture and Conflict studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “All counter-insurgency is local (and) this is a rural insurgency. We need to go where the Taliban are operating 24/7, 365 days a year.” The only way to do that is to leave the military-secured bases that are essentially garrisons cut off from the country and people around them and go into villages on a full-time basis, he said. “We need to embolden the traditional villager system so they can give the Taliban the finger,” he said in an interview at the Canadian out-reach compound in Kandahar city. Johnson’s work caught the eye of Canadian Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance, the senior military commander in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province. The two men, along with a couple of other experts, joined forces to design Canada’s leading-edge approach of trying to normalize small population centres on the five main approaches to Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city.

Read the full article here.

… and then prosecute you for it. This, on the science and psychology of eyewitness testimony, from Seed Magazine:

This February, 10 years after his death in prison, Timothy Cole was posthumously exonerated for a rape he did not commit. Before his trial, a victim picked him out of a series of photographs, but her memory may have been skewed by the fact that his image was the only one in color. Cole’s case is not an isolated one. The Innocence Project, a legal advocacy group that worked on his behalf, has cleared the names of more than 175 people who were wrongly convicted due to the unreliability of human memory.

Psychological research continues to undermine the trust given to eyewitnesses’ ability to accurately remember the details of a crime, and we’re becoming increasingly aware of how often their memories are unconsciously manipulated. Paired with a growing interest in the field of neurolaw, which examines the intersection of neuroscience and legal systems, the desire for tools that can objectively assess the accuracy of memories is palpable. But is it possible?

Recently, the stakes for answering that question have been raised. Last fall in the Indian city of Pune, a woman was convicted of murder on the basis of a brain scan that purported to show that she remembered putting arsenic in her husband’s food. This controversial case piqued the interest of Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University who specializes in the legal implications of neuroscience. “We want to figure out how plausible it actually is that you could tell if someone has a memory or not,” he says. “It’s certainly plausible enough to explore it.”

Greely is exploring that question and many others as the codirector of Stanford University’s Law and Neuroscience Project. Awarded a $10 million MacArthur Foundation grant in late 2007, this group of about 40 neuroscientists, lawyers, and philosophers is making the first concerted effort to examine neuroscience’s impact on the law. The team will convert its research into guides for judges and law schools, detailing what current neuroscience technologies—particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—can and cannot reveal about the information in a person’s mind.

Read the full article…

I hadn’t seen this before. Absolutely hilarious.

H/t Jason Sigger.

Two posts on strategic focus helped crystalize a major criticism I’ve had of the kind of work done in the puzzle palace… natch, make that the kind of work required of the big thinkers sitting in the puzzle palace, who are ultimately responsible for answering the requirements laid out by the stars and bars who run the place.

Drew Conway, picking up on Robert Haddick’s weekly This Week at War report at the Foreign Policy website, writes about stated military interest in developing decentralized, autonomous fighting units. I disagree with some of Drew’s observations. “From my experience,” he writes, “most terrorist networks are organized as highly clustered layers, with central leadership forming the center, pushing orders downrange to the periphery.” OK. “Terrorist foot soldiers are rarely, if ever, allowed to act without explicit consent from agents connect to the leadership.” Here I think Drew overgeneralizes, since there are few givens linking intent and implementation – a.k.a. command and control – and outcomes vary considerably.

Drew goes on to make some excellent points in his discussion of network specialization and niche expertise, which makes for a useful basis for comparison of terrorist networks and proposed military networks. A point not made, and that I would add to this, is that deliberately enabling and accepting real tactical unit autonomy is a catch-22. Modern technology enables very senior people to focus on very very granular issues. Many have argued that that’s a recipe for nano-management and inhibits strategic thinking – producing a peculiar counterpart to the proverbial strategic corporal: the tactical flag officer.

This is at the heart, I think, of what the other Drew – Andrew Exum – asks at Abu Muqawama. Citing Nir Rosen, Ex asks whether mass casualty events like yesterday’s truck bombing in Iraq have any strategic significance. Rosen’s analysis is worth revisiting:

The occasional al Qa’eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil. It would be naive to say that Iraq’s future is certain, or even likely, to be a peaceful one, but the war between Sunnis and Shiites is now over.

Some of the logic that pre-dates 9/11 and that was amplified by it has been that terrorism does what it does by virtue of the fact that it’s a form of psycho-theatre, so its impact is contingent on both the extent of damage done, and more importanly, on how much attention we pay to it (through fear, sensationalism, politicization, or what have you). Mass casualty incidents certainly emphasize the former, but I think there’s probably an argument to be made even in such cases that it’s the latter that amplifies things – and begs questions about quantitative thresholds and serious cost-benefit analysis of appropriate countermeasures and responses.

The short version is that least likely though most dangerous scenarios – say, bin Laden himself deploying a backpack nuke – require a tactical level focus on individuals and their movements. So, the network fight at the core of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency may, under certain well-defined circumstances, involve a high-level focus on microscopic detail. But I’ve heard silly statements like “tactical events with strategic effect” applied way too many times to the most mundane details to believe that it’s anything more than an excuse, a default setting, for getting and staying stuck in the weeds.

I’m not sure that there’s any way out of the conundrum. Better filtering of information is always a good thing to strive for. Better judgement, too. In both legal and ethical terms, military commanders also have a responsiblity to be as well informed as possible; the consequences of being ill-informed, much less wilfully so, are potentially disastrous.  So where to draw the line between command level situational awareness, and the imperative to impose control over units, right down to the tactical level? Do we need to turn off the technology that enables it? That’s tantamount to turning a blind eye to what goes on below strategic level; is it a necessary pre-condition for accepting small unit autonomy? Somewhere between cyberneticism run amok and autonomous battlefield  tonka toys – things we’ve debated extensively at CTlab – there’s got be a more effective, if not exactly happy, medium.