This, from the Washington Times:

Gen. David H. Petraeus plans to open an in-house intelligence organization at U.S. Central Command this week that will train military officers, covert agents and analysts who agree to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan for up to a decade.

The organization, to be called the Center for Afghanistan Pakistan Excellence, will be led by Derek Harvey, a retired colonel in the Defense Intelligence Agency who became one of the Gen. Petraeus’ most trusted analysts during the 2007-08 counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq.

Hmmm. Expertise. Political expedience. Expertise. Political expedience. Say that combo ten times fast, and let me know which one you get tripped up on. The problem isn’t analysts and other dedicated folks staying focused on the subject at hand. Political masters and senior staff are notoriously, monstrously pragmatic, and will think absolutely nothing of assigning, say, the resident West Africa guy to go deep on South West Asia…. with a report back deadline of tomorrow morning. I have no doubt that the management will come up with some wonderful feat of time compression to abbreviate that decade-long commitment, when conditions demand it, and reassign folks whenever there’s a shortage of heavy lifters and thinkers somewhere else.

H/t DR

While the al-Megrahi fiasco still boiling away, this little bit of news has simultaneously bubbled up to the surface, but received almost no mention:

Libya Wins Swiss Apology For Arrest of Gaddafi Son

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz apologized to the Libyan government on Thursday for the brief detention last year of a son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, clearing the way for a return to normal diplomatic ties.

“We are apologizing for what happened to Hannibal Gaddafi and the two sides agreed to form a committee to discuss the matter,” Merz told reporters in Tripoli.

Libyan Prime Minister Al-Baghdadi Ali Al-Mahmoudi said the two countries had agreed on a “normalization” of their relationship, a decision that was confirmed by Merz.

The row began when Hannibal Gaddafi and his pregnant wife Aline were arrested in a Geneva luxury hotel in July 2008 on charges of mistreating two domestic employees. Armed police forced open their hotel suite after being alerted to repeated altercations.

Libya cut back oil supplies to Switzerland and withdrew more than $5 billion in assets from Swiss banks in 2008 over the incident.

Geneva’s prosecutor dropped the case in September last year following the withdrawal by the plaintiffs of their formal complaint after they reached an undisclosed settlement with the Gaddafis.

A Geneva lawyer representing Libya and the Gaddafis said in April they had sued the Geneva authorities for more than 500,000 Swiss francs. A hearing on the civil suit was due next month.

Switzerland’s government said last month it wanted to hold a summit with Gaddafi to defuse the row and that Merz was prepared to meet the Libyan leader soon.

A Swiss statement said that two Swiss who have been detained in Libya will be able to leave the country “in the next few days.”

Swiss officials have named one of the Swiss prevented from leaving Libya as Max Goeldi, director of Swiss-Swedish electrical engineering conglomerate ABB in Tripoli, but have declined to identify the other.

“Both countries agree to set up independent arbitration to investigate the circumstances of the arrest of Hannibal Muammar Gaddafi and his wife,” the statement said, adding that Switzerland was prepared to apologize for the “unseemly and unnecessary” arrest of Gaddafi and his family.

I’ve reproduced it here in full for purposes of debate and discussion… but in keeping with Tim’s point on blogfluff, I won’t venture forth any conspiracy theories – except to suggest that we’re not getting the whole story on what’s going on with Libya. What have the Libyans got that’s inspired everyone to cater to their interests?

Between The Surrogates, Gamer, and now what’s being touted as James Cameron’s masterpiece, Avatar, this has been a year for pop culture promotion of proxy precepts…

OK, that was maybe a bit too alliterative for its own good. But I find it intriguing that such a robust theme is running through mainstream pop culture, and at the same time that the implications and consequences of surrogate warfare are being served up in daily doses of current affairs. Think coerced and unwitting suicide bombers, private military and security contractors, reliance on local militias in Iraq and Afghanistan. Think robotics in war, remote battlefield participation via drones and mechanoid substitutes for flesh and bone combat. You get the picture.

Trailers have been hard to come by so far (see the Visual Stream section here at CTlab for a couple of tasters pulled from YouTube). Michael Conroy, on the 15 minute 3D trailer that previewed in theatres on 21 August, writes:

The clips flitted from a battle command room, to a frantic forest chase scene, to lush magical glades and soaring, floating mountains between which dragons soared majestically in their hundreds. It’s impossible to describe in words the sheer beauty of Cameron’s realisation of his hybrid world of science fiction and fantasy, but as you observe the sheer scale, magnificence and care that has gone into the creatures and settings, you realise you’re experiencing a perfect moment of fantasy indulgence. You realise that yes, this is what science fiction and fantasy should look like. You may have had the same feeling when you first saw a lightsabre drawn, or those wondrous first moments of magic in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Cameron’s boyhood fascination with fiction really shows, but to me the world feels like some sort of beautiful merging of The Legend of Zelda, Halo and Bioshock. I was utterly awestruck by the majesty of the world presented, for the first time since Peter Jacksons’ interpretation of The Lord Of The Rings.

Interesting, too, that these are all science fiction movies. A cathartic genre?

I know some of you have been wondering, well, are they important or aren’t they? There wasn’t much clarity on this the last time we debated it. This time, those who’re involved are pretty heavy hitters.

Will the fog lift? Will reason prevail?

All I have to say, really, is thanks to everyone for all the book-grist. 🙂

Go read, at Foreign Policy’s blog empire:

• Stephen M. Walt, “The Safe Haven Myth.”
• Peter Bergen, “How Realistic Is Stephen Walt’s Realism?“

Shocking. This, from Malcom Dando, via Robert Evans and Reuters:

GENEVA (Reuters) – A leading expert on chemical and biological arms control called Wednesday for urgent efforts to stop new mind-altering drugs developed for medical purposes from being adopted by the military for use in warfare.

In an article in the U.S. journal Nature, British academic Malcolm Dando said civilian researchers in many countries seemed largely unaware of the danger and urged quick action to adapt a key arms pact to head it off.

“In the past 20 years, modern warfare has changed from predominantly large-scale clashes of armies to messy civil strife,” wrote Dando, citing the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s and current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chemical agents and even gene therapy being developed in civilian life science laboratories “are particularly suited to this style of warfare; it is not hard to find people in the military world who think they would be useful,” he declared.

Read the rest here.