It’s hard to imagine that a little more than a year has gone by since I first thought about starting up a research group focused on the spatial dynamics and politics of conflict – originally inspired by participation in the New Battlefields Old Laws project, and one of its workshops in Herzliya, Israel, in the summer of 2007. The ambition was that it might evolve into a fully fledged research centre. The intent was that it would be inclusive, reaching out to academic and non-academic practitioners (yes, academics are practitioners, too!) of all kinds, and bridge scholarly disciplines. I also had in mind that it would take advantage of online technologies and function as a virtual think tank of sort.

CTlab hasn’t taken the full shape I intended for it: we managed to host two symposia, and organized a well attended public lecture at University College London in November. Many ideas were voiced but never followed through, or were unsustainable; constraints of time and resources. We’ve been most active with this blog. Tim Stevens’ participation and enthusiasm, eventually taking on the mantle of Managing Editor, has helped it to flourish in its first year. He “got it” when many didn’t, or didn’t want to. My old friend Matt Barlow brought to the table an historian’s perspective and depth on place and space, and his continued involvement promises to lead us in interesting directions in 2009. Both have been invaluable sources of advice, sounding boards for my ambitions for CTlab, and great sources of individual and intellectual support to the project. Various contributors have written subtantive pieces for CTlab, as well, helping us build a critical mass of content.

There’s much more that I could write about the experience of the last year. I’ll sum it up with the suggestion that we have a long way to go, and that it’s become clear that our interests and our focus are both much broader and much narrower than initially envisioned. I look forward to what CTlab has yet to become.

Fred Kaplan, writing at Slate: “It’s time to start getting nervous about Afghanistan.” He sums up the issues thus:

The problem of Afghanistan is the easiest—or at least the easiest to calculate—in the sense that it’s to some extent susceptible to military power. But, as Gates and Petraeus have said several times, it’s not entirely a military problem; there can be no “victory” in the standard meaning of the word. A good ending, if there is one, will involve a negotiated settlement in which “reconcilable” Taliban—those who joined the insurgency for nonideological reasons—are lured over to the Afghan government’s side.

Top U.S. officers, he writes, “are starting to aid local militias in the fight against the Taliban,” an approach that “has the merit of realism”, acknowledging as it does that  “Afghanistan is a tribal society; power is focused on the militias; securing the population, at this point, can be done only through them.” Kaplan, noting WaPo coverage, is rightfully cautious:

…we’re not going to win over any chieftains unless we can demonstrate that we might win. This is the main reason for a boost—nobody’s calling it a “surge”—in U.S. troop levels. We need some quick tactical victories against the Taliban. Air power can’t do it: Bombing kills too many civilians; and that turns the Afghan people against us, against the Afghan government, and toward the insurgents. So more ground forces are the only way.

There’s more, notably Kaplan’s observation of a typical COIN paradox: “More U.S. troops are needed to provide security to the Afghan people; but these troops may, at the same time, fuel the insurgency—which will require more troops, and on the cycle goes.”

All of this is pretty straightforward. Where I disagree with Kaplan is his suggestion that the way forward (the way to “short-circuit this cycle”, as he puts it) is to demonstrate a few quick and easy successes. The idea is to cast a positive light on NATO and Coalition forces and their efforts, which will hopefully generate a cascade of good will and positive progress. To do that effectively, though, would require some pretty robust information operations, and so far, it’s the Taliban who have that one down pat. I’m not sure how Kaplan’s recommendations would hold up under that sort of spotlight; a few quick and easy successes, absent the sustained attention that would keep them from being reversed or overturned, will just as easily fuel local cynicism.

That said, Kaplan did note the paradox of our involvement, and I’m being churlish; I offer no solutions.

With Israeli strikes on Gaza raising temperatures over the weekend, you’d think major outlets would have their hands full of real material to fill the pages. Not the New York Times, which published a piece by Dan Bilefsky entitled “Islamic Revival Tests Bosnia’s Secular Cast” (sic). I’d like to think the spelling of “cast” this way was deliberate, but that would be a stronger attribution of talent than I’m qualified to comment on (never mind that “caste” has little do with the former Yugoslav state’s intricate weave of contentious identity politics). My concern, really, is that this makes news out of non-news. To whit: “Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is undergoing an Islamic revival.” Uh-huh. More:

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling $28 million complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population.

But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others while they chanted, “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were injured.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they had sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

Yawn…

Aside: Orthodox Patriarchs are a facially hirsute bunch, so I’ve always chuckled at observations that “men with beards” are a sure sign of the second coming of bin Laden. More to the point, social engineering has been in play in Bosnia for a while (a continuation of war by other means?), and Bosnian Muslims have been  involved in revivals of one kind or another for a lot longer than 13 years. Whatever you might think of thist latest iteration, I’m not convinced that just because it’s now bearing observable fruit (which must be why it’s being reported as news now, right?…), that it’s really all that significant… except to the extent that it’ll inspire nationalists, who are unlikely to pass up an opportunity to fling the usual hysterics.

Waltz With Bashir, an animated movie about memory and Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon, looks compelling, and reviews have been positive.  Andrew O’Hehir, in his Beyond the Multiplex blog at Salon, writes that the movie’s depiction of “war as a bad acid trip” is, “stunning”, “…the year’s most singular visionary experience available at the movies, and catapults Folman from the obscurity of Israeli TV onto the world stage.” The New York Times’ reviewer A.O. Scott notes that it’s “by no means the world’s only animated documentary… But [Director] Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power.” Listen to the Salon podcast with Ari Folman here.

Details are scant, but according to Anderson Cooper’s blog, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has died at the age of 81.