This one falls under the "pillaging the internet for old news" category. Still, a fascinating Reporters Without Borders graphic of internet black holes, part of a RWB campaing against internet censorship. According to the RWB page,

24 Hours Against Internet Censorship

The Internet is increasingly falling prey to censorship round the world. The 13 "Enemies of the Internet" are blocking access to news which displeases them and imprisoning bloggers who express themselves too freely. Join the campaign now to defend the right of all of us to freedom of expression.

I’ve been reading blog notes on the death of Michael Bhatia, an Oxford PhD candidate working with the US Army in Afghanistan. He was just killed in a roadside bombing incident. He was affiliated with the Watson Institute at Brown, which had this to say:

In Memory of Michael Vinay Bhatia ’99

Michael Bhatia

May 08, 2008

Michael Vinay Bhatia ’99 died yesterday in Afghanistan, where he as working as a social scientist in consultation with the US Defense Department.

In addition to graduating magna cum laude in international relations from Brown University, Michael was a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute from July 2006 to June 2007. At the Institute, he was involved in a research project on Cultural Awareness in the Military, while also writing his PhD dissertation.

Over several years, Michael’s research and humanitarian work took him to such conflict zones as Sahrawi refugee camps, East Timor, and Kosovo, in addition to Afghanistan.

Of his work in Afghanistan, Michael wrote in November: “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population’s concerns, views, criticisms and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”

Michael had recently published some of his research on Afghanistan.

His co-authored book on Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society was just released by Routledge in April. It assesses small arms and security-related issues in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

His edited book on Terrorism and the Politics of Naming was published by Routledge last September. Stating that names are not objective, the book seeks the truth behind those assigned in such cases as the US hunt for al-Qaeda, Russia’s demonization of the Chechens, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In August, his personal three-part photo essay, “Shooting Afghanistan: Beyond the Conflict,” was published by the Globalist. In it, he wrote:

“Afghanistan will soon reach a desperate milestone – the thirtieth anniversary of ongoing conflict. … Though I have spent the majority of my time there researching the wars and those involved in it, conflict is not my primary memory and way of knowing it. I am compelled to write about experiences and ideas that cannot be placed into analytical paradigms, which do not speak to theories of war or peace, to destruction or to reconstruction, but instead to daily interactions that occurred in the course of research.”

His love of photography is revealing. In the Globalist piece, he also wrote:

“Building on Robert Capa’s statement that "If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough," James Nachtwey, the preeminent photo-realist and conflict photographer, once indicated that the primary characteristic of a good war photographer was proximity, closeness and involvement.”

Michael was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He was awarded a George C. Marshall Scholarship in 2001 and a Scoville Peace Fellowship in 2000 supporting residence at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, DC.

He was working on his dissertation, titled “The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978-2005,” based on 350 interviews with combatants throughout Afghanistan, as well as archival and media research. He has also conducted research in Afghanistan for the Overseas Development Institute, the Small Arms Survey, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the UK Department for International Development (via the International Policy Institute, King’s College, London), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Before his fellowship at the Institute, he was a sessional lecturer on the causes of war in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa.

He is the author of War and Intervention: Issues for Contemporary Peace Operations (Kumarian Press, 2003); and of articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Global Governance, Review of African Political Economy, The International Journal of Refugee Law, International Peacekeeping, and Middle East Policy. He was the guest editor of The Third World Quarterly Special Issue: “The Politics of Naming: Rebels, Terrorists, Criminals, Bandits and Subversives,” which was then released as a book by Routledge. He received his MSc in international relations research from the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.

“It’s a terrible loss of someone so young, who had already accomplished a great deal, but had so much more to contribute,” said Institute Professor Thomas J. Biersteker, who advised Michael in his studies over the years.

Details about services will be made available.

Read Michael’s personal photo essays here.

There are more personal write-ups here and here. The Watson write-up was actually offline, and I had to pull it from cache here. Ghosts of Alexander has a thoughtful write-up, citing a report in China News here and a Reuters report here.

I thought this was remarkable for more than the obvious reasons: I’m unaware of any prior human terrain team casualties or other military-employed social scientists killed while on duty. This is a first. Let’s hope it’s the last.

I finally got around to reading Jared Diamond’s New Yorker essay on tribal vengeance in Papua New Guinea. Alex Golub’s detailed post on the subject at Savage Minds, and the reader comments that follow it, are pretty sophisticated; for what it’s worth, this is my two-cents worth.

The title, "Vengeance is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need to Get Even?" is telling, but I was surprised by the turn it took and intrigued by its comment on  modernity  and foreign policy. Diamond starts off by recounting, through the lens of Daniel Wemp, the sort of tit-for-tat vendetta-based warfighting that’s a regular feature of daily life in the New Guinea Highlands. Cultures of individual and local violence are contrasted against the impersonal mechanisms of the state; the recurring theme is the personal satisfaction that accrues from the former.

It’s Diamond’s foray into his own family history that drives his point home. His father-in-law, Jozef Nabel, a Polish Jew who fought in WWII, sought to ascertain the fate of three family members who’d gone missing near the end of the war. When he discovered they’d been executed, and then came face to face with their killer, he declined to kill him and avenge their deaths. "Until his own death," Diamond writes, "nearly sixty years after the murders of his parents and his release of his mother’s killer, Jozef remained tormented by regret and guilt—guilt that he had not been able to protect his parents, and regret that he had failed in his responsibility to take vengeance." For Diamond, Papua New Guinea’s tribal system of vengeance is disruptive, but offers emotional release and gratification to its participants.

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.

There is no doubt that state acceptance of every individual’s right to exact personal vengeance would make it impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow-citizens of the same state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in non-state societies like those of the New Guinea Highlands. In that sense, Jozef was right to leave punishment of his mother’s killer to the Polish state, and it was tragic that the Polish state failed him so shamefully. Yet, even if the killer had been properly punished, Jozef would still have been deprived of the personal satisfaction that Daniel enjoyed.

My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

 Diamond, Jared. "Vengeance is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need to Get Even?" New Yorker (21 April 2008).

Cross-posting this after submitting it on Abu Muqawama, in response to a query AM initiated. You can read the full version here; my thoughts follow below. I told myself I wouldn’t get too caught up with debates in the blogosphere, not because they’re not worth it, but because I have a day job, and the body, as they used to say, is meat. This one was interesting enough in that it’s caught up in some issues that have been in need of thorough corrective thinking for years. Some of the reader responses were right on the money on the aspects of the debate that they addressed, so I would highly recommend going to AM’s site to read the entire thing through.

 BEGINS

I’m going to weigh in here, but only because I’m surprised that this is still being debated the way that it is.

AM: the internet is used by terror groups and guerrilla groups to spread TTPs — tactics, techniques, and procedures

AQ Expert: while the internet was certainly central to the radicalization process, you need an actual physical space to spread tactics and know-how

1. Not only is this not an either-or issue, but judging from the way you wrote it up – and the way your audience responded – everyone’s talking past each other on the very basic elements of this.

2. I suppose my root assertion is: define "spread". Instruction and learning involve a range of practices and processes, but in the absence of applied learning, the "spreading" of "tactics", "techniques", and "procedures" is nothing more than "sensitization" to TTPs. That’s a far cry from being able to demonstrate proficiency through applied knowledge.

3. The process of learning and communication is not divorced from the physical world. Regardless of the kind of primary activity the insurgent or terrorist is involved with, the physical NEVER goes away until he’s dead. Ideas can persist and evolve independent of any one entity. But there’s no such thing as an insurgent or terrorist conducting the sharp kinetic end of the operational spectrum while in a disembodied state. That – the virtual havens argument – is what’s been exaggerated, and I suspect that that’s the point Mike Scheuer was making. 🙂

4. I know that there are manuals for any number of activities – say, flying aircraft – but if I don’t spend time studying them AND applying that learning by actually getting into the cockpit and into the air, I’m probably not going to get too far as a pilot. So, "spread" is a big word, whichever way you cut the argument.

Sorry, maybe the pilot analogy is a bit tasteless – not meant that way.

5. The last point I’ll mention is that disputes over physical vs. virtual domains – read the sanctuary discourse in U.S. policy – has always been overblown. The most sensible approach I’ve seen on this is David Kilcullen’s 2003-2004 ADF concept paper, Future Land Operations Concept: Complex Warfighting.

That document, and the thinking behind it, have been extremely influential in shaping contemporary COIN, asserting that the real and metaphorical enemy "terrain" is complex, not simple, and warfighters need to approach it in terms of its physical and material conditions, human & demographic conditions, and informational & cognitive dimensions – not in isolation one from the another, but as part of a thick weave of obstacles to clean, direct, linear combat.

6. Despite its post-modern flavor, that approach also never loses sight of the fact that at the end of the day, the blood you shed isn’t a poor pixilated facsimile on a computer screen, but the real slippery deal, in the real world.

ENDS 

First there was Wired Magazine‘s national security blog, Danger Room. Then there was Danger Room‘s senior reporter, Sharon Weinberger, who’s got her own website. Then there was Subtopia: A Field Guide to Military Urbanism,  which is listed in the  "Underground Sources" section of Weinberger’s right-hand navigation menu. That was the path that took me to it; Subtopia’s latest entry, "’Block D’ Enters the Pantheon of GWOT Space" is fascinating. Bryan Finoki, who pens Subtopia, refers to a "nebulous pantheon of war space"; "less formal territories of roving cars and disguised suicide bombers that lurk below the surface of the Middle East like a kind of unpredictable predacious root system"; "geospatial domains of ominous surveillance networks". From Abu Ghraib to Gaza’s tunnels, Finoki wonders: "Even if we could calculate the cement tonnage of this footprint, I imagine an even larger volume of GWOT’s unholy vault could only be truly gaged by its cavities of architectural secrecy."

Finoki is now my favorite.

Brilliant. 

There’s more. Go read it.