An interesting Canadian news segment, entitled “Taliban Tactics Evolve.” It features NATO surveillance video, released to show Taliban concealment warfare at work in Afghanistan.

Carrying this forward – cross-posted from previous blog.

Al‐Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records
A new report, from the Combating Terrorism Centre, US Military Academy (West Point). Drawing from records in the US DoD’s Harmony Database,  includes some of the most detailed analyses and useful statistical breakdowns of foreign fighter networks yet extant.

Recent media items on same:

Sharon Behn, “Foreign fighters Seen on the Rise“,Washington Times  (18 October 2007)

David Rohde, “Foreign Fighters of Harsher Bent Bolster Taliban“, New York Times  (30 October 2007)

Richard A. Oppell, Jr., “Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.“, New York Times  (22 November 2007)

Ian Black,  “Saudis Make Up 41% of Foreign Fighters in Iraq“,The Guardian  (23 November 2007)

Andrea Elliott, “Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis“, New York Times  (25 November 2007)

I just finished reading Mark Buchanan’s Small Worlds: Uncovering Nature’s Hidden Networks, published in the US as Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002).

Buchanan’s prose is accessible and spiced with just enough wit to keep the reader engaged, and keeps this a smooth read. The book’s also a great primer on the field of complexity science, tracing its trajectory from Milgram’s early experiments right across the disciplines, including detailed coverage of the work of such pillars of network theory as Granovetter and Barabasi.

There is some striking ambivalence, though. Buchanan, a PhD physicist by training, engages in what I can only describe as the bigotry of the hard sciences on the nature of evidence and truth claims, "objectivity", and verifiable research – the sort of thinking that presupposes there is no evidence absent hard mathematics to back it up (which is irritating in the extreme for a field of research that’s making claims on social phenomena).

Buchanan doesn’t exactly dismiss social sciences out of hand, and curiously, he’s almost reverent of historical method when it comes to dealing with particulars rather than generalizables. But his verbiage hints at condescension (toward some social science suppositions) and apprehension (that the answers to some of those those pesky unexplained elements of networks, alas, sigh…. may lie in the social sciences), when it isn’t engaging in idol-worship (the tyranny of numbers!).

I’m skeptical. Aggregate studies are useful, of course, and theories on the "naturally occuring order" of network architecture – the Godhand – are fascinating.  But  I don’t want to believe that individual human agency is a secondary or irrelevant phenomenon to collective dynamics.

 

Two really interesting items in the latest Harper’s. Full citations with links as follows:

Richard Rodriguez, "The God of the Desert: Jerusalem and the Ecology of Monotheism," Harper’s Magazine Vol 316, No. 1892 (January 2008): 35-46.

John Gray, "Faith in Reason: Secular Fantasies of a Godless Age," Harper’s Magazine Vol 316, No. 1892 (January 2008): 85-88.

Rodriguez’ piece is participant narrative. Gray’s essay is a review of recent books on contemporary and historical problems of secularism by Charles Taylor, Olivier Roy, and Mark Lilla. The TLS  had something similar from early December 2007: Jon Habgood, "God Debates: The So-Called New Atheism is Little More Than a Step Backwards to the Old-Fashioned Atheism,"  Times Literary Supplement  (12 Dec 2007).

Rodriguez associates the desert with emptiness, and Jerusalem, "at the centre of the world", with both; his "curiosity about an ecology that joins three desert religions" dating "from September 11, 2001, from prayers enunciated in the sky over America on that day." He simultaneously bridges and parses naturally occuring worlds and their human-constructed outgrowths, eliciting a fascinating broad-stroke panorama of symbol and paradox:

Those divisions generate boxes, some authentic and some not – their razed and vacated contents metaphors for Jerusalem’s own surrounding ecological context:

The desert is also emblematic, of monastic asceticism, of a dead language, of gaps and cracks in the built world:

The concentric elisions of Jerusalem in the desert – empty urban spaces sprouting from an environmental void – are a twinned and attenuated ecological vacuum in which human communities, amazingly, still manage to coalesce and thrive. One of Rodriguez’s informants describes this locus of activity as "the umbilicus", he notes, "by which term he means the concentration of God’s intention on this landscape." Shades of network theory. "Underfoot," he continues, punctuating the conversation with anecdotal meaning, "is a large anthill – a megalopolis – then a satellite colony, than another, then another, the pattern extending across the desert floor."

Rodriguez’ interpretation is useful, I think, for its discussion of ecology as something more than just a contextual accumulation of the elements. Understanding the primal environmental impetus to belief formation and concept development is especially salient to getting at the foundations of more-or-less mature ideological systems, and an obvious lynchpin for unpacking processes of radicalization. But I’d hesitate to go so far as to suggest that Rodriquez’ landscape of the barren, of the hyper(un)real, reduces the complex to the simple.

This was interesting: "Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy," New Yorker (12 Nov 2007). It looks at the sometimes less than rigorous inner workings of criminal profiling. Fascinating. Its author, Malcolm Gladwell, takes a good hard swipe at the practice, and generally demystifies the sort of analytical gobbledygook that can caveat any argument out of being especially right or wrong. Gladwell probably overstates the case, but makes a good point: beware the BS artist in investigator’s clothing, professing metaphysical insights into the ways of the badman.