Afghanistan

I haven’t written much about Afghanistan lately because I didn’t think I had much to add to the conversation.  My experiences there are becoming less and less relevant but I occasionally see something that sparks a memory or thought.

This article (from late June) talks about a rocket attack at Bagram Airbase that killed two soldiers.  When I was there we came under rocket attack a few times and I was always under the impression that either the rockets that were fired against us were virtually useless as a weapon when jury-rigged to fire as they were (we never had one come close to any living/working areas in spite of the base housing around 10,000 soldiers and all sorts of equipment) or that the people firing them were more interested in sending a message than in actually hitting anything.  When I first got in country I believed the former but by the end of my tour began to strongly suspect the latter.  An occasional rocket over the perimeter could be an effective tool in convincing the military leadership that we still needed local warlords to maintain control and order in the countryside and guarantee the flow of money and materiel.

In fact, I was so non-plussed by the threat of rockets that I refused to get out of bed during one attack until I heard the second one whistle over my tent and then didn’t think much of casually sauntering to the latrine before making my way to my assigned station (a shoddily constructed plywood building that would have collapsed into a pile of matchsticks had it been hit).  I’d like to think I was just incredibly brave (and believe me that’s how I’ll play it up if anyone is buying the drinks) but really it just didn’t seem like a real threat.

I think back to my time outside the wire in the area around Bagram in 2003-2004 and I have to say it’s surprising to hear that things have deteriorated so much since then.  It’s a long way from riding in unarmored SUVs with poor communication equipment, 4 or 5 other soldiers armed only with individual weapons and not being particularly concerned and the way the country is described today.

As a related aside, I highly recommend reading the dispatches of Graeme Wood.  He’s currently in Helmand with the Marines and has some great observations.

Finally…

Oh yeah…and I finally finished Half Life 2.  Now that’s an accomplishment!

Terrorism and crime

A few weeks ago I took a writer to task for inflating the risks of a terrorism/street gang alliance and bemoaned the lack of good research into the question of whether such an axis is a real threat.  Well, maybe I’m just thrilled that someone is confirming my biases but I’d like to recommend “A Crime-Terror Nexus?  Thinking on Some of the Links between Terrorism and Criminality” (you’re probably going to have to get it from your library if you don’t have access to a journal archive).

Now, my only criticism of the work is that they don’t really define terrorism very well and include groups that I wouldn’t (FARC, LTTE -until recently, of course-, and Hezbollah seemed to have moved beyond ‘terrorist’ status into some sort of quasi-state status actually controlling territory and fielding more traditional fighting forces and/or weilding political power) but this inclusion makes their findings all the more interesting.

[Terrorist groups'] ideological (political) distinctiveness from organized crime will preclude fully symbiotic cooperation.  Where there is evidence of cooperation between terrorists and organized crime groups, it generally occurs in contexts where terrorists are “forced” to ally with organized crime (for example, because organized crime already controls the relevant illicit markets), and these relationships are temporary and/or parasitical rather than symbiotic.

What’s more, if we’re talking about criminal activity beyond retail narcotics sales (like the Mardrid bombers) and want to think about bigger crimes (like human trafficking, wholesale narcotics trafficking, etc.), then the authors say:

This type of criminal activity, however, requires extensive organizational capability, and is likely to be engaged in by more organized terrorist groups rather than by individuals or stand-along cells.

From the article it looks like the ‘more organized’ terrorists are the ones I would classify as insurgencies or civil war combatants rather than terrorists but the bigger point is that small cells and long wolves are just not likely to have the capability or intent to engage with organized criminal networks on a significant scale.

The authors do a pretty good job of classifying types of criminal organizations based on the crimes the commit and, through them, the skills required for such operations and parallels that with a classification of terrorist groups.  The truth is that there are very few reasons for terrorist groups and criminal networks to interact.  Most terrorist acts aren’t too expensive and require little in the way of cash.  Criminal groups are unlikely to want to work with terrorists either through their own twisted concepts of patriotism, don’t want the risk of attracting attention or because they realize that their profits are dependent of a semi-functioning state and the radical change most terrorists claim to want could endanger that cash flow.

The authors do state that such collaboration could be more likely in weak states but even so, the evidence for a symbiotic relationship between criminal groups and terrorists is very, very thin.

Dork-out

Note:  This post is about D&D and so you should only consider reading it if you have a passing interest in that subject and are in a place your co-workers, spouse(s)?, and others won’t mock you for reading it.  You’ve been warned.

After a 23 year hiatus, about a year ago I started playing D&D again (fate conspired to move a gamer cousin within about 15 minutes of me and that sealed the deal).  The game in its current 4th edition incarnation is a long, long way from when I played it originally and I have to say the changes are all for the better.  The game adds structure to the administrative parts and allows much more freedom for the fun (roleplaying) parts.  Of course, it could just be that I enjoy it more now that I’m older and so have some real world experiences to add to my imagination (really, is negotiating with an ogre that different from dealing with that pinhead from headquarters who may not have much in the way of brains but could crush your career with a flick of his wrist (either by club or evaluation report)?

If there’s a fault with the new game system is that there are too many options for any player to fully explore.  Gaming (at least for those of us with jobs, spouses and other interests) is an occasional pastime at best requiring calendar synching with 5 or 6 others and yet Wizards of the Coast seems intent on publishing new material so fast you barely have a chance to digest it before you see another heaping plate coming towards you.

So, I was thinking it might be interesting to change to focus of a campaign away from characters and instead, put the focus on an item and have the players interact with it over time in various guises.  Perhaps an example would make things a bit clearer.

Imagine a group of characters starting out at 1st level.  They’re given a quest (defeat an enemy, make a treaty, protect a caravan, etc) and given a magical item to start them off.  The whole campaign will focus around this item so if the party is killed by a band of raiders, no problem.  If it’s stolen by some pesky kobolds, ok.  As soon as the item is out of the hands of the party the players will generate new characters to represent the new owners of the magic item.  Maybe they have a reason for having the item and maybe they don’t but the central theme of the campaign remains with the item.

As characters increase in level (perhaps each change of owners would be reflected in a higher level) a new aspect of the item could be revealed (maybe uncovering enchantments would become quests in themselves).  At some point it becomes clear that this isn’t a regular magical item but some sort of all artifact (with innate intelligence driving the characters to some end?).  By the time the characters reach the end of the campaign the full powers of the artifact could be revealed or maybe the item is actually a bound demon/demi-god which is finally released (for good or ill) upon the earth.

Thing about the Lord of the Rings but not focusing on the trilogy but rather taking a longer view of the history of the ring and allowing players to play the various owners of the ring throughout generations.

Players would have to change characters with much more regularity than normally occurs which might be a bit dissapointing but, on the other hand, they get to play an incredible amount of races, classes and even occasionally monsters.  It might be a great introductory campaign after which players would have a better idea of what kind of characters they’d like to play.

And now that you’ve made it this far, here’s a movie clip…if you get the references and think it’s funny (or suspect someone stole your character notes from when you were a kid, check out the whole movie, it’s quite good.

America according to Peter Kalm

I just started reading Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America.  In 1747, Kalm was sent by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to find and bring back plants from the new world which could be cultivated in the cold Swedish climate.  He took advantage of his opportunity to observe and document almost every aspect of his travels throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Canada.  As a result, his book reads a lot like an 18th century blog with a wonderful hodge podge of descriptions and facts about colonial America.  Since there’s no central narrative Kalm is free to talk about Indian burial rites in one passage and then switch to the price of firewood in Philadelphia and the reader, if they so choose, may open the book and read at random.

Perhaps because he wasn’t on a specific government mission like Lewis and Clark (and wasn’t crazy as a bedbug like Lewis) I am finding Kalm’s work more interesting.  He seemed to approach his travels as an opportunity to describe America to a readership back in Europe that still knew virtually nothing about the land or the people (including, perhaps, many former countrymen) and so needed descriptions about virtually everything.

It also provides a glimpse about European (or at least Scandinavian) perceptions about life in the mid-18th century.  For example:

[Americans] do not attain to such an age as the Europeans, and it is an almost unheard of thing that a person born in this country lives to be eighty or ninety years of age.

How long were Europeans living in 1750s?  I was always under the impression that life expectancy was rather short.  Apparently all those old geezers were getting busy as well…

[American] women cease bearing children sooner than in Europe.  They seldom or never have children after they are forty or forty-five years old and some leave off in their thirties.

Wow…apparently the biological clock was ticking much slower back then.

The Swedish response to organized crime

Last week, while listening to my Radio Sweden podcast, I heard this story about something called the ‘Alcatraz List’.  It seems it is a list developed by Swedish law enforcement of the ‘most dangerous’ criminals in the country and there are concerns that it might not have been worth the expense to create it given that only half of the people on the list have received any jail time in the three years the list has been in existence.  The story was pretty sparse on details so there wasn’t much to say.  I did a bit of poking around on this wonderful series of tubes that is the internets and found this summary of report evaluating 14 initiatives designed to fight organized crime.  Thank god the Swedes love to 1)  do research, 2)  write about it and 3)  translate it.

Just an observation, Swedes apparently also love their white space.  The amount of blank pages stuffed in the front of the report (you’ve got to get to page 6 of a 33 page report before you get to any content) and the margins in the report are so big (oh my god…it’s full of stars!) that I’m reminded of my school days as I tried desperately to pad my reports to get them to meet the minimum page requirements.

In 2006, the Swedish National Police Board decided that SEK 120 million (approx 15.5 million dollars. Eds.) would be released for police efforts aimed at fighting organised crime…It was hoped that the campaign would provide the Criminal Investigation Department and the police authorities with an incentive to commence
larger projects, which previously lacked resources.

That being said, even though the report is in typically restrained Swedish style there’s quite a bit here to raise an eyebrow.  First, let this soak in:

Brå was commissioned to make an evaluation of the special campaign against organised crime, i.e. a thorough investigation of outcome and results made upon completion…This entails not just describing what was done within the campaign, but also why it was done, and whether it was the most efficient way of doing it.

Whoa…an actual evaluation of anti-crime initiatives?  That is impressive all by itself.  While in the U.S. the Department of Justice may do evaluations of initiatives I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find such work being done at the state level.  While it may be basic management strategy, the idea that law enforcement initiatives should be clearly articulated with cost estimates and metrics to determine success or failure remains as elusive as bigfoot at sub-Federal levels in the U.S..  Given that 11 U.S. states have populations roughly equal or larger than Sweden’s 9 million and have significant amounts of personnel and resources devoted to law enforcement and anti-crime activities one would think there would be some interest to determine the effectiveness of their efforts.

Secondly they identified their broad targets as:

1. Groups involved in organised crime: Hells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, Original Gangsters, Angereds Tigrar, Brödraskapet and A.S.I.R.
2. The importation and distribution of cannabis in Sweden.
3. Particularly difficult and serious crime over time, for example attacks on security transports.

Now, the report isn’t clear if their goals were more specific than this (How exactly is ‘organized crime’ defined?  What in the world is ‘difficult and serious crime’?) and it might either have been included in the full report or be an issue with translation but such broad goals could lead to abuse of the program.

How?  Glad you asked.

Imagine offering departments a big bucket of money to address the problems above.  A good bureaucrat will look around at what they’re already doing and see if they can shoe-horn existing activities (via some creative writing) into this program resulting in extra money for no extra work.  I’m not saying that happened here and knowledge that there would be an evaluation of funding and results would certainly go a long way to mitigating that risk but clear definitions would be helpful.

Some of the findings of the report:

• Much more is needed in the form of preventive action.
• Cooperation with municipalities and the social authorities involved in crime prevention
  work has, however, not been developed within the project.
• Cooperation with private sectors has not been particularly developed either.
• What has been mentioned in the interviews as less successful, are those projects that have had a narrow focus, primarily those that have been directed towards a particular individual.
• Most projects within the campaign have been operational, and have been directed towards tactical analysis with short-term objectives, in the form of confiscation and legal
  proceedings. Internationally, it has been put forward that there is a need for more strategically directed analyses within the police
• One implication regarding the projects that have, so far, been concluded, is that most of them are based on methods used by the police in their day-to-day police work.

It’ll be interesting to see if these points resonate within the Swedish justice system and they devote some energy to prevention, strategic planning and targeting, and incorporating non-law enforcement partners.  They are, essentially, arguing to adopt an intelligence led policing model of which I’m a fan, although I haven’t seen it actually work as advertised in an ongoing basis (although I hear positive things out of Canada and the U.K).

I would really like to know what sort of intelligence and analytical techniques they found (un)helpful and incorporate in their operations.  They get hinted at several times throughout the report but I can’t get a feel if they’re being intentionally vague, don’t see it as central to their initiatives or don’t really incorporate intelligence and analysis in their activities.

Update:  Oh, and just for the record I do not approve of the new intro music for Radio Sweden.

Putin strikes again

I know it’s cheap political pandering but geez, I find Vlad Putin damn entertaining.  We just don’t have a politician that can do political theater at this level:

The prime minister abruptly interrupted a meeting with senior retailers at the Moscow White House, the seat of the Russian government, to drag them on an impromptu visit to a nearby branch of the Perekrestok supermarket chain.

Rounding on Yuri Kobaladze, the chain’s head of corporate relations, Mr Putin demanded: “Why do your sausages cost 240 roubles? Is that normal?” “But these are high quality sausages,” Mr Kobaladze replied, looking crestfallen.

But the prime minister was not to be deterred. “Too expensive,” he muttered, before conjuring up a price list from his pocket. “I can show you your mark up. Look at this kind of sausage. You’ve marked it up by 52 per cent.”

“This is double the (cost) price,” he said to Mr Kobaladze. “Is this normal?”

“Is 120 per cent a high mark up?” Mr Kobaladze responded timidly.

“Very high,” the prime minister said.

“It will be lowered tomorrow,” the executive replied.

I’ve got to get these videos on DVD.  You can almost feel these executives squirm as they think about gulags, 3am knocks on the door by trench coat wearing thugs or various Czarist excesses.

This guy really needs a reality show.

Don’t mess with Comrade Bear.

Drilling isn’t boring

The Norwegian state oil company decided it needed a themesong.  Rather than go with the typical corporate drivel they attempted to do something hip and ended up with the following.  I was a bit dismissive at first but the damn song is catchy so now I’m thinking I’m just jealous.

Gangs and insurgencies – the final chapter

I figured I had said all there was to about this subject and then David Kilcullen had to go and appear on The Colbert Report.  Check it out (sorry, I can’t seem to embed it).

Here’s the relevant exchange (forgive any errors in the transcription but this is really close if not exact):

Colbert:  …[You say] people in poor communities turn to gangs for protection, for services when the government can’t do it for them…

Kilcullen:  Exactly right…There’s actually a huge amount of similarity between basic police work and the sort of stuff that happens with gangs and so on and what happens in this [insurgency] environment.

So, first, it’s nice to know that David obviously reads this blog but he really should credit me for these ideas [I'm just kidding Mr. Kilcullen.  Call me! ]

More seriously, I’d make a slight tweak to his observation.  There is a huge similarity to the challenges in police work and insurgencies but I’d argue that most American police departments have been trying to approach those problems from a mindset that more closely hews to traditional military thinking that counterinsurgency doctrine.

Current anti-crime measures are almost exclusively reactive and suppression based.  You wait for a crime to occur, you find the suspect and you arrest him/her.  There’s no identification or addressing of underlying factors.

This video really struck a cord with me since I had virtually the same conversation with my command which I was in Afghanistan in 2003.  My command could not get their heads around the idea of insurgency and could only conceive of conventional military threats.  Hence, I was tasked to do an Intelligence Preperation of the Battlefield so that they could plan what to do if the Taliban attempted to overrun Bagram airfield.  Now, Bagram had over 10,000 soldiers at the time, in addition to a sizable number of attack helicopters and aircraft and yet, the only threat scenario these guys could come up with was a Taliban motorized rifle division coming over the Koh-i-Safi mountains.  IEDs?  Rocket attacks?  Nah…”This isn’t Iraq” I was told or “C’mon…who does that?”

As a side note, my repeated attempts to convince them that such a scenario was highly unlikely and that other threats should have a higher priority went unheeded, setting off an unfortunate string of increasingly dysfunctional exchanges which ended with me telling the S-3 that he was full of bulls*it at a very full shift change brief.  (Not a particularly wise move for a mid-level NCO although, miraculously, I avoided any repercussions).

We had a number of soldiers with civilian law enforcement experience and I recommended dragooning them, on a part time basis, to assist in intelligence gathering and developing a decent view of our new operating environment.  Command couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t get all the information we needed from the internet.  Needless to say, that didn’t happen and 2003-2004 in Afghanistan (at least in the Bagram area) can best be thought of as a year of lethargy.

Still, it is encouraging to hear that the military was inspired in part by the academic/research work done in law enforcement and people who understood the issue made it to the top.   Hopefully the military can return the favor to the law enforcement community.

mea culpa

As pennance for my tasteless jibe at Gov. Sanford yesterday I submit this article from John Dickerson about the situation that deserves a wide reading.