Good news, bad news
The good news out of Afghanistan is the agreement to reopen the logistic routes through Pakistan. The bad news is that the Taliban are going to make millions charging for it.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – As the United States trumpeted its success in persuading Pakistan to end its seven-month blockade of supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan, another group privately cheered its good fortune: the Taliban.
One of the Afghan war’s great ironies is that both NATO and the Taliban rely on the convoys to fuel their operations — a recipe for seemingly endless conflict.
The insurgents have earned millions of dollars from Afghan security firms that illegally paid them not to attack trucks making the perilous journey from Pakistan to coalition bases throughout Afghanistan — a practice the U.S. has tried to crack down on but admits likely still occurs.
Meanwhile, in Syria, the good news is that the Assad regime continues to collapse. The bad news is that in the process, some of its chemical weapons may have already fallen into the hands of the Free Syrian Army. Karen Kaya at Long War Journal has a report and video showing the FSA in possession of at least some chemical detection and protection equipment.
A July 27 posting on a Turkish jihadist website claims in a short statement and video that the Free Syrian Army has obtained chemical weapons equipment from a military base in Aleppo that belonged to President Bashir al Assad’s army.
The video, which is titled, “Chemical Weapons Equipment belonging to Assad Forces,” shows images of rebels holding gas masks and what they claim are biological and chemical weapons equipment that they found at a military base following clashes in Aleppo. A written statement above the video claims that Abu Ali, a Free Syrian Army commander, said Assad’s military had left the area in a rush and had not had time to take the equipment with them …
The posting came four days after the regime issued an unprecedented threat to use chemical and biological weapons against any “foreign aggression,” after having characterized the rebels as “foreign terrorists.” …
This raises the question of whether Syria is losing control of its weapons stockpiles amid the chaos there. Furthermore, increasing numbers of videos are popping up showing jihadist groups loyal or sympathetic to al Qaeda, indicating al Qaeda involvement within the Syrian resistance. The prospect of al Qaeda-related groups obtaining chemical and biological weapons is considered one of the greatest threats that the world faces today. [For a list of jihadist groups emerging in Syria, see LWJ report, Army of Islam fighter from Gaza killed in Syria.]
As the Long War Journal notes, there are several jihadhist groups emerging in Syria. Good news is welcome, but it seems that every ray of sunshine has a leaden lining. The New York Times reports that the Turks are terrified they are witnessing the emergence of a major Kurdish threat.
LONDON — There are mounting concerns in Turkey that the conflict in neighboring Syria has opened a Pandora ’s Box from which an autonomous and potentially hostile Kurdish entity will emerge.
With global attention focused on events in Aleppo, which rebels vow to turn into the “regime’s grave,” Turkey has sent troops, armored personnel carriers and missile batteries to the border with Syria after chunks of Syria fell into the hands of Kurdish militias.
“Turkish officials now fear that Syria could become a beachhead for Kurdish militants bent on wreaking havoc inside Turkey,” according to my colleagues Sebnem Arsu and Jeffrey Gettleman.
“Turkish officials have indicated that they will not hesitate to strike in Syria should Kurdish militants stage attacks against Turkey from there.” …
Turkish concerns are focused on the apparent ascendancy in the region of the Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), a Syrian Kurdish movement regarded as an offshoot of Turkey’s banned Kurdish Workers Party (P.K.K.).
A world without American hegemony, which the Left has so long dreamed of, is now within realistic possibility. A little more and we’re there. But it may not usher in the Age of Aquarius, as the Left had predicted. Rather it may be a much more brutal world than they imagine.
The Washington Post reports on rising naval tensions between China and Japan. “TOKYO — Japan voiced concern Tuesday about China’s growing assertiveness in regional waters at a time when it is becoming less clear who in Beijing is making decisions about the country’s military.”
As evidence of China’s alleged aggressiveness in western Pacific waters, particularly the East China Sea, the paper pointed to a “record number” of Chinese training exercises near Japanese islands, with at least one exercise involving an unmanned aerial vehicle. It also cited several instances in which Chinese helicopters flew close to Japanese destroyers. China has also increased its surveillance in the contested waters in recent years, the paper said, adding that the annual Chinese defense budget has more than doubled since 2007.
“China has been expanding and intensifying its activities in waters close to Japan,” the paper said. “These moves, together with the lack of transparency in its military and security affairs, are a matter of concern for the region and the international community.”
Nor are the problems confined to far-distant lands. “The U.S. Internet’s infrastructure needs to be redesigned to allow the NSA to know instantly when overseas hackers might be attacking public or private infrastructure and computer networks, the agency’s leader, General Keith Alexander, said today.” And why? Because he claims Russia and China are eating America’s lunch. Sydney Freeberg at AOL writes:
As the Senate reconvenes to debate the cybersecurity bill, President Obama himself has set the stakes in terms of preventing a future catastrophic attack. But some say the real and present danger is what’s happening under our noses right now, in an online theft of intellectual property that Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
“Don’t wait for something to go boom. It’s happening and it’s happening quietly right now,” said David Smith, director of the Potomac Institute’s Cyber Security Center, in an interview with AOL Defense. “I don’t think they’re nibbling around the edges; I think the rat’s eating your sandwich.”
Modern society is a extraordinarily vulnerable to disruptions in the information and power infrastructure. What has the Western public has not yet internalized is that all those Chevy Volts, Iphones and Starbucks Wi-fi connections can be rendered useless in an instant if the plug stops working. “India suffered a second day of a massive power breakdown that affected nearly half the country on Tuesday. India experienced its worst-ever power crisis, leaving more than 650 million people without electricity.”
India’s transport system screeched to a halt for a second day, as trains stopped and traffic signals stalled — stranding passengers and drivers …
The massive power failure for two straight days has turned the spotlight on India’s electricity deficit. Analysts have long said that the country’s power requirements have failed to keep pace with the demands of an expanding economy and a growing population. As a result, outages for several hours a day are routine across much of the country.
You would think that Western leaders would be interested in beefing up the Design Margin. Storing nuts, like prudent squirrels against a rainy day. Hell no. There’s nothing so desirable as more debt. Nothing that can’t be cured by spending more money. No benefit that can’t be reaped by disarming the populace. Nor is there any cost — how could there be? — to taking decades to bring new power sources online.
We’ve never needed them before, why should we need them now?
The world is apparently leaving the 70-year old Pax America for more troubled waters. But the principal danger is that it is led by a political elite that hates “unproven missile defense”, dreams of a world without nuclear weapons, hopes to rely on wind power for its energy needs and believes that the highest priority is to keep fast food companies whose owners don’t approve of gay marriage out of the restaurant business. That’s the bad news. What’s the good news?
Belmont Commenters
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
Yes, it’s hard to sit back with a box of popcorn and enjoy the show when you’re sitting atop the collapsing house of cards.
The good news is that we are here to witness it all looking through the windows of the restaurant at the end of the universe.
I think the good news lies in the massive, pent up, and near unlimited potential lying below the surface that could be…could be…unleashed with right political leadership. There is an amazing future out there for all of us, if some of the trends from last 200 years are allowed to continue (disease eradication, cheap/reliable energy, abundant and clean water, etc).
Jury is still out on the Mittster (assuming he wins), but we know what continuing down current path will bring.
The Turks are worried about Kurdish designs on their tiny little country?
Oh, so no wonder Erdogan is such a staunch supporter of Hamas!!
File under:
Did China just fire a shot at India? Will the war be over before we hear about it?
America pays the Taliban to transport our Army. In related news, did FDR get credit for hiring the Reichsbahn to transport Patton’s 3rd Army? Did he get a discount for allowing the Germans dual use for the rolling stock so they could also ship Jews East? See Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, they really did arrange it as a package works holiday. Did Lincoln pay the Confederates to supply Contraband slave labor to dig the trenches at Petersburg? Did the Nazis pay Milo Minderbinder to bomb his own airbase on Pianosa?
5. Blast From the Past:Did the Nazis pay Milo Minderbinder to bomb his own airbase on Pianosa?
Only in chocolate-covered Eqyptian cotton.
The good news is G-d is still in charge.
The bad news is people still have free will.
About a hundred years ago, King Faisal told Gertrude Bell, et al, that the Arabs had been subjugated too long ( by the Turks ) for self-rule to succeed. But, the Brits and then the US tried anyway in order to avoid a return of the endless tribal warfare that is the history of the middle east. We needn’t regret our ambivalence about empire – the Brits actually had one and they failed before we did. The most we can do is damage control, yet even that is a trap. What choices do we really have, Richard?
We could save mega-billions of dollars and thousands of lives every year by simply buying and then burning the annual Afghan poppy crop, buy the godawful North and South Waziristan provinces from Pakistan and give them to the Taliban, and give every truly-poor adult in America a $25,000 annual income. Milo Mindenbinder would approve.
10-year-old problem in theoretical computer science falls
Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office
July 31, 2012
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/interactive-proofs-work-even-if-quantum-information-is-used-0731.html
Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, they’re just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems.
Twenty years ago, researchers showed that if the questioner in an interactive proof is able to query multiple omniscient respondents — which are unable to communicate with each other — it can extract information much more efficiently than it could from a single respondent. As quantum computing became a more popular research topic, however, computer scientists began to wonder whether such multiple-respondent — or “multiprover” — systems would still work if the respondents were able to perform measurements on physical particles that were “entangled,” meaning that their quantum properties were dependent on each other.
At the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science in October, Thomas Vidick, a postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Tsuyoshi Ito, a researcher at NEC Labs in Princeton, N.J., finally answer that question: Yes, there are multiprover interactive proofs that hold up against entangled respondents. That answer is good news for cryptographers, but it’s bad news for quantum physicists, because it proves that there’s no easy way to devise experiments that illustrate the differences between classical and quantum physical systems.
This would all be soo interesting to watch if it wasn’t so frighting as to where it might spin off to. The Left in western Europe and the US live in a tooth fairy land of fantasy and seem to have no working understanding of catastrophy. This is their fantasy land collapsing LARGE. I suppose at the end of this there will be fewer people in MENA to worry about wheat.
Extra large popcorn at my house with body armor and ammo on the side.
In the short and medium term, there is no good news.
In the long run, well, there is no good news there either.
As for the ability of the US to positively shape events – it is small and declining rapidly with every cut in the military. Obama and the people who voted for him wanted the US to be less powerful and influential, and to spend more money on vote buying welfare schemes at home. This is what they got. I can only hope the American people enjoy the new disorder, this is exactly what they voted for. After all, Wretchard, it was always clear and obvious to anyone who cared to think what would happen once the world sherrif went home. So, may the Ameican left enjoy the world they willed into being. It will no doubt be a bloody and brutal place, but I really dont think that will bother them much. It never has in the past.
I dunno, who exactly is Taliban, who is just your average Afghan, and what does it matter outside of which turban he puts on in the morning? It’s all spinach if you ask me.
The world is apparently leaving the 70-year old Pax America for more troubled waters.
What Pax Americana is that? The big troubles in the Middle East *started* in 1948. India has *never* had reliable power for most of the country, and that’s hardly an American problem.
c @ 9: Twenty years ago, researchers showed that if the questioner in an interactive proof is able to query multiple omniscient respondents — which are unable to communicate with each other — it can extract information much more efficiently than it could from a single respondent. </i?
Say what? How many omniscient respondents does one need to question, for Ghu's sake? I'm not up on this stuff, and that's largely because I don't think there's any stuff there worth being up on. This does sound halfway interesting, if only because it is not madly in favor of some unrealizable technology. I'll put it somewhere on my list of things to worry about, sometime.
Bad Luck, _Heinlein
Watching the embedded video in the Long War Journal I saw something familiar: the electronic device the insurgent was holding(upside down!), looking something like a handheld radio was a photoionization detector, or PID. It is capable of detecting volatile organic substances (for example, chemical agents) at 1 part per million. Unfortunately, they do not identify the substance, but they will detect them at very low levels. The unit in the video has 4 other gas detection channels, usually Oxygen level, Carbon Monoxide, Hydrogen sulfide, and explosive/flammable gases and vapors (calibrated usually to methane).
Full disclosure, I was a Hazardous Materials Technician for 18 years.
12. Josh
In the middle east it seems freedom is defined as having your king’s boot in your face. Slavery is defined as having some foreign king’s boot in your face.
Usually we’re told that the situation in the middle east is serious but not hopeless.
I’m wondering if the situation in the middle east is hopeless but not serious.
We can only hope that after being consumed by the fire the phoenix truly does rise from the flames.
“I dunno, who exactly is Taliban, who is just your average Afghan, and what does it matter outside of which turban he puts on in the morning? It’s all spinach if you ask me.”
10 ring, Josh. Since you are a non shooter, the ten ring is AKA bullseye. In the black is another term.
One of the big lies Islam uses is that they are fractured into sects. Not if you are an infidel. Sunni and Shitte will cover each other’s backs while killing infidels. Taliban translates as ‘student’. Everybody in a Medrese is a taliban. Since most madrasah are part of a Mosque, they are also social centers, armories, first aid stations, etc. It would be safe to claim that 99% of Muslims are Taliban. Our Dear Leader, President 0bumbler, was a Taliban since he spent a year or so in a Madrasa in Indonesia.
Firecapt, how available are PID’s? Can just anybody buy one? Are they retailed thru specialised shops or can you pick up one on E-Bay?
I’m curious about the agi-prop value of that bit of kit. We are dealing with people that have been proven to murder a 7 year old boy so as to blame it on Israel. Buying a piece of gear and passing it off as captured Syrian army is right up their ally.
Chemical weapons are difficult to use. Humidity, wind direction and force play critical parts of their disbursement. Unless the target is in a trench and pinned down by firepower they aren’t much use from the military POV. Drawbacks exceed the benefits. As a terror weapon, the terr would have to find (or create) just the right circumstances. Buildings holding large numbers of people. Used outdoors they aren’t that effective. Once victims start falling over, most people will run. That would limit fatalities to those that run the wrong way and those physically unable to run. IIRC, Sarin and VX are both heavier then air. Ground huggers. Climb a tree and you are golden.
Wretch: The fall of Assad is decidedly not “good” news. It’s a humanitarian disaster, as you soon shall see.
The Pax Americana doesn’t even seem to cover all of the lower 48 anymore. Victor Davis Hanson says California is already Road Warrior (as in Mel Gibson’s 1981 film) territory.
Has C’thulhu risen and taken up residence in the Golden State?
Should we be surprised? The Western World has been trying desperately to destroy itself since at least World War I, an asinine war, pointless in beginning–except to the German General staff, who started it because they feared Russia, then began to fight it by attacking France rather than Russia, then wrecked that attack to defend against Russia when the latter (surprise…NOT) attacked them–sheesh, it was like watching a tennis ball at a match go back and forth. But as I say, as pointless in its beginning as in its never-ending pointless slaughter as in its incredibly stupid conclusion.
So after that, should we be surprised at Winston Churchill, magnificent in 1940 and ’41, turned troll by keeping the Americans from invading France in 1943, and giving Central Europe to the Russians, moving Poland’s borders about on the map with burnt match sticks? It’s like some low-grade demon took possession of him after Casablanca. I mean, c’mon–remember he kept wanting to open a third front–in the damned Balkans??? They actually invaded Italy down in the bottom of the boot! They could have landed directly at Ostia and had Rome free in a matter of hours–then let the Germans south of them starve.
But no, the Brits insisted on using their Air Force (and ours) to get back at German civilians in an effort to ‘break’ them.
But what am I saying? Even before WWI, Marx and Engels made themselves into an anti-civilizational virus. That was what, back in 1848?
So since 1848 and the Communist Manifesto, (when James K. Polk was president) a counter-religion religion has been snarfing up tens of thousands of intellectuals into an utter banality; i.e., Communism. As we’re seeing from our beloved president, Communism is nothing if not banal. I see that banality’s leftovers here in this poor country, the people of which lived a life of utter banality for decades because of it.
And we need not review either Korea or Vietnam for the madness of our governing elites. It is as though they’re all graduates of R’lyeh U., where the angles are all wrong.
I mean, even were I a total atheist, I’d believe every word C.S. Lewis’ devil Screwtape uttered. The old fiend was spot on! Maybe mighty C’thulhu is the form a bored bureaucratic devil embraces when he flips?
Pardon me boy,
Is this the Lair of Great Cthulhu?
In the city of slime,
Where it is night all the time.
Bob Hope never went
Along the road to Great Cthulhu,
And Triple-A has no maps,
And all the Tcho Tcho’s lay traps.
(Claimed by Lawrence Press, Joan Carruth, and David Geller)
I esp like the line “where all the doles/will make Big Macs of our souls.”
An unintentional–or prophetic–pun about food stamps and the price of living on the government dole?
An Préachán
c @ 15: I’m wondering if the situation in the middle east is hopeless but not serious.
Adam Ant says, “desperate but not serious”.
Their killing drives us delirious, …
s @ 17: One of the big lies Islam uses is that they are fractured into sects.
As you say, but it’s true even at the other extreme. They can be Taliban in the morning and Afghan Army in the evening, ain’t we got fun. Sects fiends.
This western idea of a single, simplified identity, of an object reality, of a static model, … none of this need apply to the wog. Or to any “liberal”, narrative-creating Lakoffian for that matter. JFKerry was for it before he was against it, and proud of whirling like a dervish.
(A foolish) consistency is a hob-goblin of a small mind.
”Taliban translates as ‘student’. ”
I think ”taliban” is plural; ”talib” is ”student”.
Good point, Moot.
So we apologize, we resume payments to Pakistan, and now we’re again dependent on them for logistics into and out of Afghanistan? Wonderful. I was starting to think that the best argument for bringing our effort in Afghanistan to a close was that we could tell Pakistan to go to hell. (Except we wouldn’t, what with the nuclear security issues.)
Josh: “who exactly is Taliban, who is just your average Afghan”
Average? I’m starting to wonder. But I had the chance to work with some ordinary Afghans who hate the Taliban more than you or I ever could; who stepped up to fight on our side, and made targets of themselves; and who’ll be among the first murdered when we leave them in the lurch. It’s a shame there are few of them. It’s worse that they’re outnumbered by the vicious, and outnumbered hugely by the craven, the ones who will go along to get along, no matter what. (I once found myself standing near the man who was “governor” of Kandahar while the Soviets were reducing its population by 75%. He’s doing just fine.) But I have to remind myself that they exist.
17. stoicheion: PID’s are readily available, but usually through a specialty retailer. I don’t know about agiprop, but the instruction book was in the case with an English-language cover in the video. There are better detectors for military-grade chemical agents.
Chemical weapons like sarin or VX are not gases at all, but oily liquids. They are organophosphates closely related to insecticides like malathion. They must be aerosolized into a mist to be dispersed. They eventually settle to the ground, although sarin is somewhat volatile. VX is not. It basically just sits there waiting for someone to come by and touch it, thus its classification as a “persistant” agent.
As terror weapons they are useful. Militaries consider them area-denial weapons.
An Préachán @ 19:
No, Thunderdome resides in any inner city – Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta – any of them. “Two men enter, one man leaves.” Try it after dark some time.
The powers that be are worshiping as fast as they can and sacrificing whatever they can with their give-a ways so that they are eaten last. Your food stamps, money for nothing and a big screen TV. C’thulhu is not just a single entity. It is a class.
Road Warrior territory is any rural place where you are ‘the other’ – not known, not familiar. You would be surprised how deep in the swamp you can get taken and right quick at that. Don’t even need a bayou.
As I have said, invest in precious metals and an emergency stash. The 2nd Amendment protects ALL of the other rights.
Apparently the 80′s post-punkers of Timbuk3 were right…Mostly; the future’s so bright, I gotta wear
shadeswelding goggles.…Looks Like Dark To Me
They try to hide their presence [al-Qaida]. “Some people are worried about carrying the [black] flags,” said Abu Khuder. “They fear America will come and fight us. So we fight in secret. Why give Bashar and the west a pretext?” But their existence is common knowledge in Mohassen” – The Guardian.
The spectre of the West looms large in the Jihadist psyche.
To the average Islamic goat herder, Americans are Majic. We see in the dark, move like the wind and kill like deamons. CROWS does a lot to spread the fear. CROWS is the remote controlled weapons turret mounted in MBT’s and APC’s. It is managed by boys that grew up with game controllers. It spins onto a target so fast you can barely see the turret move. Most carry either a mini-gun or a .50. They can be set up with a version of the Mk 19.
A terr steps around a corner with his RPG and before he can lift it up to shoot he has a chest full of bullets. Scary to watch.
They dig holes to hide in and something falls from the sky and kills them. It explodes in a hole, Never misses. 5 terrs think they are hiding in spider holes to ambush an American patrol. There is an explosion and now there are only 4 terrs and a bloody mist surrounding a fresh bomb crater;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1jD7v2ucBc
That video is from an Apache gunship. It is over a kilometer away, most likely two. The Terrs cannot see it or hear it. From their POV something is killing them. They have no idea what where or how. Majic. To an ignorant 3rd worlder, the US Army is as scary as it gets.
Josh (12),
Don’t feel bad, the fish doesn’t know he’s wet, either.
“I’d rather pay off the Taliban than see a kopek go to those damn Russkies.” – paraphrasing Kirrill Pirrongski of the University of Houston
A world without American hegemony, which the Left has so long dreamed of, is now within realistic possibility. A little more and we’re there. But it may not usher in the Age of Aquarius, as the Left had predicted. Rather it may be a much more brutal world than they imagine.
I’m not so sure about that. The problem that has befallen the American Left is that it appears incapable of knowing who its friends are. Old-fashioned Marxists such as Christopher Hitchens understood that al-Qaeda is and always will be the enemy of the proletariat more than the bourgeoisie could be. In contrast, the “New Left” is so indoctrinated into regarding “conservatism” as the enemy that they simply fail to realize that Islamists will never be their friends.
One effect of the American Left’s tunnel vision is that its idea of utopia cannot be realized without mass murder. It is as if the Spanish Civil War is supposed to be a blueprint for their future, except with the Spanish Fascists decisively defeated and executed en masse. In their minds, George W. Bush is the Devil Incarnate and the Tea Party is no different from the Nazi Party. They seek “Justice” – and that “Justice” means Zimbabwe writ large.
To people fixated on “Justice”, mass murder and the most vicious brutality imaginable is merely a means to cleanse America of its privilege and pretension. It becomes a means to cleanse American of its moral stain; in this world view, cataloging America’s sins has nothing to do with writing an honest history or actually helping survivors of horror – or even their descendants. No, cataloging America’s sins and ranting about “Privilege” becomes a means to create a “moral” pretext for a mass execution of “The Enemy” – usually Americans labeled “hicks” without any real regard for who they are.
This is a Left made up of privileged white men who rail against the privilege of white men, failing (of course) to see themselves as privileged, failing to see that wearing a Che Guevara T-Shirt and vilifying “The Enemy” as a bunch of chimpanzees won’t keep them from being seen as the rich brats they are. The ”Age of Aquarius”? They want “Peace”, and that “Peace” means destroying anybody who they have labeled as “The Enemy”.
It all depends on what the definition of “Peace” is.
Mars is peaceful from a lack of war perspective.
My backyard is peaceful from a Afghan perspective.
But to a leftard peace is a gulag full of wrong thinkers.
22. blert
Good point, Moot.
That was certainly not a moot point.
Er, or was it?