Category: Iraq

GSM Warlord, with actual statistics

Via Trombly x Exum, an interesting paper on mobile telephony and the Iraq war is here. I was impressed by the fact the authors know there are multiple antenna sectors per cell-site, and that they bothered to find out roughly what an emerging market GSM operator’s roll-out process is like. In fact, if you wonder, the paper is actually quite a good high-level brief on how you go about picking the sites for a mobile phone network and some of the operational considerations, in Iraq or anywhere.

But that’s not the point. The authors set out to answer whether GSM helped the insurgents or the counterinsurgents in Iraq. They reasoned that it might help the insurgents by letting them co-ordinate their activities and by letting them set off bombs remotely, and the counterinsurgents mostly by making it easier for civilians to inform on the insurgents. They also took note that it could contribute to economic development, which is presumed to help the government side. (They don’t discuss the impact of either counterinsurgent ELINT spying on GSM traffic, or insurgent spying, probably as it’s very hard to get any information.)

They pulled a hell of a lot of data, helpfully provided by Zain (i.e. ex-Celtel), and concluded after a creditable effort to understand it that there was a small, but formally statistically significant, effect in favour of the counterinsurgent. Importantly, this was strongest in the areas that were classified as mixed Shia/Sunni in 2003, i.e. the battlefield, and during early 2007, i.e. the decisive peak of the battle.

That said, the R^2s aren’t huge (highest is 0.28). There’s also a problem in that they took quite a lot of care to identify antenna sectors that got service for the first time, in order to compare them with ones that already had it and ones that never did. This is scientific, but it does pose the problem that Zain weren’t putting so many BTSs out there in the spring of 2007 in the worst of the civil war, because their people didn’t want to die, and therefore you wonder about the sample size and the representativeness of some data points that are quite crucial.

Actually, you learn a lot here about the history of Zain Iraq’s network; in the months before the fateful mosque attacks of 2006, they were building out like maniacs, true to their reputation back then as Mo Ibrahim’s pioneers covering the most troubled hellholes of Africa. Then, it got bad enough and suddenly that they shut down most investment and stayed that way until the end of 2007. The authors say that “month-to-month variance in violence” didn’t lead to “major design change”, but the point wouldn’t be design change but timing, and they also include a chart that suggests they basically stopped in the worst of the war.

Growth isn’t necessarily stabilising, and I suspect that Zain engineers would tell you that straight off. In a very low-trust society, more resources are quite likely to lead to more conflict. I think it’s a safe assumption that GSM coverage helps people to rat to the government more than it helps them to rat to insurgents, because insurgents need to be in the network of strong personal ties to survive. I’m not completely convinced, though. There were examples of insurgent intelligence exploitation of GSM back then (see the 2005 and 2006 archives) and the weak/strong tie distinction is subjective.

Also, I would like to know what role anti-social networking played; to what extent did better communications, that were mobile, two-way, and also personal, help to spread propaganda, hate-speech, and paranoia? Radio Mille Collines was a broadcast system, but there’s no obvious reason why incitement to genocide can’t be participatory via SMS or (better) voice.

That said, the most responsive measurement of violence was the percentage of IEDs found and cleared, which suggests something was going on.

But one of the most interesting things in the paper is this:

Most importantly, the teams would typically enter into long-term contracts with local community members and organizations to pay for site rental, generator fueling, site security, and training of local engineers to provide these services. Where possible, they would engage with local elites to identify the personnel who could be entrusted with these jobs.

This strategy of establishing close connection to local elites meant that once marketing had identified an area for network expansion, teams were mostly able to move in effectively even in areas with high violence.

So perhaps we’re seeing the emergence of people who can navigate the emerging low-trust society. On the one hand, the interhierarchical leaders of instant tradition, who would later be the key interlocutors with the Americans in the counterinsurgent phase, on the other, the pre-merger Celtel team who were already familiar with working in this kind of environment.

you haven’t got any less wrong, you know

Shorter John Lloyd: The Iraqi people have proved unworthy of me. And all those soldiers of ours are a bunch of girlymen.

You think I’m joking?

But we did not anticipate that Iraqi forces who hated the US – including those loyal to Saddam – would dominate after the invasion, that the population would not be active in ensuring democratic choice as it had been in, say, Poland, and that the west had limited staying power.

Unlike Lloyd, who went once as a journalist to offer solidarity to the Iraqi trade unions (i.e. go to some meetings), says so right there in the piece. Doesn’t mention that they needed solidarity against the authorities John Lloyd wanted to impose on them.

Not even bothering with a shorter for Tony Blair:

The fact is, yes, there are people who will be very abusive, by the way I do walk down the street, and by the way, I won an election in 2005 after Iraq

Yes, after you promised to resign in favour of Gordon Brown.

Meanwhile, the polls:

The approximately two-to-one balance of opinion against the Iraq war broadly applies across both sexes and every age range. Every nation and region of the UK also retains a clear anti-war majority…

The marchers are also vindicated by opinion up and down the social scale, although the 49%-36% balance of opinion in favour of the marchers among the so-called AB occupational grades is somewhat more balanced than the crushing anti-war majorities among working-class voters….

there is no partisan slant in the public’s opposition to the war. Conservative supporters believe the marchers were right by a 57%-30% margin, statistically indistinguishable to the 57%-29% support for the marchers found among Labour voters. Supporters of the Liberal Democrats, the only big party in 2003 to offer a united anti-war stance, are only marginally more strongly behind the marchers – they are split 59%-24%. The 54%-33% anti-war majority found among Ukip supporters confirms Blair is judged to have been on the wrong side of history, right across the political spectrum.

A very short post about Iraq

A quick post, too long for twitter.

The problem with telling me that you got it wrong about Iraq because you’re such a nice guy is that all I hear is someone telling me they mistook the shit for chocolate in good faith. Yes, yes, I feel your pain. You meant well.

But I’m still not sending you to the shop on your own.

Perhaps this could have been predicted

Ink Spots rips into what sounds like a truly dreadful TV belch, as well as one where the Stiftung’s opinion would be worth having. Ackerman also has a go, specifically at former SACEUR Wesley Clark’s role in it.

Which reminded me. Back in 2004, in the circles of my MSc International Relations course, all sorts of neatly policy-wonky people were mad keen on the thought of Clark running for president, as were the duller bits of the US Democratic blogosphere. I did know the story about him and the pre-eyelid job, pre-Iraq version of General Sir Michael Jackson, which made me wonder, but then anybody can drop a bollock and that’s what a blind eye is for.

But, of course, Clark wrote a book, Waging Modern War. And I read it. And it turned out to be…something and nothing, Freakonomics or Airmiles with B-52s, probably not really worth publishing except of course as an instant presidential campaign job.

And perhaps I should have realised that, if the best idea anyone in a position of power in the US had was to find someone with more gold braid in the hope they wouldn’t be accused of being With The Terrorists, things were wrong in more subtle and serious ways than I had thought.

O RLY?

Here’s an interesting story about US efforts to aid the Syrian rebels. Especially this bit:

A centerpiece of the effort this year focused on getting Iraq to close its airspace to Iran-to-Syria flights that U.S. intelligence concluded were carrying arms for Assad loyalists—contrary to flight manifests saying they held cut flowers…

One example of the U.S. approach—and of its limitations—came earlier this year when the U.S. sought to pressure Iraq to curtail flights between Iran and Syria across Iraqi airspace. That supply route opened wide after the U.S. completed its troop withdrawal from Iraq in December, U.S. administration and military officials say.

The next month, the CIA picked up detailed intelligence that Iran was using an Iranian private cargo airline, Yas Air, to fly arms over Iraq to Syria, according to U.S. officials. . . .

In an official complaint to Baghdad called a démarche, the U.S. demanded an end to the flights, said officials briefed on the discussions. “You’ve got to stop this,” the Americans told Iraqi leaders, according to one senior U.S. official.

The démarche appeared to persuade the Iraqis to act, according to American officials; the flights stopped.

But in late January and early February, the CIA began to track flights of Syrian government AN-76 cargo planes between Syria and Iran, a new tactic. . . .

While U.S. and Iraqi officials went back and forth on the issue, several Syrian cargo planes made the trip to Iran and back without interference.

As Iraq prepared to play host to an Arab League meeting at the end of March, which would showcase its emergence from American occupation, U.S. officials raised the possibility Iraq would face disclosures about the flights—an embarrassment because most Arab nations had turned against Mr. Assad.

The warning appeared to get through. Iraqi leaders told the U.S. they might search the suspect flights. Two weeks before the Arab League summit, the flights of the Syrian AN-76 cargo planes abruptly stopped, U.S. officials say.

Flowers, eh? No fish? Doing a quick look, I find that Yas Air is now on a UNSC list, and that it operates 2 Il-76 and 3 An-74. All three of the An-74s were previously registered to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Corps. The Ilyushins have knocked around various Iranian owners, but the prior one (Parsair) also seems to have taken over another aircraft from the IRGC. Guys. This isn’t going to fool anyone.

A slight return to 2004. Wasn’t that fun.

Tom Watson runs for the gap, specifically yet another ugly little employment law story at the Sun. Readers will know that they’re like that among themselves and there’s something of a press tradition of not mentioning the names. On this occasion it’s Our Boys Go In Editor “Tom” “Newton” “Dunn” vs. their Whitehall editor Clodagh Hartley.

The other story is that Watson is suggesting that Trevor Kavanagh took the credit for publishing the Hutton whitewash ahead of time when Hartley was in fact responsible.

Sadly this just recalls Labour’s relationship with the Sun. A close reading of this explains all:

Kavanagh, who claimed he had been read the contents of the report over the telephone by an “impartial” source went on to tell the BBC “the source had nothing to gain financially or politically, no axe to grind, no vested interest”

Access to the document, no financial or political interest, someone who had Kavanagh (or Hartley)’s direct phone number = i.e. they were a civil servant operating with permission from their boss who was in contact with them, or to put it another way, a government press officer.

As is fairly well known, Alistair Campbell got powers to give the career COI officials orders in May 1997. His departure didn’t end that. The source was probably Godric Smith or Tom “Walter Mitty figure” Kelly. Kavanagh was lionised by the media establishment for having what was, in fact, the government’s line-to-take read out into his ear by a government press officer. It wasn’t as if the Blair governments were averse to racking up brownie points with Murdoch where possible, was it?

On the other hand, perhaps the most repellent of the Murdoch/Met cases was the Forest Gate raid of 2006, when the police launched a miniature Operation OVERLORD (or rather, MOTORMAN – I don’t think they used a boat) in Walthamstow in pursuit of a “chemical dirty bomb suicide vest” which was capable of attacking aircraft up to 5,000 feet overhead in their opinion, accidentally shot someone because their hand slipped, tore the building apart, found nothing, and satisfied themselves by having the News of the World smear the suspects as paedophiles, before spending ages trying to seize their savings. It wasn’t so much a police operation as a sort of wildly overdone high-camp mashup of 2000s tropes. News International columnist Andy Hayman was in charge, but perhaps we were spared worse:

The police always argue that (many things they do) are a matter of operations and politicians should not be involved. Well, I’m afraid I have a big argument with that.”

Citing the 2006 raid on a street in Forest Gate, he added: “At one stage the police were going to turn out all the residents of the street at 2am in the morning. John Reid was the home secretary and I was working with him.

“Andy Hayman, who was in charge, wanted to turn them out and I said to John Reid – no, you can’t do that. He said ‘John, it’s operational’. I said ‘S** operational, there are political considerations here’ – turning out a street of Asians at 2am with the allegations of a gas plot and we don’t know what the evidence is for that.”

So when did they start tapping Prescott’s phone?

It remains the case that Labour’s half of the twisted relationship with Murdoch was very different to the Tories’. It was transactional and contingent and that’s one of the reasons why it was so horrible at the time, but that also made it possible to leave. When you are one entity you cannot cooperate, said Montgomery. It’s also very hard to stop.

Production note: part of this post was originally a comment on Tom Watson’s blog and was never released from moderation. I might have been nice about this, but you know.

fighting the real enemy

Con “WMD” Coughlin’s piece in the Torygraph is worthy of close reading. You’ll note that this:

Whitehall was caught off guard by the seriousness of the situation in Helmand province, where British troops were deployed in Nato’s reconstruction programme. Most Labour ministers supported the view of John Reid, the defence secretary at the time, that “we would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot because our mission is to protect the reconstruction”.

Intelligence assessments conducted in southern Afghanistan concluded that they would receive a hostile reception.

isn’t actually sourced to either General Richards, who is the ostensible subject of the piece, or to Sandy Gall’s book mentioned later in it. Also, the piece contains extensive quotes from Richards that turn out to have been dug out of Gall’s book, when a over-rapid look at the piece might give you the impression Coughlin spoke to Richards.

Reid’s remark has gone down in the annals of stupidity, but the notion that “most Labour ministers” agreed with him isn’t sourced to anyone at all. In fact, the policy was repeatedly re-debated and altered, as I blogged here over the winter of 2005-2006, which doesn’t suggest everyone agreed on it. Further, it’s news that “intelligence assessments” accurately forecast what would happen – especially as any assessment carried out before the deployment would have been an assessment of the original plan, not the plan as it was radically altered in the field.

I suspect Coughlin is talking the secret services’ book here, and they are fighting the real enemy – the uniformed services’ Defence Intelligence Staff, which would have been responsible for such an assessment. Further, DIS was notoriously right about Iraq (if you believe Brian Jones’ telling) and this is inexcusable to the spooks (who weren’t) or Coughlin (who wasn’t, and who culpably published their nonsense).

Further, does this quote sound convincing to you? For an American general, he sounds a lot like a British journalist trying to sound tough.

Sir David also recounts a heated argument between Brigadier Ed Butler, the first British commander in Helmand, and an US general who took exception to him. “I nearly punched that damn Limey’s [Butler’s] lights out, he was so arrogant,” the US general said.

Liam Fox: Not Fit For Purpose

OK, so “Not All That” Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble.

“He is an odd bloke,” said one fellow minister. “He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line.”

Another Tory MP said Fox’s tendency to name-drop and brag about his close friendships with Republicans in the US, media magnates such as David and Frederick Barclay (owners of the Daily Telegraph), and his endless globe-trotting, even before he entered the cabinet, has made many bristle and help explain why he has plenty of enemies in the Tory party and in Whitehall. “I think you either roll with the bluster or find it repellent,” said a Tory MP.

Ah, one of them. Anyway. Part of the problem is this famous meeting where his bestie Adam Werritty just happened to turn up. What was on offer? Well, a product called Cellcrypt, whose makers were trying to sell it to the MoD to stop evilly-disposed persons from eavesdropping on British soldiers’ phone calls back to the UK. (Note: this is going to be long. Technical summary: voice encryption apps for GSM-style mobile networks can guarantee that your call will not be overheard, but not that your presence cannot be monitored, and not necessarily that the parties to your calls cannot be identified.)

Back in the early days of Iraq, the CPA permitted one mobile phone operator in each of its three zones to set up. The British zone, CPA-South/Multinational Division South-East, let the Kuwaiti national telco, MTC (now Zain and busy running Mo Ibrahim’s old Celtel business into the ground) set up there with a partner some of us may have heard of. It’s from Newbury and it’s not a pub or an estate agency and its logo is a big red comma…funny how Vodafone never talked that particular investment up, innit? Anyway. Later the Iraqi government did a major tender for permanent licences and Orascom got most of it, but that’s another story.

One thing that did happen was that soldiers took their mobiles with them to Iraq, and some of them pretty soon realised that buying a local SIM card in the bazaar was much cheaper than making roaming calls back to the UK. Either way, lots of +44 numbers started showing up in their VLR, the big database that keeps track of where phones are in a GSM network so it can route incoming calls.

Pretty soon someone who – presumably – worked for the MTC-Voda affiliate and whose purposes were not entirely aligned with Iraq The Model realised that you could use the VLR to follow the Brits (and the Yanks and the Danes and the Dutchmen and Kiwis and all sorts of contractors) around. Not only that, you could ring up their families in the UK and make threats with the benefit of apparently supernatural knowledge.

This obviously wasn’t ideal. Efforts were made to mitigate the problem; soldiers were discouraged from using local GSM networks, more computers and public phones were made available. The eventual solution, though, was to get some nice new ruggedised small-cell systems from companies like Private Mobile Networks Ltd., which basically pack a small base station and a base station controller and a satellite backhaul terminal into a tough plastic box of a suitably military colour. You open it up, unfold the antenna, turn on the power, and complete some configuration options. It logs into the mobile operator who’s providing service to you via the satellite link.

Now, because radio signals like all radiation lose intensity with the inverse square of the distance, you’ll be vastly louder than everyone else. So any mobile phone nearby will roam onto your private mobile network and will be in the UK for mobile phone purposes, a bit like the shipping container that’s technically in Egypt at the end of Four Lions. And none of this will touch any other mobile network that might be operating in your area. Obviously you can also use these powers for evil, by snarfing up everyone else’s traffic, and don’t for a moment think this isn’t also done by so-called IMSI catchers.

You’re not meant to do this, normally, because you probably don’t have a licence to use the GSM, GSM/PCS, or UMTS frequencies. But, as the founder of PMN Ltd. told a colleague of mine, the answer to that is “we’ve got bigger tanks”.

So, where were we? Well, the problem with trying to do…something…with Cellcrypt is that it doesn’t actually solve this problem, because the problem wasn’t originally that the other side could listen to the content of voice calls. Like all telecoms interception stories, it was about the traffic analysis, not the content. Actually, they probably could listen in as well because some of the Iraqi and Afghan operators may not have been using up-to-date or even *any* air interface encryption.

But if you’re going to fix this with an encryption app like Cellcrypt, you’ve got to make sure that every soldier (and sailor and diplomat and journo and MoD civilian) installs it, it works on all the phones, and you absolutely can’t make calls without it. Also, you’ve got to make sure all the people they talk to install it.

And the enemy can still follow you because the phones are still registering in the VLRs!

So, there’s not much point relying on OTA voice encryption to solve a problem that’s got nothing to do with the voice bearer channel. However, bringing your own small cell network certainly does solve the problem, elegantly, and without needing to worry about what kind of phones people bring along or buy locally.

And the military surely understand this, as by the time of the famous meeting, they’d already started deploying them. Also, back when this was a big problem, 19 year-old riflemen usually didn’t have the sort of phones that would run a big hefty application like Cellcrypt, which also uses the mobile data link and therefore would give them four figure phone bills.

To sum up, Werritty was helping someone market gear that the MoD didn’t need, that was hopelessly unfit for purpose, wouldn’t actually do what the MoD wanted, and would cost individual soldiers a fortune, by providing privileged access to the Secretary of State for Defence.

Callaghan-era surge

I have recently been reading David McKittrick (et al)’s Making Sense of the Troubles. An interesting point, which I wasn’t aware of before, is their contention that the late 70s and Roy Mason’s tenure as Northern Ireland secretary was an important turning point. In fact, you could make an interesting comparison with Iraq in 2007-2008.

Mason’s policy was to forget about further top-level negotiations, after the collapse of the Sunningdale agreement, and focus on security and economic issues in the hope that progress from the bottom up would bring the conflict parties back to the negotiating table on better terms. In fact, during his tenure, there was a dramatic drop in the rate of killings that was never reversed. This is the hub of McKittrick’s argument – having surged in 1971 and peaked in 1972-3, levels of violence stayed very high until 1977 and then dropped to a new, much lower average level.

The British government in this period tried various expedients. The military used more special forces, and integrated their intelligence systems and those of the police and security services. Overall, there was a deliberate effort to project the whole war as a law-enforcement problem (very much a theme of US and Iraqi government propaganda during the “surge”), and to launch as many criminal prosecutions as possible. They tried hard to recruit informers and to make use of supergrasses.

McKittrick and his co-authors argue that there was a sort of cycle-of-recruitment effect at work – terrorism caused recruitment into the loyalist terrorist organisations, whose violence caused further IRA recruitment, which led to more military intervention and more loyalist violence. They further argue that this cycle was broken or at least slowed down in the late 1970s – whether the government was succeeding in providing security or not, it at least reduced the demand for unofficial, privatised violence. The government also tried hard to recruit potential paramilitaries into its own forces, and demonstrated that it was willing to use force against loyalists as well as republicans (they argue that the failure of the 1977 loyalist strike was important). This is all quite familiar.

However, the drop in violence was an over-determined event. There was a major change in the IRA leadership and strategy, which emphasised holding out for the long term and eventually led to an increased emphasis on the ballot box. (The parallel with the Sadr movement stands out.) There was a major protest movement demanding peace, which is another way of saying that the people were unwilling to tolerate so much violence any more.

Although this turning point meant much less violence, it didn’t solve anything in and of itself. And it involved quite a lot of state violence in itself – especially during interrogations. This Musings on Iraq roundup is telling – rather than gunbattles and mass bombings, the war continues with a low-level assassination campaign. In Northern Ireland, the best any security solution could ever do in the absence of a political solution was to hold the levels of violence down around the post-77 average, with a very significant cost to society as a whole.

status: it’s complicated

This post brings several things to mind. Apparently, eastern Libya was a hugely overrepresented area among the international jihadis who went to Iraq and there exploded. Clearly, this means that you can’t assume that they’re fighting for democracy, whiskey, sexy.

However, it’s also very likely that this represented a deliberate policy on the part of the Libyan government to channel its dissidents into particular ideologies that its new friends also perceived as the enemy, and then to ship them out of the country and hope they would explode somewhere else. Making jihadis – repressing all other forms of dissidence, while not trying too hard to stop them recruiting or leaving the country – had the side benefit that it validated their claim to be a bastion of stability assailed by Islamic extremism. They could produce the extremists, after all. And it further allowed them to avoid burning all their bridges with the other side. If it became expedient to make friends with the terrorists again, they could produce the bloody shirts – the martyrdom videos – and demonstrate that they had been useful.

Of course, Gadhafi didn’t have to be an evil genius to come up with this plan – he was essentially copying Saudi Arabia’s homework, and depending on how you look at the relationship between the Egyptian regime and the Brothers, perhaps sneaking a look at the neighbours’ as well. Giddens may have thought they were going to be a new Norway, but the real plan was more like Saudi 2.0, probably right down to the hereditary government.

Another lesson from this is that they’re probably not going to give up easily.