From Crooked Timber: Speaking of hypocrisy, what of the revelations (big surprise) that CIA had been briefing Pakistan govt on the drone strikes, while the latter was simultaneously denouncing them? From the blog, December 2012, I point out that the CIA and the Pakistanis were evidently cooperating in so far as they coordinated their use…
Read More No surprise bloggingDavid Axe has a good piece on how vulnerable drones are to any kind of organised air defence. “The predominant use of RPAs [Remotely Piloted Aircraft] over the past decade has been passive [intelligence] collection coupled with air-to-ground strikes in permissive airspace,” Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis tells Danger Room. “There’s very little…
Read More The drone that didn’t crashErik Lund has an interesting post on the high, Kipling era of the North-West Frontier and how it essentially got that way due to technology. Longer-ranged rifles meant that the forts the British and their client rulers relied on were over-watched from the hills, and that the numbers of troops needed to manoeuvre up the…
Read More Inventing the mujahideenBack from MWC. Heavy cold. Browser queue jammed with stuff. I’m going to do a brief succession of link posts to clear up. (Happenings last week; huge Leveson revelations, James Murdoch out, King Mob abolished workfare, horse, Borisbus fiasco, debate on Daniel Morgan, even more Leveson..) This one deals with everyone’s favourite global geo-political region,…
Read More Middle Eastern LinksVia yet another really excellent Arms Control Wonk piece on Indian and Pakistani nukes, it turns out that A.Q. Khan, formerly of Khan Research Laboratories, the man who sold the world the unofficial open-source community version of the Urenco enrichment cascade, and now of luxurious house arrest right up until the Navy SEALs climb over…
Read More Dr A.Q. Khan: Has a BlogFollowing up this post, here’s a really interesting piece in Dawn on the Indian-Pakistani nuclear balance and the implications of the COLD START doctrine. It’s an especially good point that if India really wanted to punish Pakistan after a “Mumbai II” terrorist attack, they could do so very effectively and much less dangerously through economic…
Read More ErrrThere’s a good debate in Jamie Kenny’s comments about the political upshot of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan. For what it’s worth, I’m with Dan Hardie on this – it’s a very important political fact that the intelligence hierarchy a) couldn’t or wouldn’t catch bin Laden and b) couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him any longer.…
Read More obl isi faqHow did the Americans make sure their raid on Osama bin Laden wasn’t misidentified as Pakistan’s real enemy? This was surely a major planning constraint. It’s been suggested, plausibly, that the bulk of their radar assets are positioned along the international border and the LOC, but once you get to Abbottabad you’re not that far…
Read More A questionI think most of my readers also read Patrick Lang’s blog, but I think this guest post is the best thing yet written on the Taliban/SIS/McChrystal/Petraeus fake sheikh affair. Really, there’s a great movie to be made here – the multiplicity of motives, the ironic contrast between the absurd story and the deadly serious interests…
Read More review of a movie that doesn’t exist yetSo, the raids on NATO trucks held up when Pakistan suspended the border crossing. A good point is made in comments at Adam Elkus’s blog – what about the people who own the trucks? What indeed. The so-called “transport mafia” played a critical role in the creation of the Taliban in the early 1990s, according…
Read More Logistics!