Chechens in Southwest Asia...

For the equivalent of slightly more than a single Euro, I managed to lay my hands on this book ("The Village of Widows" by Ravi Shankar Etteth). On its Hungarian edition, to be exact, sold as a paperback at a railway station. And remarkably I came across the following dialogue in it. Quoting, in my translation back to English, from page 38 of the edition I have:

"Thank you for not trying to resist," continued the police chief. "I don't want lose one of my best because of a bunch of idiotic and suicidal Afghans and Chechens..."

I do not remember having heard of specifically Chechen foreign fighters in Kashmir before, but the kind of motives for their mention in places distant from Chechnya, listed by Christian Bleuer in this classic of a post on the subject, seem to be relevant in the Kashmiri context as well. The thing that bothers me is the consistency with which Chechens are mentioned by many. I even heard mention of them by an Afghan friend who was there in Afghanistan very recently. So what to make of this? The question persists. Have actual Chechen Chechens become part of the history of entire "Southwest Asia"*? Or is this only myth?

* Using this deliberately out of place term in my discourse...

World Food Day, and what it means

October 16 was the World Food Day, and people in Paris did this in order to make you notice:

Photo: Thibault Camus (AP)

They called this the "hunger banquet," and the point was that nothing was served there.

Now, in Afghanistan, according to 2007/2008 data used by the World Food Programme there are over 7.4 million people facing a critical lack of food security (and there are more on the brink). War, destruction of the infrastructure, drought, the unsustainable and desperate exploitation of natural resources, and recently the food price crisis have all contributed to this. The latest development is that the floods in Pakistan this year also caused the loss and the diversion of a significant amount of food aid originally headed for Afghanistan where winter is coming and WFP was facing a 40% shortfall in funding to begin with. All reasons why FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organisation has Afghanistan shortlisted along with 21 other countries as particularly severe, protracted crises.

The scary aspect of this is that I am not sure what the prospect of famines or mass starvation in Afghanistan means today to the average Western observer. I have only the assumption that some are deeply troubled by it, while others may think that primarily the war should be ended, costs what it costs, and then humanitarian aid could somehow be delivered more easily than now in a deal with whoever is in power. But of course one has serious doubts about whether that indeed would be the case: in fact it is hard to believe. And so one wonders when thinking back to the post-9/11 critical discourse about how supposedly one needs to tackle root causes and not just hunt after terrorists... Remember French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine for example, lecturing Americans about the need to do so? Are people ready to tackle root causes? Like factors that contribute to, say, bringing rural religious militias to power in lands emptied of intellectual capital via exmigration? I know, "root causes" can be defined in many ways, fitting anyone's agenda.

Future warfare - future Afghanistan?

Days after U.S. President Obama presented the Medal of Honor to the family of Staff Sergeant Robert J. Miller, one of only four recipients (three of them, including Miller, posthumous) of this decoration in the war in Afghanistan, here is the trailer for the new Medal of Honor video game. Much Afghanistan-like (or, to be more precise, Kunar-like) scenery to begin with, and the familiar sights of SF gear, Chinook helos, A-10s doing strafing runs etc.

Just a brief comment: if this is the future, and Afghanistan is turned into an "SF/drone firing range" as Joshua Foust put it not long ago, reacting to the "Team B report" tacitly encouraged and selectively human-resourced by the Obama administration, i.e. if it comes down to a romantically desperate fight of SFs in an endlessly long war, the only thing missing for the ultimate feel-real experience in this trailer I think is the robots. The drones above, and all the other remotely manned warfare that gives SFs in general and operators in concreto a chance not to be outmanned in that future. I am not sure if I meant this sarcastically, or matter-of-factly... part of the explanation for this is that I can't relate so meaningfully to robots.

Drone strikes and militant attacks: two takes

This is the kind of discourse you're facing in Pakistan where a recent survey found that six out of ten think the U.S. is their enemy. On the left above you see stats from the BBC, and on the right you see what hardly qualifies as real stats from a Pakistani source. They are telling different stories: the BBC's data show how the U.S. drone campaign followed in intensity the intensity of the campaign of militant attacks in Pakistan. Going beyond the "correlation/co-variation is not causation" problematique, the BBC points out how the Pakistan Army's South Waziristan offensive drew retaliation in the form of peak-points in the militant campaign's intensity.

The Pakistani source, on the other hand, was eager to highlight how U.S. drone strikes are the chief problem for Pakistan. So he (yes, I presume "he") did the following. He marked "drone strikes" in red, as that is the colour that generally attracts attention more. He drew the curve for drone strikes above the blue curve of militant attacks by using some kind of indecent incident-counting method that is not revealed - thus he made sure drone attacks seem more destructive and omnipresent whereas in reality the militants killed random civilians in a number several times higher than the number of people targeted or accidentally killed in drone strikes (note: this is not to sell you the idea that civilian casualties in drone strikes are no concern). Plus the Pakistani source drew the curves so that militant attacks show a lag to drone strikes.

Given this, you have problems when you are trying to tell people in a country like Pakistan that, well, we don't really want extremists that you wouldn't harm to get the chance to go where they please, to kill people and blow up stuff. Which is what they seem to have been preparing to do relatively intensively lately, with Ilyas Kashmiri (the commander of AQ's paramilitary wing these days, it seems) and a certain Yunis al-Mauretani involved, along with militants resident in Germany and Britain (converts, first and second generation immigrants, dual citizens, i.e. militants from these countries, of all kinds).