Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Laid Off -- Hagerstown and Surrounds

If you're located in the region around the I-81 and I-70 intersection and believe yourself a casualty of the nation's recession, I would like to hear from you for potential interview and portraiture.

James S. Oppenheim

Pakistan: Uncloaking

As the Taliban launch more and more suicide attacks against Pakistan's military, it may find itself playing the equivalent of forced chess moves as regards its so far prized invisibility.

This past month, as noted in Jane Perlez and Pir Subair Shah's report in The New York Times, at least five loud actions, if I may use that term, against military targets have taken place:

--Car bomb against a police bus yesterday (Thursday, August 28);
--Bridge bombing of an Air Force bus in Peshawar (Tuesday, August 12);
--Twin suicide bombing at a munitions factory (Thursday, August 21);
--Massed attack on the Tiarza Fort and Tiarza Bridge Checkpost in South Waziristan (Wednesday, August 27);
--Missile or rocket attack (origin uncertain) against a Taliban target at Zari Noor (Wednesday, August 20)--my first-page Google search failed to turn up a correlating Taliban attack against Pakistani military outpost at Zari Noor.

Whatever else may be going on in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), it seems to be bringing Taliban guerrillas into the fields with increasing frequency and in increasing numbers.  Road-related bombing may not call for warrior bands, but attacks on forts do.  In tandem with bombings, the upswing in tempo should reduce Taliban invisibility in as much has to happen by way of movement across lanes, roads, and fields every other day to sustain activity.

Moreover, as the essential impotence of one-off bombings becomes clear, the necessity of contesting forts, checkpoints, roads, and bridges turns the warfare far toward the conventional.

Also, with revenge against Pakistan's military often the driver and refraining from action likely to be viewed as cowardly, the Taliban would seem pressured, at least, to continue this round of fighting in ways that throw more and more "foot soldiers" into combat with troops that even when they're weak and routed far exceed their own numbers in reserve.

Wherever the Taliban as well as other opposition militia lose their cover, they may lose also all of the advantages afforded by having been able to work on the sly and, better still, across primarily mindful (peer-to-peer) networks.

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Reference

Burki, Irfan and Mushtaq Yusufzai.  "12 killed in US missile attack on SWA village."  The International News, August 21, 2008: http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=16735

Perlez, Jane.  "Bomb kills 13 on Pakistani Air Force bus."  International Herald Tribune, August 12, 2008: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/12/asia/pakistan.php

Perlez, Jane and Pir Zubair Shah.  "Car Bombing of Police Bus Kills 8 in Pakistan."  The New York Times, August 28, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/world/asia/29pstan.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Roggio, Bill.  "Taliban suicide bombers kill 70 Pakistanis outside a munitions factory."  The Long War Journal, August 21, 2008: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/08/taliban_suicide_bomb_4.php

Roggio, Bill.  "Pakistani military repels Taliban assault on South Waziristan fort."  The Long War Journal, August 27, 2008: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/08/pakistani_military_r.php

Don't Miss "The Red Cross Ambulance Incident"!

Photographic authentication hardware and software didn't make the news here: fakery did. 

As regards news coming out of conflict culture, and as with other sorts of con, news breaking too fast under pressure for fact checking, this apocryphal tales tells how fast a hoax may be constructed and then how far it may go.

It's older news, but having just read it, still news to me:

http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/

Pakistan's Tribal Frontier: One State Only

Departing from a possible pattern of token betrayal of Al Qaeda and Taliban operations throughout its northwest frontier to assuage Coalition objectives in neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistan this month, and especially this week, seems to have engaged militants in their mountain redouts in earnest and with a vengeance.

It has been said of war that it leaves all displaced and disordered, if not physically then culturally.  As much would seem true today in such as the Kurram Agency.  Daud Khattak, reporting fro Daily Times, notes:

"Tribal elders in Kurram Agency on Monday requested the government raze madrassas involved in militant training and called for arresting all those involved in such activities.

Presenting a list of suggestions to curb sectarianism in Kurram Agency, the elders said the government must take notice of foreign interference inciting clashes between Shias and Sunnis in the agency."

While Khattak's sources claim operations in their area a consequence of misinformation fed to NATO troops, his lead starts, "Tribal elders in Kurram Agency on Monday requested the government raze madrassas involved in militant training and called for arresting all those involved in such activities," a good indicator of confused expression, possibly reporting, or coded transmission through the press. 

What may be known is Pakistan's army, others possibly, have raised the level of violence working through the tribal territories, and whether killing innocent Sunni Muslims, as Khattak's reportage may suggest, or reducing the prevalence of autonomous militants in the region, they're producing a clear, forceful, and persistent presence in the tribal territories on behalf of the main body of the Pakistani state. 

Reclaimed police outposts; sorties against militant positions, misinformed or not, this week's military action will not be mistaken as a gesture intended to placate NATO.

In response to the state's challenge, militant actions may stress their ownership of the geography involved.  As the latest in roadside bombs may suggest, this one involving the detonation of about 88 pounds of explosive beneath a bridge over which a military transport had been crossing (see Riaz Khan's AP article in the New York Sun), militant ability to stay off the field and run the familiar palette of low visibility missions may remain intact for a while longer.

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Reference:

Adnkronos International Pakistan.  "Pakistan: At least 50 killed in clashes in border region."  August 11, 2008.
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.2408363569

AFP. "One soldier, 25 Taliban killed in Pakistan clashes: officials." Yahoo!Xtra News. August 7, 2008, 8:16 pm
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/4864051/soldier-25-taliban-killed-pakistan-clashes-officials

AFP.  "Pakistani clashes kill six civilians, 20 Taliban: officials."  Yahoo!Xtra News. August 11, 2008.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080811/wl_afp/pakistanafghanistanunrest_080811122717;_ylt=ArnB_dhcNACoY2lDkcimwl3OVooA

Alleyne, Richard.  "Al-Qa'eda's Abu Saeed al-Masri 'killed on Afghan border'."  Telegraph, UK, August 12, 2008.

Khan, Riaz.  "14 Dead in Pakistan Bombing."  Associated Press, New York Sun, August 12, 2008.

Khattak, Daud.  "Kurram elders call for razing madrassas training militants."  Daily Times, August 12, 2008.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\08\12\story_12-8-2008_pg7_46

Khattak, Daud.  "Taliban threat: Police vacate posts, take positions in markets, shops."  Daily Times, August 11, 2008.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\08\11\story_11-8-2008_pg7_17

Perlez, Jane.  "13 Killed in Attack on Pakistani Air Force Bus."  The New York Times, August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/world/asia/13pstan.html

Reuters Alertnet.  "Militants kill 'spies'; Pakistani aircraft attack." August 11, 2008.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL183847.htm

Roggio, Bill.  "North Waziristan peace agreement allows Al Qaeda to remain."  The Long War Journal, June 8, 2008.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/06/north_waziristan_pea.php

Iraq: Idle Ploughshares

In the fight fire with fire world of U.S. allied Islamic military politics, obtaining the interest of tribal leaders and loyalty of young fighters may turn more easily done than getting the near biblical conversion of "swords into ploughshares."

Ask men the job of men in tribal societies, and the job title "warrior" comes up tops and both privileged and respected.

How some Americans feel about owning guns--" . . . when they pry it from my cold, dead hands"--may be how many men in Islamic states feel about carrying them in public. Following the behavioral path of least resistance, the poet-warriors of Islam may produce language and culture fit to the pride of boyhood strut and rejecting as irritating verbal bombs delivering a veil of peace, flowers, and happiness over a reality filled with low-wage, low-esteem jobs as franchise cooks and servile janitors.

In the Land of Psychobabble, but a handful of concepts account for individual adjustment and motivation: from Maslow--"self actualization"; from others, competence seeking behavior and autonomy, in social science variable-speak, concerns with "locus of control" and "degrees of freedom".

Rightfully, perhaps unfortunately, programs that first convert boys into weapons-carrying soldiers, which speaks to more than a few deeply held and ingrained personal beliefs about warriors and their glorious role in the life of The People (in Native American parlance, The Original People, and any of them, of course), and then seeks to convert the same to peaceful but much less emotionally rewarding pursuits risks failure.

Anna Badkhen's article in Salon, "We were basically hiring terrorists," connects the relationship between the recent reduction of violence in Iraq, a good thing, with the mobilization of better than 100,000 armed guards, most of them Sunni (an American treated to the same spectacle would call it "a cop on every corner"), and then looks toward the demobilization of that force and the predicament of leaving so many young and armed men at loose ends.

The language that would pit "warrior" against "janitor" may be amiss: peace makes way also for the development of powerful personalities quite capable of standing up for themselves, earning money, and taking care of their people through construction, engineering, invention, professional services, and trade.

One of the more tortured of Islamic cultures, Pakistan's, has traveled better than half way across that bridge and does not want to turn back the clock entirely to the age of the cleric-poet and the enforcement of aesthetic ideals through the warrior's sword. However, in the most disastrous state, Somalia, I think, the playing over and over again the tribal warrior theme across loose and competing bands of "Islamists" fairly guarantees the suffering of The People as the fighting has always more to do with the testing or affirmation of power and very little with humanitarian or more practical and altogether adult concerns.

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References

Badkhen, Anna. "We were basically hiring terrorists." Salon, August 6, 2008.

National Rifle Association. "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." Wikipedia, August 6, 2008.

Iraq: Violence--The Pure Measure

Reporting for Reuters, Deborah Lutterbeck notes the relationship between cessation of violence in Iraq and the Bush Administration's weighing the potential for troop reductions based on that [1].

It must be strange for any mind that keeps score and wants always to even or better it to find in the clinical metrics of America's military an impartial measurement meaningless to personal investment.

 

Assessing "level of violence"--within quotes here to set it off as an empirical variable--in a war zone would be like counting hits and strike-outs at a baseball game without credit to one team or another.  Although ascription surely exists in the field records, it would seem the level of violence, without fingerpointing, has been made the one pure variable by which to measure coalition progress in Iraq.

 

The cessation of violence in conflict may open the way to more robust and more widely distributed humanitarian aide, resettlement, and development--an abundance of good and necessary things separated from association with dueling (and scorekeeping and score settling) camps.

 

In a war on a behavior, which is the "War on Terror", violence itself may become more the target of intelligence and military effort than enemy affiliation.  Shutting down the means to and allaying the results of violence migrates the platform for conflict back to struggle through language, literature, and psychology: better violence in the head, which may be ascribed to and abetted by cultural systems and technologies, than blood in the streets.

 

Were the same index applied in Mogadishu, it would be evident, probably, that Somalia's anarchic violence has most to do with the adventure into competitive aggression and related states of mind.  The "Islamic Small Wars" often involve youthful and romantic battle groups--the students at Lal Masjid all dressed up to thrill (one another) and kill (with wood-stocked Kalashnikov); the vigorous landing party at Nahr al-Bared; the Sha'bob pulling off raids (but not quite hanging around and putting down roots) in Somalia--and they are in their preparations and talk beautiful and glorious for that. 

 

It's what happens next to old men, women, and children, to an audience at a cinema, brothers watching a soccer match, passersby on a street corner, aide workers risking their lives (tautological, that) to dole out food and medicine to strangers that spells what violence accomplishes.  Those murdered in the name of Allah lay in many places throughout Islam, and not one competing party has much, if anything, of permanence to brag for it.

 

They--whoever--took the town, but then the army (name any) took it back.

 

The bomb destroyed a hundred lives, but cars and pedestrians pass by on the same street corner a day later, more worried about the change in odds and not much, if at all, about their perception of The All or their place in relation to the Divine. 

 

With each passing day, violence in conflicted cultures proves less a prod and more a distraction: truth to tell, it may be enough for anyone just getting between home, market, and work without incident--for that, one may rightfully thank an Almighty.

 

Reference

 

1. Lutterbeck, Deborah.  "Bush keeps troop cuts open."  Reuters, August 1, 2008.