Fwd: Counter Terrorism Human Agents

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Replies to Al by one of the folks on the National Security Decison Making
Simulation group.  Walter makes good points as always.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)

Sep 11 Favorite Links:
http://www.semitrue.com/thankyou/
This made a big hit at the office today ... I had people asking me what kind
of printer I had on my home PC, because of the high quality pictures
reproduction ... it is an HP Desk Jet, structurally similar to the Canon that
most folks at the office have, except it does not break down as often &
changing the ink is easy as pie.

Great discussion archives
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TYR
http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/midrange-nontech

Newspapers World Wide
http://www.wheretodoresearch.com/news/foreign_newspapers.htm
http://www.wheretodoresearch.com/news/US_Newspapers.htm

Intelligence Briefings by country
http://www.c-span.org/international/links.asp
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/17/asia.support/
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html
http://www.economist.com/countries
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/search/list/index.html
http://www.debka.com/
http://www.stratfor.com

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From: "waltrn8r" <waltrn8r@concentric.net>
To: <nsdmg-news@nsdmg.org>
References: <ac.1b02fafe.28da1c1e@aol.com>
Subject: Re: Counter Terrorism Human Agents
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 14:16:16 -0400
Sender: nsdmg-news-request@nsdmg.com

My comments:

> US Pakistan relations have been very poor for years, thanks to US
Opposition
> to Pakistan nuclear program & their backing of Kashmir separists.  America
> needs to rethink several policies & trade-offs.
    It's a poor to no-win situation, WRT to USA-Pak relations. The
leadership of the country is acceptably pro-western, but the population is
upset and angry with the West, thsnks to aggressive anti-western propaganda
on the part of Radical Islamic Clerics. We can help the Pak leadership along
as best we can, and try not to give the population an excuse to revolt. Or
we can "screw you, we're backing India", and guarantee to anger the whole of
the Pakistani nation, leadership and populace.
    Our relationship there eeds to be re-evaluated, but not the way you
might think. It's more along the lines of "how so we strengthen the
Pakistani government, while not angering India, and still get our job done?"

> The CIA probably does not have a single truly qualified operative who can
> play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years
of
> his life with diarrhea, no women, living in caves, and everything else
that
> goes with the territory.
    Yes, because Concerned Citizens lobbied their congressmen, who then
passed laws forbidding the CIA from hiring unsavory locals to help espionage
efforts. We could get away with this during the Cold War, because Satellite
reconnaisance is good at counting tanks and boats. Now, we have a stack of
satellites that are useless to the task at hand- satellites can't walk into
a meeting in a cave and take notes...(And don't give me any BS about how we
have satellites that can "count rivets" and such. Remember that satellites
don't penetrate cave walls very well)
    There are probably a good number of locals, in any given area, who are
happy to tell what they know of a situation for a nominal fee. But since a
number of US citizens and legislators don't want us to be involved with
"unpleasant/icky/dirty/criminal" people, the Intelligence community is
deprived of the BEST resource available for espionage efforts.

> The Northern Alliance has pledged 15,000 fighters to the US led effort.
> Their motives are obvious.
    They are better than the alternative. My quick perusal of history
indicates that the bast majority of Afghanis are happy to live "at home",
tend their herds, raise their crops, and not go out to bother people. It's
other people wanting to gain control of the place that causes the problems.

> One of the major grievances that Muslim Fundamentalists seem to have with
the
> west is how slow we were to move into cleaning up the mess in Yugoslavia,
as
> if they had zero responsibility to clean up the mess, or use proper tools
to
> galvanize Western action sooner.
    No one in the Balkans is blameless. They all commit atrocities against
each other, given a chance. Ask the Serbians about WW2 Croatian cooperation
with the Germans. Then start going back through history a bit more. There
are no good answers-they all suck.

> Perhaps helping the Northern Alliance to take over Afghanistan will just
make
> the Muslim Fundamentalists that much stronger & not solve this core
problem
> ... they will still be mad at the west for waiting so long to clean up
> another mess, so perhaps it would be better to clean it up in such a way
that
> the new management there is not Muslim leadership, but a UN Protectorate.
> The UN needs to conduct a series of classes in how to build & sustain
> civilization.
    You'll have to excuse me if I'm suspicious of the competence of the UN
to build a nation,etc. They have had very poor success in the past. Parking
a small group of troops in a country only defers the fight, not ends it.
"Peackeeping forces" suit the sensibilities of Western nations, but don't
solve the core problem(s).
    First, the UN needs to get a course in "what a nation is" realize that a
lot of their members don't really qualify. Then they have to learn "how can
you build a nation". There are couple of different ways (that I vaguely
understand and can't quite articulate).
    Second, they'd have to find a way to build a nation, that suits their
multicultural theories, but somehow manages to also obtain the acceptance of
the populace involved. The "usual" way of building a nation is very often a
warlike process, that results in many people dying. Then the nation-to-be
has to work out it's internal differences in such a way as to satisfy it's
populace. ALL of the populace. And not kill large numbers of them in the
process.

> It is unfortunate that the Northern Alliance language is Farsi, which is
also
> something the USA has officers who know, from perspective of communicating
in
> Pushtu, the main language of the Taliban, but that does make it practical
to
> communicate with these people, which is a start.
    People can, in fact, learn new languages. It's disappointing that we
have as few multilingual people as we do, in the armed services. Seeing as
how the Bush Administration is gearing up for a long war, I think language
training will be part of the planning. There are professionals who can be
hired for their translation services. There also some people there in
Afghanistan, who speak English or French (or Russian for that matter), so
the language problem is not completely insoluble.

Walter