Your Daily Read

1. A carrying capacity model for vampire-human predation

2. John McHugh reports on problems with the ANA 

Your Daily Read

1.  Why Afghanistan isn't the "graveyard of empires" - or at least, not all of them.

2. "Mature wisdom often resembles being too tired" - how Jimmy Carter made one of his best decisions about Chinese relations when awoken in the middle of the night.

Your Daily Read

1. Attn "pomocons": The rise of an unending issues-based partisanship is the death of intellectualism. But maybe that's a good thing? Ambiguous conclusion. 

2. What happens when prepublication copies of controversial papers get spread online; academic criticism's response loop gets sped up, both for good and for ill. 

Your Daily Read

1. A very Agrarian-Studies-esque argument that Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution developed crops that were ideal for the type of farming conducted by confiscatory landlords, but that small farmers don't get nearly the same yields. Calling all Jim Scott fans....

2. Andrew Exum on how CT and COIN policies can be usefully combined. Builds effectively on what CNAS has already written to say some new and interesting things. 

The Intifada Problem

Andrew Exum writes in a recent post that 

Now why do I mention this? Because I'm sticking to my guns -- how you behave tactically has strategic effects on the modern battlefield. My central thesis, I believe, is correct -- whether you're talking about the U.S. military, the IDF, or any other Western military:

Relatively recently, a consensus has emerged stateside that well-drafted rules of engagement are A Good Thing, and protecting the population is A Better Thing. Those are broad, broad statements that have to be applied differently to different circumstances. But the central issue at play here is this: How do we assess those circumstances? How do we predict when populations will rise up in response to any particular deadly incident*? 

This is THE central hard problem political scientists and military strategists don't have an answer to. The First Intifada was triggered (not caused, but triggered) in part by a traffic accident. Both the PLO and Hamas were caught utterly flat-footed by the uprising, as was the IDF equally. The IDF thought it had the population pretty well in hand; West Bank Palestinians were at that point employed in fairly large numbers in Israeli cities,** they had decently-managed checkpoints, the PLO was in exile. 

Yet a series of small incidents triggered a massive amount of violence, and then escalation in response by the IDF. No particular change in ROE would have prevented it, and no particular predictor could have told you when violence was going to flare up. 

We know generalities about how violence versus respect matters once civil wars orinsurgencies are underway and there is a high pace of operations; telling US soldiers in Iraq to "First, do no harm" was a good call. But the majority of IDF interactions with Palestinians are at checkpoints, raids on houses, clashes at settlements, NOT high-intensity warfare. And I'm really skeptical that we have any clear idea about what the right tactics are to produce the strategic outcomes we desire in low-intensity operations and peacekeeping. 

(Crossposted to the Abu Muqawama comment thread)

*Phrase made intentionally broad not to just cover killings that violate the laws of war, but lawful warfare, accident, etc, etc, etc. 

**General disclaimer from now until eternity: If you look hard enough in this part of the world, you'll find a way to turn territorial terminology here into a statement of some political craziness. I almost certainly don't believe whatever you'd read the tea leaves to ascribe to me.

Your Daily Read

1. Taliban parasitism of NSP funds in Afghanistan

2. Center for American Progress weighs in on Afghanistan

3. Lyall and Wilson argue that mechanized armies lack the COIN knowledge acquired by foraging

Your Daily Read

1. John Rawls and Religion

2. The econ major as the "just right" signaling mechanism

The Biggest Missed Opportunity of the BSG Finale

No spoilers here; the biggest missed opportunity had nothing to do with any of the strange messages sent by the epilogue; rather it was that there were no Terminator: Salvation commercials.

I mean, come on. There is this large, dedicated fan base of people who love post-apocalyptic stories of humans and good robots fighting against bad robots with machine guns and computer hacking. They have NOTHING LEFT IN THEIR LIVES. You have a movie offering them precisely that coming out in under two months. The advertising plan practically writes itself.

Your Daily Read

1. Advanced document reconstruction technology aids human rights prosecutions in Guatemala

2. Game theory for troops in Afghanistan 

Your Next Ethnic Food Craze

Via Abu Muqawama (Be less derivative! - Ed I'm trying!), a great piece by Anthony Shadid on a Baghdadi shawarma stand. 

To anyone who's ever had the pleasure of eating in Iraqi restaurants (of which there are many in countries neighboring Iraq), this story makes the stomach rumble with longing for the warm spices and bold flavors of good Iraqi cuisine. Not just the shawarma, but rich za'atar-drenched kabobs and tishreb - stacks of bread drenched in soup with meat so soft it falls off the bone. 

And there's not a single Iraqi restaurant anywhere in America, so far as I can tell.

If there was, it would outshine the on-the-go muchability of Lebanese and the rich spiciness of Indian food, and have a narrative that would (sad-to-say) make it more than trendy. 

Though I love Adams Morgan, its shawarma options are palest in comparison. Shawarma King's chicken shawarma lacks any of the fat or dark meat that makes Jordanian shawarma so addictive.  Old City Cafe's beef shawarma is quite good but the pita it comes in isn't so great. Shawarma Spot is supposed to be decent, but I haven't gotten there yet. And though Busboys and Poets is owned by an Iraqi-American, there are only a few Iraqi and Moroccan dishes on its menu. 

One can only hope that Iraqi food eventually makes it to the United States, though given our current visa policy, the prospects are not only slim, but demonstrate the failings of our policy. It could possibly arrive via the (as yet saddeningly far too small) resettlement programs for Iraqis who aided MNF-Iraq, but since we let relatively few refugees in, and almost no Iraqis via the normal immigration process, this seems less than likely. (And anyone who claimed this as a silver lining of the Iraq War should seriously take a long look in the mirror) 

Yet maybe one day the peace foreshadowed by one neighborhood shawarma cart will be in all of Iraq, and maybe one day we can all break bread together. Until then, I'll just have to dream.

Your Daily Read

1. FM 3-24.2, "Tactics in Counterinsurgency."

2. Why "carrots and sticks" is a metaphor that harms public diplomacy

Standing Athwart His Stories Yelling Stop

For the life of me, I really have no clue what the point of this clip dump on Ross Douthat's college column is. 

The overall theme appears to be "LOOK! Here are boring things he wrote that he later explicitly or implicitly disavowed with more interesting comments! Tell your leftist friends who haven't read his stuff before so they can prejudge him!"

Some writers maintain a consistent voice from college into their professional lives, such as David Brooks, or my friend Jamie Kirchick. Others really, really don't. The man has written two books, a ton of articles, and blogged for years.  

Look, there's nothing wrong with mining the archives. But responsible journalism seeks to put these things in context.

Confidential to Jim Cramer

Do Not Pick A Fight With Jon Stewart.

See this video here? 

This is him ENDING one of the most popular political shows on television in 14 minutes and 13 seconds. He took down a show anchored by Tucker Carlson, Bob Novak, James Carville, and Paul Begala. These people collectively caused Congressional investigations and defeated presidents, and he still stole their pants on national television. You are a guy who throws rubber chickens and suggests that people buy Bear Stearns. 

Seriously, leave your spittle-stained pride on the floor, and back off. This just won't end well otherwise. 

"Whatever you do, don't blink!"

Yves Smith writes a dynamite post about  the problem with relying too heavily on either heuristics or quantitative models (read the whole thing):

[I]f our mental construct of how the world works is off in some fundamental respects, it also calls into question our ability to make good decisions. And apart from Taleb, there are reasons to question our abilities here. It has been pretty well documented in brain research that humans can only hold so many variables in their consciousness at once. Our decision-making capabilities are more limited than we'd like to believe. And confronting every situation as if it were new would be simply exhausting, That is why we rely heavily on rules of thumb (more fancily called heuristics). Now we also have certain types of analytic processes, what I like to think of as pattern recognition, that can serve us well (this was the topic of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink). The problem is that this quick pattern recognition can work very well, or be absolutely wrong, and we have no easy way of telling which.

My College Years, In Acoustic

"I Will Never Lie to You," said bin Laden

Spencer Ackerman, whose work I love and cite, makes in passing a frequent argument that I've always found slightly problematic:

al-Qaeda has never believed it could actually defeat the United States at so much as a ping-pong match. What it looks to do instead is lure the United States into strategically untenable situations in which the U.S. arouses widespread Muslim anger and experiences too much military pain at too high an economic price to justify a continued presence on the Arabian peninsula. We know this because, like, Osama bin Laden says it. It’s worked to some degree — a couple of years ago this country, like a less-self-aware Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, went out of its mind and invaded and occupied Iraq — but nowhere near sufficiently, as the United State will undoubtedly retain an on-shore presence in the Peninsula, and much of the Arab world won’t really care so much. Could the economic crisis be an opportunity for al-Qaeda?

Well, yes, bin Laden says it. I don't know about you, but if I were a terrorist, I'd make a business out of saying anything that psyched out my opponent as much as possible. In other words, I think bin Laden wanted to humiliate the US with a short, victorious war, and only adopted the rhetoric of long-run quagmire afterwards. Since the two are somewhat similar, and the US presence has turned out to be long-lasting, it's easy to assume he always intended the latter rather than the former. 

Now, the following is slightly risky to write about, since I could embarrass myself. So perceive the following as a request for evidence regarding bin Laden's strategy, where I'm willing very much to be proven wrong.

The quote Spencer links comes from a 2004 bin Laden tape. As far as I'm aware*, there is no pre-9/11 quotes where bin Laden says that he wanted to draw the US into a long-term, Russia-style quagmire (look, e.g., at this official, unclassified compilation of quotes by bin Laden, where the only references to quagmire come in 2002, and 2004, i.e. months after US invasions). He does refer to the US as a paper tiger, however.

He does say that he expects that the US won't last long in any post-attack invasion, just as it did not last long in Somalia, just as it didn't do anything major after the Embassy bombings. But the strategic goal there is essentially defensive - to outlast - rather than offensive - to wear down American forces and win in the field. America is metaphorically and theologically similar to Russia, but he seemed to think we wouldn't last as long in the field.

This rhetorical shift isn't without precedent; bin Laden only begins mentioning Israel-Palestine relatively late in al Qaeda's evolution for example.

Admittedly, the data are thin, but they seem to shade my way.  First, it's too damned convenient for bin Laden, and lacks any sort of easy rebuttal. Second, the timing of his statements seems to fit that; he wanted to bloody the US, but in a relatively short time frame. Third, the September 10th, 2001 assassination of Massoud, a major Northern warlord, by AQ operatives seems to be a shaping operation for defensive purposes. Killing the local enemy with whom the US might ally, who might stick around after the Americans leave, seems to fit this narrative. 

Could he have been willing to accept the possibility of a prolonged, Russia-style war? Sure. But I don't think that's what his main bet was on. 

*Please correct me if I'm wrong; I've looked through compilations of bin Laden quotes in the past for this, but the number of expansive and/or dubious quotation compilations produced in recent years makes it hard to be certain about this. If I am wrong, I'd be glad to admit it. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us what forceful argument, the kind that takes every word, clause, connector, and punctuation mark, and turns it into a weapon, looks like.

This is the best paragraph, but read the whole thing:

The point is that you have to be able to distinguish your deeply held beliefs, from the electorates. I think much of the GOP's trouble stems from the inability to discern the difference. That whole "Real America," "Real Virginia," small-town snobbery bit, isn't an act--they actually believe it. I've never understood the whole "Center-right country" meme, because it's ultimately self-serving--and then self-defeating. It blinds you to the hard work of arguing, cajoling and fighting with the electorate, until they see your point. It's interesting that so many of their most dominant voices of the GOP (Steele, Gingrich, Limbaugh) have either never won an election, or haven't won one in a decade. 

I Went to the A'n'P to Make You An OMLT but I ETT it...

...Tom Ricks has discovered the joys of LOLghanistan:

Do you have to break eggs ...to make an OMLT ("Operational Mentoring and Liasion Team")? Do they come with American cheese? This is my favorite new military acronym.

(ETT=Embedded Training Team, the best such blog about which is Afghanistan Shrugged)

Why Yale Didn't Implement Gender-Neutral Housing

Yesterday, Yale announced it would not implement gender-neutral housing for upperclassmen. That decision flew in the face of both years of lobbying by the LGBT Co-op's activists, as well as a recommendation by the Council of Masters, which is usually the final step before the formal adoption of a policy.

Already, Yale students are forming facebook groups and writing op-eds in protest.  They'll claim it's discriminatory against transgender students (which, given that Yale is unwilling to even carve out individualized accommodations for such students, it is), and that it distorts the housing market for upperclassmen (which it does). 

They'll note that other universities get away with it, and that co-ed living arrangements exist de facto in some significant fraction of rooms already, due to the existence of, y'know, heterosexual relationships.

All of this is true. None of this is relevant. President Levin's staring at a hole in his budget the size of a small African nation's GDP (no, really, look it up, Yale's endowment lost more money last year than Mauritania makes in a year) and is forced to make hard choices.

It's no secret that many really, really old alums still find the idea of women at Yale a little od; gender-neutral housing is definitely a Rubicon too far. Yale is desperate for money now, so my strong hunch is that this decision was motivated by a desire to avoid damaging any Hail-Mary fundraising attempts this year.  To a certain extent, financial considerations made it logical to screw the transgender lobby. 

Is this morally the right call? I hate to say it, but there's some point at which Yale faces a bad enough financial crisis where it seems like it might be (say, 300 more jobs lost versus waiting another few years to implement the rule change).

I guarantee, however, that at no point in what is certain to be a very angry and frustrating public debate will this rationale be brought up.  The activists don't want to weigh rights claims against pragmatism, and the University doesn't want to imply that its donors are prejudiced against transgendered people. Just remember that when this bar fight reaches the national news.

Terrifying Darwinian Lesson du Jour

You have body hairs whose sole purpose is to create belly button lint.

Backwards-Compatible Atheism

Via BoingBoing, a call for backwards-compatible atheism:

With religion, I think atheists have the same dissonance going on. If they really think the world would be better off without religion, they shouldn't hate religion and call believers fools. Any successful new belief system must appreciate the beauty of what it's replacing and strive for backwards-compatibility. If Matthew 1:1-16 hadn't explained how Jesus' lineage fulfills the prophecy in Isaiah 1:1-5, it wouldn't have gotten where it is today.

So I put it to declared atheists-- the ones who fly the flag about it, not the ones who are quiet or closeted: Do you think that most of humanity is A) hopeless and doomed to kill each other because of their stupid religious beliefs, or B) capable of coming to and benefiting from your views?

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

This actually gets at something I was trying to address in my last post: absences only are meaningful in the context of presences. Christianity attempts to fulfill what it sees as the legacy of Judaism, but it explicitly doesn't require the following of most Jewish laws. The more interesting argument here would be to claim that atheism should fulfill the point of religion without requiring religion. I don't see that coming out of pure science or the triumph of the Anglo-American analytical philosophers.  But "quiet atheism" only makes sense if you belong to a community where faith isn't the point of religion, where the community, and its practices, are the point. 

If the distinction I'm trying to draw between Judaism and Christianity seems to abstract, think of it this way; we think of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc, as being religions just like monotheistic religions, even though worship, festival, and law aren't really linked to promise of an afterlife per se, though they have transcendent implications. Many subtypes of Judaism are a hybrid between a focus on practice, and a focus on belief. Atheism has a healthy place in the first sort of religion, but I'm not convinced it can in the second. 

The Ten Commandments

Via Andrew Sullivan, a great article about the Ten Commandments and their political significance:

Yet what of the third commandment, the one about not taking the Lord's name in vain? Today, we take this to mean something like "thou shalt not swear when a hammer has whacked thine thumb." But that is a much later Calvinist-style distortion: there's plenty of obscenity and swearing in the Bible. Rather, think back to the highland refugees. Any miscreant who "swore" on the authority of the commandments about something he in fact had no intention of doing—such as helping in the next year's harvest—would undermine the trust everyone depended on. It seems a small matter, but this principle had immense consequences later on. When descendants of the original settlers were taken into captivity in Babylon in the 6th century BC, the habit of co-operation that the third commandment fostered helped to create the meeting house—the blueprint of the later Christian church and Muslim mosque. This was unprecedented. Ordinary people weren't supposed to join together, but the third commandment encouraged people to trust each other enough to do so. It is also about humility, a rejection of the hubris involved in presuming to speak on a god's behalf. In this sense, it has performed a function quite opposite to what Hitchens presumes. Many leaders (including Abraham Lincoln) have used it to block anyone invoking God's name to justify their political proposals—a humility one retiring US president would have been wise to consider.

One of the difficult parts about being Jewish in a Judeo-Christian culture is that it's sometimes hard to separate Christian meanings from Jewish meanings. Sometimes that's a good thing; Maimonedes pretty clearly managed to sneak in parts of other philosophies and religions into Judaism, and, well, there's something peculiarly Jewish about being okay with that sort of thing happening. 

But knowing how to do that requires have a sense of what structure there is to push against. And, let's be frank, the vast majority of Jews in America, myself included, have no idea what the melody we're supposed to riff off of is in the first place.  Since Judaism isn't a religion based off of faith alone - in fact, faith is almost entirely irrelevant to the shared communal experience - text and interpretation matters, but a lot of us go around pretty unarmed. But we have a community nonetheless, a robust, beautiful one.

I think I'm going to draw a line across the page at this point, since I'm not sure where I'd take the thought after that.