inothernews:

THE SPACE BETWEEN During a lull in a firefight with Taliban militants, U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Jordan Christie, of Washington, Ind. takes cover at the edge of a muddy irrigation canal, in Nawa district, Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, Sunday, Oct. 4, 2009. Taliban militants engaged the Marine patrol Sunday. The firefight came after hundreds of insurgents armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed a pair of remote outposts near the Pakistan border Saturday, killing eight U.S. soldiers and capturing more than 20 Afghan security troops in the deadliest assault against U.S. forces in more than a year.  (Photo: AP / Brennan Linsley via the Chicago Tribune)

Bizarre Friday, (fake) war reporting edition!

This is good enough for another Bizarre Friday. While everyone is caught up in the Somalian piracy story, few have taken notice of our local, home-brewed maritime chaos around the Maltese-flagged but Russian-crewed cargo vessel M/V Arctic Sea. The Arctic Sea set out from Jakobstad, Finland, on 23 July with a stated cargo of wood, and headed towards the Algerian pot of Bejaia - until Stuff Happened.

On 24 July, they were approached by what looked like a Swedish police RIB near Gotland. A boarding party of around ten people, said to have spoken English, came aboard, detained the crew, ran through the ship with what has been described as a fine-toothed comb. Then, the crew reported that they left the boat. Sweden denies involvement.

On 28 July, the boat passed through the Strait of Dover, and two days later, its AIS transmitter (giving location and identity signals) was switched off. From that point on, the ship was, for all practical purposes, lost. On August 3, Interpol issued a hijack alert.

At this point, it gets rightly weird. On August 14, the Arctic Sea was sighted off Cape Verde, and a flurry of weird statements started. First, the Cape Verde Russian ambassador said that a frigate was heading there (detached from the Black Sea Fleet, which has been told to look for the Acrtic Sea), and some other military person who didn’t really want to have his name on record said that the ship is found, but we’re not telling you where it is, ha-ha. On August 17, finally, the Russians publicly announced that they found the Arctic Sea, that they’ve been systematically misleading all and sundry to preserve OPSEC (yup, with the Russians, that’s actually rather credible) and the crew have been picked up by the Ladny, a Krivak class frigate of the Russian Navy for a friendly debrief. Or whatever.

The usual explain-o-matics ensued, the Finns and the Swedish Police initiated a joint whatever, the chief security officer of the Renaissance, the insurance company that insured the Arctic Sea, reported there have been demands for around €1.5m (not that much, considering that the cargo was worth marginally more), the Malta Maritime Authority suggested that they knew along with the Finnish and Swedish maritime security authorities where the ship was all along, and finally on 18 August, the Russians announced that they’ve got eight suspects in the local nick. The alleged hijackers denied they wanted the ship, and claim to be environmentalists. More bizarre details: the Russians claim that when the boat was found, the captain said the ship was in fact North Korean (and he sought to pull that off… how? Did he have a spare N Korean flag in his pocket and a bucket of paint to change Valetta to Pyongyang?), which of course the North Koreans denied immediately. Meanwhile, the Russians dished out gag orders on the crew.

Well, on Wednesday, it just got a bit weirder when Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the Sovfrakht Marine Bulletin decided he was better off jumping ship (ha, ha) and leaving Russia for a bit:

“Some serious guys hinted to me yesterday or the day before yesterday,” Voitenko said. “They advised me to return in three or four months.”

Asked who the people were, Voitenko said simply, “Guess.”

Asked if it was because of his role in the Arctic Sea case, Voitenko said, “Yes, it was because of the Arctic Sea.”

Speculation is now rife, with the EU’s piracy czar (jeez this post is full of bad puns today!), former Estonian defence chief Admiral Tarmo Kouts saying that the Russian story is not very credible, and the ship probably carried missiles. To whom remains a big beautiful question. Algeria isn’t a bad guess, but the shady bunch of guys in the hills over there calling themselves al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb sounds better.

Nice, eh?

Small Wars Journal has an article by Luke Coffey on detainee operations in COIN. It’s a ‘lessons learned’ paper from Afghanistan, 2005-2006, and makes some interesting points (okay, they’re interesting to me probably more than to you, as I’m writing on the subject at the moment). Coffey writes:

Even though counterinsurgency operations do not stop at the gates of a detention center, adequate guidance on dealing with detainees is lacking in much of this literature.

(…)

If the Golden Rule in counterinsurgency operations is to protect the local population then the Golden Rule for detainee operations is to treat all detainees with respect and dignity; from capture to release.

Can we have a big hell yes! for CPT Coffey? As someone coming from the legal angle, I’m still amazed how legalistically the detainee issue has been seen from the start, and how little attention was paid to the effect of such a legalistic view on the actual implementation of the norms in question. Views like Coffey’s, which focus less on deontic imperatives (that are likely to be the first things to be thrown overboard when the going gets tough) and more on the prudential side of things are rare but welcome phenomena. Beating the legal drum may be a satisfying exercise, but will not help detainees’ rights. It will take the combination of deontic imperatives with prudential imperatives that will allow warfighters to see fair and humane treatment of detainees not as a supervisory ‘red light’ principle that is stacked against them, but as a ‘green light’ principle – a principle that assists them in doing their jobs (that is, COIN warfare) more effectively, and can be integrated organically into their warfighting methodology.

This week’s Bizarre Friday, we’re happy to bring you… an enormous FAIL! of an Eryx launcher, courtesy of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Hope no-one got hurt.

Answer: when it’s not supposed to be normal. In the Mojave Desert, it rains less than ten inches a year. Rainfall is pretty rare to begin with, extensive rain is virtually unseen. I suppose we can all say the Mojave Desert is abnormally dry. In Cardiff, Wales, which is where I am at the moment, it rains quite a lot, about once every couple of days, but not unusually much. Let’s say it rains within the normal range, albeit at the upper end of it.

Now imagine you’d see the amount of rain that’s entirely normal in Wales in the Mojave Desert. You’d be alarmed, wouldn’t you be?

OpFor cites a recent article by Craig Whitlock in the Washington Post:

In June, the international envoy who oversees the rebuilding of Bosnia invoked emergency powers that he said were necessary to hold the country together. Although U.S. and European officials have been trying to get Bosnia to stand on its own feet for years, many Bosnian leaders say the only thing that can permanently fix their gridlocked government is for Washington to intervene – again – and rewrite the treaty that ended the war in 1995.

The economy is in tatters, with unemployment exceeding 40 percent. Serbs are talking openly of secession. Croats are leaving the country in droves. Religious schisms are widening. In December, street protests erupted after Bosnian Muslim school officials in Sarajevo tried to ban “Santa Claus” from delivering gifts to kindergartens.

The national government answers to three presidents, who agree on one thing: Corruption, political infighting and bureaucratic dysfunction are paralyzing the country. In May, Vice President Biden visited Sarajevo and lectured Bosnian leaders to put aside their differences. But the squabbling has only worsened since then.

Zeljko Komsic, a Croat and chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite rotating presidency, said the country has increasingly hardened along ethnic lines. Even as Bosnia dreams of integrating into NATO and the European Union, its population has become more segregated than ever. Many Bosnian Muslim and Croat students, Komsic noted, attend school together but are separated in the classroom so they can learn different lessons about history, geography, religion and language, based on their ethnicity.

If I may be so bold as to suggest it, we’re gravely misunderstanding the Balkans. We’re misunderstanding it for two reasons: first, because we ignore the importance of culture and think in states where statehood was never a big story (but cultures and religion were), and second, because we want to misunderstand the Balkans. If the Balkans settlement collapses, the only ‘working’ example of humanitarian intervention, one that was seen as a possible model for Iraq after the war, goes down the drain with a bang that will be heard in ar-Ramadi and DC.

The way in which we are misunderstanding the Balkans is by making a major assumption: that what is normal for us will be normal there. This is gravely wrong.

Walk through the streets of Sarajevo, and you’ll find it in a state of normality that would pass muster anywhere in the West (with the exception that Sarajevo is one of the few capitals that have no McDonald’s). There has been fairly little overt ethnic tension. The Bosnian state has at least regular and established existence. What Croats and Bosnians had to fight for, Montenegro got without struggle. Slovenia is in the EU, Croatia is on its way there, and for the rest of former Yugoslavia, there is the not all too distant prospect of EU membership and full integration into the community of Western democracies. As far as democracy and human rights go, the present situation in all successor states of Yugoslavia is at least satisfactory. Admittedly, nationalism is at an all-time high, but that is somehow understandable and explicable as a reflex reaction to an insecurity of sorts that flows from ‘new’ statehood. None of this looks like a failed state.

Except we don’t know what to look for. The Balkans feel unproblematic because we apply what we regard as problematic to a possibly very different problem. We equate prosperity and human rights with ‘things being all right’. We come from an analytical perspective that favours the present over the past - the past has a price tag, and a reasonable amount of wealth and prosperity and peace can buy forgetfulness. This, at least, is what the West German example illustrates. This is how we think.

But not everyone on the Balkans thinks that way. As an old Serb once told me, people on the Balkans have long memories and long knives. That’s a bad combination, and every now and then, the two combine to produce ethnically laden bloodshed. And worst of all, we’re deprived of seeing when this will happen because we think that democracy (or what passes for it on the Balkans, which isn’t half bad), reasonable prosperity, cars and Britney Spears means that all is well. It does not. What it means is that the conflict is simmering, that there is something brewing but that it has not yet reached critical mass. Given the murder and bloodshed that took place in the last few years on the Balkans, peace is not to be expected. It is not normal. The people now living together as neighbours have been bitter enemies in the last ten years, and quite a few of them have done quite horrible things. The unmarked mass graves do not go away, and neither do the grieving families harbouring a very understandable resentment. In a place where you may well live next door to someone who ten years ago was committing atrocities against your people, the absence of conflict is abnormal, however normal it seems from our point of view.

Is Bosnia a failed state? Only time will tell. The hammer certainly hasn’t dropped yet, and most definitely not in favour of ‘no’. It is not at all clear what the outcome will be here, and whether the Yugoslav model of humanitarian intervention works. There is a strong bias towards hoping it will, therefore pretending that it does. That is problematic because when we ignore that normality by our concepts is possibly abnormal in abnormal contexts, we blind ourselves to the lessons of a valuable case study on the pathologies of a state post humanitarian intervention.

As they say in less restrained climates: you just can’t make this shit up. And indeed it’s real: nuclear scientist Arkadi Brich, who worked on the Soviet nuclear project sixty years ago, says nukes are actually quite pretty, and let’s have more tests anyway:

‘The day of the first test should be considered a national day of celebration,’ he told RIA Novosti.

‘People who knew nothing rapidly familiarised themselves with new technology and succeeded in creating a bomb in a country devastated by war.

‘It was a miracle.’

The Soviet Union detonated its first atom bomb, the RDS-1, on August 29, 1949, in the Semipalatinsk test zone in northern Kazakhstan.

The test came four years after the US detonated atomic bomb Trinity, the first in history.

‘The nuclear mushroom is a very nice phenomenon,’ Brich recalled, adding that after the explosion and the shockwave the sky cleared and there was glorious weather.

Gee. I bet our domestic lease of nuclear hawks are envious to the extreme for every country in which it’s approaching mainstream thinking that nukes are pretty. I guess the Soviet Union did not enjoy the fervent nuclear disarmament protests the West did.

benjaminhilts:

Night Over Europe

Enemy tracer bullets weave an intricate pattern as they shoot towards the planes of the Royal Air Force during a night attack on Hamburg. This picture was made from one of the raiding planes. (via The Boat Lullabies)

Pretty cool stuff. I’ve always loved tracers.

Okay, back to business.

So long, glad times?

In his recent column in Foreign Policy, Robert Haddick argues that the Yemen conflict might be a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran:

The current round of fighting, now into its second week, is the sixth uprising in this area since 2004. What raises the profile of this development are accusations of foreign intervention in the conflict. The Yemeni government has accused Iran of providing funding and weapons to the Shiite rebels. Iran’s news media has in turn reported that Saudi Arabia’s military forces have joined in the fighting. The Saudi government acknowledges consultations with Yemen but denies any direct participation by its forces. Evidence of foreign intervention in the conflict is sparse. But Yemen’s foreign minister was at least concerned enough to summon Iran’s ambassador his office. Meanwhile the Saudi and Yemeni defense ministries have stepped up consultations. According to The Economist, Iran’s Arabic language news service has been reporting the latest round of fighting including Saudi Arabia’s support of the Yemeni government.

Other than the Iranian ambassador getting invited for an Interview Without Coffee, what does this exactly mean for the region? Haddick suggests that “the conflict is probably the newest front in a broadening proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia”, along with Lebanon and the rest of the Gulf, where Iran has been garnering support with Shi’ite populations against governing Sunni regimes. Needless to say, Shi’ite empowerment is one message that would fall on a very receptive audience in Iraq, where it is in fact at the same time an avowed aim of the Coalition to redress the imbalance in favour of Sunnis maintained during the Ba’athist years by hiring more Shi’ite judges, administrators, policemen and civil officials.

The interesting part of this question is how this will align with another fault-line in the Islamic world. The Sunni/Shi’a conflict dates back to the death of the Prophet Mohammed, and Sunnis and Shi’ites have been duking it out for the last couple of hundred years in small intermittent conflicts. The more recent division in the Muslim, especially the Gulf Arab, world is between the states that support the Western powers and states that are adamantly opposed. From that perspective, assuming that Iran is indeed funding various Shi’a groups throughout the Islamic world, three explanations are possible.

First, the Yemeni conflict and the other placeholder wars, present and to come, may be yet another round in the Sunni/Shi’a match. If that is true, it is essentially a religiously motivated story, and has nothing to do with what the parties’ idea about the place of the Islamic world in the world order is. The Sunni/Shi’a Cold War Haddick argues may be emerging from the increasing Iran-Saudi Arabia tensions with placeholder wars like Yemen is, then, just another layer upon all the other divisions that split the Islamic world, including the division between those who see the West as a friend to embrace and those that see it as an infidel enemy to be demolished. What speaks against this explanation is that Iran, as theocratic as it is, would just not go on a sojourn to randomly fund people pushing the same religious agenda.

Alternatively, the Iranians may be using the Sunni/Shi’a conflict and Shi’a minority resentment in Sunni-dominated pro-Western Arab countries like Saudi Arabia to weaken and distract one of America’s most important allies in the region. If this is the case, conceptualising the outcome will be a challenge indeed. For quite a number of prominent and vehemently anti-American jihadists were committed Sunnis - AQ’s leadership, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are both Sunni Muslims, for instance, and highly critical of Iran. This suggests the emergence of a tripartite conflict: Wahhabi Sunni Al-Quaeda is propagating its form of Qutbism, that is, the rejection of everything other than a Sunni-run Sharia-governed state, and fights both the Sunni powers cooperating with the West and Iran. Iran, on the other hand, is trying to use the age-old Sunni/Shi’a split to destabilise pro-Western Sunni regimes, first and foremost the House of Saud. In Iraq, where the Sunni/Shi’a issue is still unresolved, this could have a big, big bang at the end. Both, at the same time, will seek to harm the strategic interests of the US, but not in cooperation. If so, the Chinese curse has come to pass, and we indeed are living in interesting times.