I am currently reading Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop – The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. I’ll review it more fully when I’ve finished reading it – now there’s an idea – but here’s something that stands out for reasons of pure partisan rage. John Reid has been mocked plenty for saying that he thought…
Read More John Reid RetrobloggingHa. Ha. Ha. Looks like Kelvin McFuck won’t be standing after all. Too risky, eh? There we were, thinking he was a heroic fighter for all he thought was right, not to mention a formidable enterpreneur, and a man confident in the backing of the deadliest nonkinetic weapon system on the planet. After all, heroism…
Read More fully recyclable cellulosic macro-feline predatorOh dear. Massive Taliban jail break in Kandahar – 400 or so rebel prisoners sprung with 400 or so others. What worries me, though, is that the attack seems to have been very much like the 2005 NOIA raid on Abu Ghraibh. Prison staff said the assault began when a tanker full of explosives was…
Read More if you know, come to teachSaid Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There’s some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it. David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be…
Read More one intelligent soldierThere is a fascinating post at Pat Lang’s about a study trip to Lebanon which involved meeting some interesting and alarming people (Samir Geagea, described here as “a bit Lyndon LaRouche” – well, whatever hard things have been said, quite understandably, about the latter, he never commanded a militia that cut huge crosses in the…
Read More The Switzerland of the Middle East (for some periods of Swiss history)Here’s a visualisation of today’s output from the Viktor Bout script, version 2.5, with the help of IBM ManyEyes‘s network graph function. Unfortunately the flight number data in there has somehow been filtered, and there should be arrowheads. Why can’t I have arrowheads? Rest assured the definitive version is coming…
Read More Political Pathetic Python AgainTurns out Abu Muq was Andrew Exum all along. Which is interesting; I’d read and been impressed by Exum’s work on Hezbollah and Iraq, but I’d never have thought it was him, chiefly because the man behind the stylish blogger template was obviously both smart and struggling to overcome a deeply ingrained wingnut streak. There…
Read More I View the Checksum: It was ExumWhere else but Northern Ireland would the government form a Consultative Group on the Past? In other news, the Kevin Myers review has achieved the rare distinction of links from ahem, reactionary ballbag hack Tim Worstall and Ken MacLeod, who reckons Al Gore would so have staffed-up from AEI and Patrick Henry College in order…
Read More ChanceSays Bryan O’Sullivan in his bookmarks: Kevin Myers, the ne plus ultra of ballbag Anglo-Irish reactionary hacks, surprises us all by writing what might be an essential close-up of the Troubles. Maybe his lunatic, protean nature was a perfect fit for the time. This was the upshot of this post. I promised, I think, to…
Read More Review: Watching the DoorWell, I asked for details of that Hezbollah converged telecoms network, and some appeared via the comments at Abu Muqawama. First of all, there’s a map. My first reaction on seeing this was that it looked a lot like a rather underdeveloped, dated official backbone network – there’s not much redundancy anywhere, and there’s only…
Read More I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall