NightWatch
For the Night of 6 July 2009
The unrest spread to Kashgar on Monday, 6 July, where police
dispersed more than 200 "rioters" at the main mosque. Demonstrators
said they had been demanding justice for two Uighurs killed last month in a
fight with ethnic Han Chinese at a factory in
Chinese authorities blame ethnic Muslim Uighurs for the violence, but exiled Uighurs say police fired on students. The representatives of Uighur groups in exile also said the riot was a response to government policies and Han Chinese dominance of the local economy.
The political objective of the Uighurs is increased autonomy of
The Han Chinese population buildup over time converts the Uighurs from a majority into a minority in their historic territory. Demographic manipulation is a form of political disenfranchisement, first, and genocide, later.
As for the Uighurs, the protests have some short term local
impact, but have no possibility of stopping the invasion of the Han Chinese.
The Uighurs, who are Muslims, have no chance for independence from
He said the second challenge would be to "deepen and broaden the agenda for inclusive development". The government increased spending on urban poor schemes and the landmark jobs-for-work scheme to help the poor.
Afghanistan-US: The commander of
Some of the changes include new guidelines for air strikes
that weigh the need for air support against the directive to avoid civilian
casualties and excessive damage on residential compounds, and new training
ordered for all
Comment: NightWatch has been following
As for Coalition forces, the Pashtuns want them out of
Judging by the increase in the number of wounded Western soldiers in May, the reduction in air support has had the predictable effect of increasing Coalition losses. During May, 27 allied soldiers were killed and 58 wounded.
May 2009 was the second month of the Taliban summer offensive, which was just beginning to ramp up. May was the worst month for Western causalities since September 2008. In the seven-year history of the conflict, May 2009 ranks as the fourth bloodiest month.
In successful counter-insurgency operations, outreach and cultural sensitivity initiatives make a difference only after secure conditions have been restored, meaning that security problems have been reduced to the level that they can be managed by police or paramilitary police without the assistance of military combat forces.
Energy and resources devoted to making friends with Pashtun
elders in
More importantly, Pashtun elders will and do understand and interpret Coalition initiatives as short term dodges that implicitly admit the Coalition is not able to provide the security that commands their respect and loyalty. The Coalition is only the latest outside power to make promises that it cannot keep for more than a few months, not the first.
Security is what the Taliban offer in over 150 of
Concerning Helmand
Province, a Taliban representative said 6 July that Taliban militants have
launched a guerrilla operation to counter the attack by U.S. Marines on their
stronghold in
The denials are credible and understandable, especially
after the US Vice President’s statement that implied
Somalia-Iran: The Iranian Navy has dispatched two
warships to join international efforts to provide security for shipping in the
Gulf of Aden from Somali pirates,
What prevents the Iranians from quietly helping al Shabaab
forces, while also fighting pirates from clans opposed to al Shabaab. The al
Shabaab Islamists have never been friendly to pirates and the Iranians are
friends of the friends of the Islamists, i.e.,
The
YOTTABYTES AND THE DATA ANALYSIS CHALLENGE
Extrapolating from current trends, according to a report by the JASON defense analysis group and just recently reported by Stephen Aftergood, data production could hypothetically reach the Yottabyte range by 2015. The Yotta- prefix means ten raised to the twenty-fourth power. Mega- means ten to the sixth power, Giga- means ten to the ninth power, and Tera- is ten to the twelfth power.
If one byte of data were used to image one square meter of the Earth's surface, then 1.6 Yottabytes would be generated by imaging the entire surface of the Earth every second for a hundred years, according to the December 2008 report by the JASON group.
The challenge of performing even superficial analysis of the constantly exploding volume of collected intelligence data is not a new problem. NSA’s brilliant and only NIO for Warning, David Y McManus, commented over 25 years ago that information could be collected and distributed faster than it could be evaluated. Human analysts remained the weakest and slowest link in the intelligence process, he lamented, because no tools existed in 1983 to facilitate and accelerate analysis.
The most troubling immediate question is that with the development
of drones that are sensors, reporters of intelligence data and weapons
platforms, who does the analysis that enables the drone or drone pilot, sitting sometimes
thousands of miles away, to distinguish between a wedding party and an ambush
party in the Pashtun regions of
In 2007, multiple agencies of the Department of Defense and
the armed services invited bids for at least seven contracts valued at over $1
billion for the development of systems that could perform automatic analysis of
the situation just described and others, without humans in the inferential
chain. None of those contracting
agencies were intelligence organizations.
The machines are under development which will make redundant all “analysts” who perform low grade cognitive functions, as described in Chapter 3 of Thinking in Time, by Neustadt and May.
Special thanks to Stephen Aftergood and FAS for spotlighting this problem, which only gets worse.
End of NightWatch
for 6 July.