A moment of cyberspace silence —            — as today marks the beginning of Year Six of war.

The slow-burning fuse of quagmire.

The prospect of a second downward spiral – though so far Afghanistan isn’t nearly as violent as Iraq – has experts worried that Western militaries don’t have an effective strategy for these irregular wars.

“One Iraq is bad enough,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. “Given that our two main theaters of operations aren’t going well, one has to question how well the U.S. understands counterinsurgency.”

[snip]

Resemblances to Iraq don’t stop there. Taliban public relations teams videotape attacks and post them online, an uncharacteristic venture into modern technology for a Muslim fundamentalist group that once banned cameras and computers.

[snip]

The Taliban comeback, while focused on the volatile south and east, has begun to hit Kabul. The mountain capital’s tree-lined boulevards are now scarred, like the streets of Baghdad, by garlands of razor wire, towering blast walls and impromptu police checkpoints.

There’s little indication that Iraqi insurgents are joining the fight in Afghanistan or giving the Taliban direct aid, although a few Arab and Chechen fighters mingle in Taliban ranks.

But even without much personal contact, the Taliban has learned from Iraq’s insurgency. Web sites explain the insurgent’s art: everything from concealed rocket launchers to roadside bomb-making.

“We’re not saying they’re getting direct support from Iraq,” a U.S. military official in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity the information. “They’ve evolved by adapting their tactics. They’ve seen the value of the suicide bomber in Iraq. For them, it’s a very cheap and effective weapons system.”

The U.S. and NATO military response in Afghanistan also has nuanced differences from Iraq. U.S. warplanes drop 10 times more bombs in Afghanistan than they do in Iraq, and a few U.S. and NATO troops live off base in village houses, a strategy rarely attempted in Iraq.

But most of the allied war efforts looks similar. In both places, troops cordon off villages and search homes. They employ billions of dollars in technology – things like signal jammers and mine-clearing vehicles – to find and disarm roadside bombs. They operate from bases nearly identical in appearance, with troops living in tin trailers barricaded by dirt-filled metal baskets. Article

Summary here and here.

Instability and insecurity across the spectrum, played out daily and repeatedly.

…Iraqi police arrive – the soldiers think too quickly. No one called them.

The body that these soldiers found had been shot by an Iraqi policeman’s pistol; witnesses saw an Iraqi police car leave the scene. Now the soldiers are investigating to see if these police were themselves involved. Surprisingly, an Iraqi police lieutenant tells us he thinks fellow police did it.

“My men are infiltrated by Shiite militias and I can’t get rid of them,” he says. “If I report them, they’ll kill me.” Article

Baghdad’s last rabbi quits.

Almost without doubt to be tried in absentia (if at all) but that should not be a reason for the record not being set straight.

Prosecutors have completed their investigation into the alleged CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in Italy and were preparing to ask that more than two dozen Americans and several Italian intelligence officials be ordered to stand trial, lawyers said Saturday.

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a terrorism suspect also known as Abu Omar, was allegedly kidnapped from a Milan street in February 2003 as part of an alleged CIA program in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries and sometimes subjected to torture.

Prosecutors say the operation was conducted by CIA agents with assistance from Italian agents, and have called it a breach of Italian sovereignty that compromised their own anti-terrorism efforts. They are seeking the arrest of 26 Americans, all but one suspected to be CIA agents. Article

If meal preferences (yes, you read that right – meal preferences) are important enough to merit mention, what are the rest of the 34 pieces of information about you that must be transmitted within 15 minutes of take-off?

US officials will no longer be able to “pull” the information - which includes details on credit cards, passports, telephone numbers and even meal preferences - direct from airline computer systems, but will have it “pushed” to them.

The information will be sent to the US Department of Homeland Security, which will “facilitate” any wider distribution among other US counter-terrorism agencies, Mr Frattini said. Article

Following up on the latest kidnappings in Nigeria.

IS THAT YOUR GEARSHIFT…

…or were you just happy to be cruising?

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ETAM YAD’G

Backing out of the Outback.

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LIMBO 2.0

Tweaking dogma.