Counterinsurgency 101

Faisal Shams Khan writes in Dawn:

THE insurgency in the tribal areas is largely understood through the use of meaningless caricatures of extremism and Talibanisation. Such explanations construct a mono-causal and simplified understanding of the insurgent movement in the tribal areas.

Krongard to Congress: Don’t Hold Me Accountable for Lying

State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard doesn’t want to be called to testify before Congress on discrepancies between his statements and those of his brother over the brother’s ties to the Blackwater security firm.

His lawyer is trying to frame it as “pitting brother against brother”.

I’m sure you’ve heard the classic advice to lawyers: “If the law is against you, pound on the facts. If the facts are against you, pound on the law. And if both the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table.” Mr. Krongard’s lawyer is pounding on the table.

Testimony wouldn’t pit Howard Krongard against his brother. It would pit him against the truth.

It’d be nice to see the truth win for a change.

My, Oh My

This wasn’t supposed to get out, was it?

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, rejected a proposal by Iran and Venezuela to discuss the weak dollar at this weekend’s OPEC summit in Riyadh, saying it didn’t want the U.S. currency to “collapse.”

[…]

Some OPEC members have said they will consider increasing transactions in euros. The dollar has fallen almost 15 percent against the euro in the past 12 months.

Broadcast Blunder

“There will be journalists who will seize on this point and we don’t want the dollar to collapse instead of doing something good for OPEC,” Al-Faisal said.

The minister’s comments were broadcast from a closed meeting before Saudi authorities unplugged the live broadcast. The blunder was discovered after just over half an hour. The main protagonists in the debate were Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Saud al-Faisal, each one talking in their own language.

Earlier in the broadcast, Venezuela, the fourth-largest producer in OPEC, had said it backs Iran’s proposal to discuss pricing oil in other currencies.

“We’re backing this Iranian proposal,” Ramirez said.

The dollar slid to a record low of $1.4752 against the euro on Nov. 9 and has fallen versus 15 of the 16 most actively traded currencies tracked by Bloomberg this year, hurting the international purchasing power of OPEC’s dollar-based export revenue. Iran already sells some of its oil in other currencies.

Well, well, well.  No wonder the Saudis didn’t want this televised.

Who was Mata Hari?

Martha Fiennes, reported by Peter Stanford in The London Independent:

 Her real name was Marguerite Zelle and she was born in the Netherlands in August 1876. Her father was a bankrupt hat-seller. At 18 she married a Dutch naval officer, Rudolf MacLeod, and moved with him to Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies, later Indonesia, where she had two children. The first, Norman, died as a child, possibly, it is said, as a result of poisoning. This is alleged to have been an act of revenge, carried out by a maid who poisoned the child's rice as a response to Rudolf's extreme brutality in this colonial outpost to a young Javanese soldier. ...

Marguerite emerged from the divorce "fallen" from bourgeois respectability with few options open to her. She used her natural and precocious sexual sense to reinvent herself completely – a kind of Madonna of her day. A divorcee at that time was regarded as damaged goods, so while her solution may sound extreme, it is also understandable.

She headed for Paris, where she worked initially in a circus as Lady MacLeod, but in 1905 started performing as an exotic dancer and calling herself Mata Hari, a name taken from the Indonesian and Malay words meaning literally "Dawn of the Day". She performed almost nude on some of the best stages in Europe, veiling herself and her body in elaborate layers of fantasy. She was, she would tell audiences, a princess from Java of priestly Indian birth, who had been initiated into sacred dancing as a child. Her act took on both an erotic and a quasi-religious dimension.

She had what we would today call a high skill set, both on stage and with men. She spoke seven European languages and was a courtesan with many lovers, including high-ranking military officers, who funded what became a lavish lifestyle. In the fin-de-siècle world of pre-1914 Paris, she was a celebrated figure....

She was packed off to her death because France needed someone to blame for its woes on the battlefield.