The case has been made that Islamic sexual relations ARE critical to our cultural clash (polygamy, cousin marriage, etc) as they are deterministic to broader aggressive tendencies.

Better to shift the payoff to monogamy for people in Islamic countries. Their sexual mores are the result of their ecologies much like those in industrial and agarian societies support their environments.

I fell for it, and will keep it in mind, but don’t think I’ll go out spreading it as a fur shur story at cocktail parties.

I know guys who are on CIA contracts to provide mobile security for case officers – they have never, not once, ever left the FOB to which they are assigned. Granted my representative sample of case officer MST contractors could be statistically insignificant but I doubt it. When one reads books like Legacy of Ashes and has friends who served briefly in the CIA and left because the organization is too dysfunctional to tolerate than one becomes skeptical about written accounts which make the CIA appear cleaver or competent. They are neither. Year after year after year they fail at their basic mission of providing clear, concise, accurate intelligence to our decision makers. Their record of running agents behind the old Iron Curtain or during the Vietnam War was dismal – 100% of their teams were compromised – most immediately after they were inserted and every bit of information sent back to Langley was Soviet or NVA generated disinformation.

If our Presidents want to read disinformation they have the Washington Post or New York Times which don’t cost the tax payer a dime (yet I mean – we could be bailing them out soon too.)

I have talked with hundreds of village elders over the years and not one had a young wife to service – that is a stereotype better suited for a Flashman novel than a news article. In fact you would need to spend an inordinate amount of time chatting with an elder to even learn how many and the ages of his wives. That is not the kind of information which rolls out in polite conversation – and you will never see a woman while conducting a shura with Afghan tribal leaders.

I know how easy it is to get Viagra and also how popular it is in Afghanistan. My frigging guard force in convinced that New Years Day means they get a case of beer at each post and every man a three pack of Viagra – not from one of the local pharmacies but from Peshawar where the real stuff is kept. The Kiwi’s who ran the Taj before I did started this tradition which I plan to modify but the story is illustrative is it not? Yes – even in the conservative Pashtun belt the boys like beer – didn’t know that did you?

We are seeing reports like this because our press is much more incompetent than usual covering the Afghan campaign. If they got out and about more they would not be so easily fooled by planted stories of cleaver daring-do from the gang that has never shot straight. How hard is it to walk into a Kabul pharmacy and ask if they sell Viagra? Has the 5th estate really degenerated to the point where they cannot figure out how to fact check?

Nothing to forgive, ’sokay. Each of us is a diletante in some subjects.

Or perhaps you need to forgive yourself.

I just watched “Horton Hears a Who”. Forgive me.

She meant SOUND (acoustics!!!!

Electronic surveillance satellites only work if the orders are being transmitted over the air. Everyone in the world knows that if they transmit something on the air, it is likely being picked up by our NSA. Even for the stuff we pick up, there is a queue things go in. If as is likely, it is a code word being transmitted, in the midst of other traffic, we would have no way of knowing until WE see the launch.

And that makes the assumption that they are transmitting, knowing that we are listening. Guess what? They probably are not transmitting. The order will probably go over a dedicated hard line within their own territory. It may be possible that we have it tapped, but I rather doubt it. There are limits to our resources, especially in that part of the world.

Can we see the launch? Surely. We have constellations of satellites that are designed and tasked for that, and they are in real time constant communication with us.

Now, are we going to tell the other side if one side launches? Let us leave aside the political point that doing so would be considered an act of war by the side that launches. Just consider the mechanics. Flight time to target is on the order of under 10 minutes. Give us a minute or so to note the launch, track the trajectory, and then start to notify our National Command Authority [which would be Hussein Pasha]. He then has to decide what to do, and then start the process of getting ahold of the target nation, whichever it is. They are not exactly known for an overabundance of communications resources. Give it time for Hussein Pasha to contact either the Pakistani or Indian NCA. Now by that time, the first warheads have probably detonated. But say they haven’t. The NCA on the other end of the line has to decide if he believes and trusts what Hussein Pasha is saying. Not something that is guaranteed.

Best case, we are not in a position to give either side a reliable warning of an imminent attack, unless we happen to have an intel source within either government that can give us warning. The decision to pass that warning on would be a political one. Keep in mind the Hussein Pasha declared in one of his two autobiographies that he would stand with the Muslims. Further, that India was close to George II Bush, and that means that Hussein Pasha’s regime is not going to be friendly with them.

Would Hussein Pasha be willing to act against the interests of a Muslim nation and support a capitalist country that has pretensions of being a democracy? If I was Indian, I would not bet my last elephant on it.

All of that is academic, however. TV and Hollywood notwithstanding, we do not have all of these neat real time assets that give us the true intel picture instantaneously. Most of the world is out of our control and out of our observation. We do the best we can, but as Hussein Pasha is going to discover, national policy is a matter of improvising with incomplete knowledge. That magic wand or the One Ring really aren’t in the White House. What the Left and the media ascribe to ill will in this administration, they will gloss over in Hussein Pasha’s regime, because they cannot accept that things will not go perfectly under The One.

We are going to be reacting to events, not guiding them.

Subotai Bahadur

Sheesh! That’s a realy good LOLcat!