North Korea continues to play the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect

July 16th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallNorth Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River:

The United States, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost thirty thousand troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.

[…]

North Korea continues to play the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect. Its foreign policy consists, essentially, of being suspicious of everyone except the Chinese, and even Beijing is not to be fully trusted despite supplying 84.12 percent of North Korea’s imports and buying 84.48 percent of its exports, according to 2014 figures by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

[…]

To its captive population it says it is a strong, munificent, magnificent state standing up against all the odds and against the evil foreigners, calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It has a unique political philosophy of Juche, which blends fierce nationalism with Communism and national self-reliance. In reality, it is the least democratic state in the world: it is not run for the people and it is not a republic. It is a dynasty shared by one family and one party. It also checks off every box in the dictatorship test: arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption, and a litany of horrors on a scale without parallel in the twenty-first century. Satellite images and witness testimony suggest that at least 150,000 political prisoners are held in giant work and “reeducation” camps.

[…]

If you come from the north, then once you are over the Yalu River there are few major natural defensive lines all the way down to the sea, and if you can land from the sea, the reverse is true. The Mongols came and went, as did the Chinese Ming dynasty, the Manchurians, and the Japanese several times.

[…]

In the twentieth century the Japanese were back, annexing the whole country in 1910, and later set about destroying its culture. The Korean language was banned, as was the teaching of Korean history, and worship at Shinto shrines became compulsory.

[…]

The defeat of Japan in 1945 left Korea divided along the 38th parallel. North of it was a Communist regime overseen first by the Soviets and later by Communist China, south of the line was a pro-American dictatorship called the Republic of Korea (ROK).

[…]

The Soviets pulled their troops out of the north in 1948 and the Americans followed suit in the south in 1949. In June 1950, an emboldened North Korean military fatally underestimated America’s Cold War geopolitical strategy and crossed the 38th parallel, intent on reuniting the peninsula under one Communist government.

[…]

The North Korean leadership, and its Chinese backers, had correctly worked out that, in a strictly military sense, Korea was not vital to the United States; but what they failed to understand was that the Americans knew that if they didn’t stand up for their South Korean ally, their other allies around the world would lose confidence in them.

[…]

In September 1950, the United States, leading a United Nations force, surged into Korea, pushing the Northern troops back across the 38th parallel and then up almost to the Yalu River and the border with China.

Now it was Beijing’s turn to make a decision. It was one thing to have US forces on the peninsula, quite another when they were north of the parallel—indeed north of the mountains above Hamhung—and within striking distance of China itself. Chinese troops poured across the Yalu, and thirty-six months of fierce fighting ensued with massive casualties on all sides before they ground to a halt along the current border and agreed to a truce, but not a treaty.

[…]

The geography of the peninsula is fairly uncomplicated and a reminder of how artificial the division is between North and South. The real (broad-brush) split is west to east. The west of the peninsula is much flatter than the east and is where the majority of people live. The east has the Hamgyong mountain range in the north and lower ranges in the south.

[…]

South Korea’s capital, the megacity of Seoul, lies just thirty-five miles south of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Almost half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul region, which is home to much of its industry and financial centers, and it is all within range of North Korean artillery.

In the hills above the 148-mile-long DMZ, the North Korean military has an estimated ten thousand artillery pieces. They are well dug in, some in fortified bunkers and caves. Not all of them could reach the center of Seoul, but some could, and all are able to reach the greater Seoul region. There’s little doubt that within two or three days the combined might of the South Korean and US air forces would have destroyed many of them, but by that time Seoul would be in flames. Imagine the effect of just one salvo of shells from ten thousand artillery weapons landing in urban and semi-urban areas, then multiply it dozens of times.

[…]

The ROK’s economy is eighty times stronger than the North’s, its population is twice the size, and the combined South Korean and US armed forces would almost certainly overwhelm North Korea eventually, assuming China did not decide to join in again.

[…]

Developing the north of Korea would be building from ground zero, and the costs would hold back the economy of a united peninsula for a decade. After that, the benefits of the rich natural resources of the north, such as coal, zinc, copper, and iron, and the modernization program would be expected to kick in, but there are mixed feelings about risking the prosperity of one of the world’s most advanced nations in the meantime.

[…]

South Korea is now a vibrant, integrated member of the nations of the world, with a foreign policy to match. With open water to its west, east, and south, and with few natural resources, it has taken care to build a modern navy in the past three decades, one that is capable of getting into the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea to safeguard the ROK’s interests. Like Japan, it is dependent on foreign sources for its energy needs, and so keeps a close eye on the sea-lanes of the whole region.

[…]

In early 2015, when the Americans, South Koreans, and Japanese got down to the details of an agreement to share military intelligence they had each gathered on North Korea, Seoul said it would pass along only a limited amount of secret information to Tokyo via Washington. It will not deal directly with the Japanese. The two countries still have a territorial dispute over what South Korea calls the Dokdo (solitary) Islands and the Japanese know as the Takeshima (bamboo) islands.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Martial arts evolve

July 15th, 2025

Matt Larsen reminds us that martial arts evolve:

As long as the environment forces students to engage in real fights regularly, as in a warlike society, they stay focused on that goal. But in most societies have long periods where they are peaceful. Then things start to change.

[…]

Kano began learning Jiu-Jitsu just a few years after the Satsuma Rebellion. (You may remember the movie The Last Samurai, loosely based on those events in 1877.) Kano was 17 at the time. He opened the Kodokan in 1882 when he was 22 (Stevens, 2013).

Later, as head of what would become Tsukuba University and a top official in Japan’s Ministry of Education, he traveled to Europe and saw how Western education used sports to build character and social unity (Guttmann & Thompson, 2001). Japan at the time didn’t have a direct equivalent to modern organized sport.

So Kano took what he’d learned in Jiu-Jitsu and reformed it into Judo, an art that could be taught safely in schools and used as an educational tool to shape moral character and discipline, not just to win street fights. That purpose shift changed what parts of the art were emphasized in training, and which parts faded.

One clue is in the oldest kata in Judo, Koshiki-no-kata. It preserves the old armored throws from battlefield days, but today is mostly a formality to connect the sport to its combative roots.

Kano’s own writings show he never intended Judo to be only sportive. His original curriculum at the Kodokan included atemi-waza (strikes) and self-defense kata with weapon disarms, the Kime-no-kata preserved techniques against dagger and sword. Students trained these alongside throws and holds.

But after World War II, occupying U.S. forces under General MacArthur banned martial arts training to demilitarize Japan (Guttmann & Thompson, 2001). When Judo returned, it had to present itself as a modern sport to survive. Its Olympic debut in 1964 cemented this path: the competition format rewarded big throws and safe randori, not strikes or weapons work. What survived was what the environment, the schools, the government, the Olympics, rewarded. The striking and weapons elements faded into kata demonstrations, mostly forgotten at the edges of the art (Stevens, 2013).

Posted in Martial Arts | 1 Comment »

It was used to house unusual prisoners, all aristocrats, in rather comfortable durance

July 14th, 2025

Back in 2004, Jerry Pournelle described the original Bastille Day:

On July 14, 1789, the Paris mob aided by units of the National Guard stormed the Bastille Fortress which stood in what had been the Royal area of France before the Louvre and Tuilleries took over that function. The Bastille was a bit like the Tower of London, a fortress prison under direct control of the Monarchy. It was used to house unusual prisoners, all aristocrats, in rather comfortable durance. The garrison consisted of soldiers invalided out of service and some older soldiers who didn’t want to retire; it was considered an honor to be posted there, and the garrison took turns acting as valets to the aristocratic prisoners kept there by Royal order (not convicted by any court).

On July 14, 1789, the prisoner population consisted of four forgers, three madmen, and another.  The forgers were aristocrats and were locked away in the Bastille rather than be sentenced by the regular courts. The madmen were kept in the Bastille in preference to the asylums: they were unmanageable at home, and needed to be locked away. The servants/warders were bribed to treat them well. The Bastille was stormed; the garrison was slaughtered to a man, some being stamped to death; their heads were displayed on pikes; and the prisoners were freed. The forgers vanished into the general population. The madmen were sent to the general madhouse.  The last person freed was a young man who had challenged the best swordsman in Paris to a duel, and who had been locked up at his father’s insistence lest he be killed. This worthy joined the mob and took on the name of Citizen Egalité. He was active in revolutionary politics until Robespierre had him beheaded in The Terror.

The national holidays of the US, Mexico, and France all celebrate rather different events…

(This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned thus.)

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When Failure Thrives

July 13th, 2025

When Failure Thrives by Marc DevoreWhen Failure Thrives was the inaugural publication by the Army Press, back in 2015:

Regardless of how revolutionary they are at the time of their introduction, all military innovations gradually lose their utility as they are overtaken by further technical and societal developments. For example, while the Prussian drill regulations and tactical ordre oblique introduced by Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia in the mid-18 Century were revolutionary for his time, they became a liability a mere generation after Frederick’s death when battlefield developments during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars led to the diffusion of new models of military organization. However, Prussia proved too slow in responding to these new developments until, after an existential defeat in 1806, policymakers finally discarded the institutions and practices they had inherited from Frederick. This case and others like it demonstrate the validity of Joseph Schumpeter’s axiom that innovation is a process of “creative destruction.”

[…]

For this reason, military innovators oftentimes advocate abolishing organizations considered impediments to reform. For example, Soviet Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, an early advocate of a Military Technical Revolution, passionately (yet unsuccessfully) lobbied for his government to shift resources from armored forces to digital command-and-control networks and long-range precision-guided munitions.

[…]

Airborne forces are an ideal case for exploring the survival and evolution of a military capability of decreasing utility because of both the nearly universal creation of such forces by the great powers between 1928 and 1941, and their subsequent development along disparate lines in different states.

In this context, although the spread of integrated air defenses, armored vehicles and surface-to-air missiles gradually reduced the utility of airborne forces, states adapted to these developments in different ways.

[…]

As both scholars and military professionals have long understood, military innovations occur when armed forces establish autonomous or semi-autonomous organizational structures (either a separate service, branch or unit) to explore new technologies and doctrines. However, the same qualities of organizational autonomy and institutional power that promote innovation in new organizations foster organizational inertia as an institutions’ favored tactics and technologies become obsolete.

[…]

In effect, airborne forces suffered cutbacks in countries, such as the United Kingdom, where they did not enjoy a high level of institutional strength or autonomy to begin with. Contrarily, they proved largely immune to cutbacks in the Soviet Union, where they were originally endowed with a great deal of organizational clout and independence before the war. Finally, airborne forces remained large, but were obliged to engage in frequent and sustained efforts to reinvent themselves in the United States, where the airborne community’s institutional strength was substantial, yet not so great as to enable airborne forces to entirely neglect the implications of technical and tactical developments.

[…]

The invention of tanks in 1916 and subsequent improvements to their performance created opportunities for land warfare to be waged in radically new ways.

[…]

In many great powers, including Britain, France and the United States, the responsibility for employing tanks was assigned to two traditional service branches — the infantry and the cavalry. Contrary to certain misconceptions, both of these branches viewed tanks as potentially very useful. Nevertheless, they narrowly defined the tank’s role and technical requirements in terms of supporting preexisting infantry and cavalry missions. This meant that the infantry demanded tanks and armored units that were heavily armored, slow moving and optimized for supporting infantry assaults. Meanwhile, the cavalry developed tanks and armored units designed to substitute for the traditional horse cavalry missions of scouting and reconnaissance. In the American case, the cavalry even insisted on combining tanks and horses in hybrid units.

Unfortunately, entrusting the infantry and cavalry branches with tank development squandered their revolutionary potential. This became apparent when Germany launched its blitzkrieg campaigns in 1939-41. Rather than subordinating tanks to existing branches, the Germans created a dedicated armored branch, the Panzerwaffe, to exploit the new technology. In sharp contrast to the approach taken by existing branches, these special-purpose organizations exploited the full potential of armored vehicles for deep maneuvers and causing chaos in opponents’ rear areas. Consequently, although Germany’s armored forces were actually numerically inferior to those of their opponents in 1940 and 1941, they nevertheless dominated the battlefield and won remarkable victories.

[…]

The rapid development of military aircraft in the early 20thth Century sparked just such a development of independent air services, beginning with the British Royal Air Force’s creation in 1918. However, because the creation of new armed services is costly owing to their many support and administrative services, policymakers frequently prefer to create new branches within existing services.

[…]

How too little institutionalization can impede innovation is illustrated by the case of United States special operations forces prior to the creation of the Special Operations Command. Before 1986 special operations forces existed as discrete units within each of the services. Because they neither possessed large staffs nor could offer appealing career prospects, special operations forces failed to attract officers of the needed quality, were neglected in national-level debates, and were unable to develop specialized equipment for their missions.15 As a result, American special operations forces did not provide the strategic value that had been anticipated at the time of their creation—a fact illustrated in the dramatic failure of the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue operation, Desert One. It was in light of these shortcomings that policymakers eventually created an institutionally robust Special Operations Command.

While the case of special operations forces illustrates the perils of under-institutionalizing a capability, the example of Soviet/Russian National Air Defense Forces (the PVO-Strany) illustrates the inverse error of over-institutionalizing a capability. Impressed by the technological promise of integrated air defense networks—combining radars, aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles—Soviet leaders established the National Air Defense Forces in 1948 as an independent armed service on a par with the nation’s ground, air and naval forces.17 This entailed endowing the National Air Defense Forces with a sizeable bureaucracy, educational institutions (a military academy and staff colleges), and training facilities that replicated many of the functions already performed by the other armed services.18 To make matters worse, the National Air Defense Forces procured costly aircraft and surface-to-air missiles that were similar to, yet different from those procured by the air force and army. Over time, this unnecessary duplication of effort came to be seen as an excessive drain on the state’s scarce resources, leading to the National Air Defense Forces’ abolition as an independent service in 1998.

[…]

Because warfare is a matter of life and death for individual combatants — and national survival for states — it is mistakenly assumed that military professionals are ruthless and unsentimental when it comes to discarding old technologies and tactics. However, one tends to find more examples of clearly obsolescent tactics and technologies in military organizations than in many other fields of human behavior. In one extraordinary case, horse cavalry survived in even the world’s most industrialized states until the 1950s, a half-century after they ought to have been abolished. There are, however, many more examples of this kind of obsolescence. The Swiss military maintained carrier pigeons into the early 1990s, long after the advent of electronic communications. The United States Army has retained a sizeable Chemical Corps since the First World War despite the declining importance of chemical warfare. Military forces in states such as France (the Spahis), Spain (the Regulares) and the United Kingdom (the Gurkhas) all retain regiments whose traditions and recruitment reflect the exigencies of long-vanished colonial empires.

[…]

One reason for greater inertia in military organizations lies in the incomplete and intermittent nature of how military organizations are tested.

[…]

It is, therefore, almost always possible for military organizations to ignore unpleasant truths by arguing that the circumstances of future wars will be more favorable to their preferred tactics and technologies. For example, in one particularly brash example of a military professional drawing biased conclusions from contemporary conflicts, British General John French summarily dismissed the need for reevaluating the cavalry’s role after their poor performance in the Boer War. To this end, French wrote, “It passes comprehension that some critics in England should gravely assure us that the war in South Africa should be our chief source of inspiration and guidance…we should be very foolish if we did not recognise at this late hour that very few of the conditions of South Africa are likely to recur.”

[…]

Driven by necessity, military organizations emphasize tradition, continuity and the value of received tactics as a means of instilling the confidence needed to perform difficult tasks amidst the chaos of battle. Put another way, Edward Katzenbach argued in a classic study that, “Romanticism, while perhaps stultifying realistic thought, gives a man that belief in the value of the system he is operating that is so necessary to his willingness to use it in battle….But faith [in a weapons system or tactic] breeds distrust of change.” Thus, a degree of bias and resistance to change is a natural by-product of military organizations’ efforts to develop élan and esprit de corps.

In addition to these unconscious biases, military professionals also develop conscious biases as a result of career incentives. Because officers are promoted within well-defined military organizations, they have a natural interest in seeing those organizations prosper.

[…]

In recent times, no better example of this phenomenon can be found than the US Marine Corps’ steadfast defense of the V-22 Osprey program. Because Marine leaders considered the V-22 Osprey essential to the service’s amphibious assault mission, Marines (and former Marines) successfully lobbied to save the program in the face of grave technical problems, sustained cost overruns, and politicians’ repeated efforts to cancel the program.

[…]

One strategy, the preferred one of military organizations under pressure, is to invest in technological innovations that promise to restore the validity of the organizations’ core missions.

[…]

Having obtained its status as a separate service in 1947 by arguing that air power could independently win wars, the Air Force has repeatedly faced criticism when it either failed to destroy targets considered essential or failed to achieve the anticipated strategic objectives. However, such shortcomings have never prompted the Air Force to fundamentally question the dogma of strategic air power.

Rather, the Air Force has consistently sought to develop new tactics and technologies capable of reinvigorating its preferred strategic mission. Such was the case, for example, when the Air Force encountered grave difficulties during the Vietnam War as a result of both North Vietnam’s sophisticated Soviet-provided air defense system and the Air Force’s own difficulties destroying precision targets. However, rather than renounce the strategic air campaign against North Vietnam, the Air Force instead concentrated its efforts at developing new technologies and tactics. Within this context, the Air Force developed a host of electronic warfare equipment, precision-guided munitions, drones, and airborne early warning systems. Tactically, the Air Force also implemented revolutionary new training and exercise methods (eventually culminating in the “Red Flag” exercises) shortly after the war. These costly efforts at resolving the Air Force’s tactical and technical problems bore fruit later in the Vietnam War and in subsequent conflicts. Nevertheless, the service’s goal of achieving victory through airpower alone has proven elusive.

Besides seeking innovative remedies for the technical and tactical challenges ailing them, another strategy military organizations under pressure can adopt is to seek new roles and missions. In effect, even if developments render a military organization’s original mission impossible or irrelevant, the organization can nevertheless survive if it identifies and fulfills another mission vital to national security. A good example of this phenomenon can be found in the United States Marine Corps’ conversion from imperial policing to amphibious warfare in the 1930s. Because the Marine Corps had hitherto justified its size and autonomy by spearheading the United States’ frequent interventions in Latin America, many openly questioned whether there was any reason to preserve the service once President Franklin Roosevelt promulgated the “Good Neighbor Policy” in 1933, which curtailed the interventions (the “Banana Wars”) that previously constituted the Corps’ raison d’être.

[…]

Assistant Commandant John Russell, therefore, urgently initiated reforms to transform the Marines from an imperial policing organization to an amphibious assault force as soon as the “Good Neighbor Policy” was announced. In short order, the Marines constituted the embryo of an amphibious force — the Fleet Marine Force — in late 1933 and suspended teaching at the Corps’ schools in 1933-34 to allow the schools’ personnel to devote their undivided attention to crafting amphibious doctrine.

[…]

In addition to innovating to preserve an existing role or adapting to accomplish a new mission, military organizations can also protect themselves by arguing that past contributions to national defense constitute an argument for future survival.

[…]

Within this context, the Green Jackets were founded in 1800 as a unit of skirmishers and long-range marksmen and the Bersaglieri were formed in 1836 to execute the gymnastic and high-mobility infantry tactics that were favored by certain tacticians at that time.

[…]

Moreover, the units were able to perpetuate their elite status because their reputations drew their countries’ best officer cadets and most qualified recruits to join them, enhancing these units’ effectiveness relative to functionally identical “ordinary” infantry formations.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

It would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers

July 12th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill (author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) came to see Vincent Bugliosi (author of Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders and DA on the case) as his nemesis:

I’ve already mentioned Mary Neiswender, the reporter who told me that Bugliosi was “terribly dangerous”: he’d sent an emissary warning that he knew where her kids went to school and implied that “it would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers.”

[…]

In 1968, Bugliosi fell into a scandal kept under wraps by the DA’s office until ’72, when he was running for district attorney of Los Angeles. (He lost the election.) He’d stalked and terrorized someone he was convinced had carried on an affair with his wife and fathered his first-born child, Vincent Jr. As clichéd as it sounds, Bugliosi suspected his milkman, Herbert Weisel, who was married with two children.

Weisel had left his job in 1965, eight months before Vincent Jr. was born. Bugliosi was sure that Weisel had quit because of his transgression—the evidence must’ve been in Weisel’s personnel file at the dairy. He made anonymous phone calls to Weisel’s wife and then to Weisel himself, demanding him to release his files. The couple began to notice “strange cars” circling their block after dark. They changed their phone number, which was already unlisted. Two days later, they got a typed letter postmarked from L.A. “You shouldn’t have changed your phone number,” it said. “That wasn’t nice.”

Eventually, Bugliosi’s wife, Gail, approached the Weisels, revealing her identity in the hopes that she could arrange a détente. The Weisels told her that her husband should be getting psychiatric help. “She told us that she’d tried many times, but that he wouldn’t do it,” they later testified in a civil deposition. She’d taken paternity and lie-detector tests to prove the child was his, but he still harbored doubts. “I know he’s sick,” she said. “He’s got a mental problem.”

The couple became so frightened that they stopped allowing their children to take the bus to school. They hired a lawyer and, after a mediation, Bugliosi agreed to stop harassing them and to pay them $ 100 for their silence. They refused the money. In ’72, with Bugliosi on the ballot, they decided it was their civic duty to go public—their tormentor aspired to the most powerful law enforcement job in the city. They told the papers of his yearlong harassment and intimidation campaign.

Enlisting his well-documented talent for fabrication, Bugliosi retaliated, telling the press that Weisel had stolen money from his kitchen table seven years earlier. Weisel sued him for slander and defamation. It wasn’t a tough case to win. In depositions, Bugliosi and his wife swore they’d only been worried about the alleged robbery of their home. The Weisels proved otherwise, bringing in witnesses who exposed the Bugliosis as perjurers. Soon it came out that Bugliosi had twice used an investigator in the DA’s office—his office—to get confidential information about Weisel, claiming he was a material witness in a murder case. Fearing the disclosure would cost him his job, Bugliosi settled out of court, paying the Weisels $ 12,500. He paid in cash, on the condition that they sign a confidentiality agreement and turn over the deposition tapes.

No sooner was the milkman imbroglio resolved than Bugliosi fell into another fiasco, again abusing his connection to the criminal justice system to straighten it out. His mistress, Virginia Cardwell, the single mother of a five-year-old, told him she was pregnant. It was his. With visions of public office still dancing in his mind, and Helter Skelter on the eve of publication, he ordered Cardwell, a Catholic, to get an abortion. She refused, but after Bugliosi threatened her and gave her money for the procedure, she lied and said she’d done it. He wasn’t about to take her word for it. He got her doctor’s name, called him, and learned that she’d never been to see him, after which he headed to her apartment and beat her so savagely that she suffered a miscarriage. He choked her, struck her in the face several times with his fists, threw her onto the floor, pulled her up by her hair, and threatened to kill her if she had the baby, saying she wouldn’t leave the apartment alive if she lied to him: “I will break every bone in your body—this will ruin my career.” Bruised and battered, Cardwell gathered herself and went to the Santa Monica Police Department, where she filed a criminal complaint. The cops photographed her bruises and then, evidently, did nothing.

That evening, an eagle-eyed reporter spotted the incident on the police blotter and wrote about it in the next day’s paper. Bugliosi returned to Cardwell’s apartment that morning, this time with his secretary. The pair held her hostage for four hours until she agreed to tell the police she’d filed a false complaint the previous day. Bugliosi assured her he’d use his contacts in the DA’s office to make sure she was never brought to trial for the false report. He and his secretary used Cardwell’s typewriter to forge a backdated bill for legal services, telling her to show it to the police. He listened in on an extension as she called to turn herself in. The dispatcher said they’d send a patrol car to get her. He vigorously shook his head, and Cardwell told the dispatcher she’d be fine getting in on her own.

The dispatcher sent a car anyway. One of the detectives who’d seen Cardwell that day, Michael Landis, told me Bugliosi and “a couple of his associates” answered the door “and tried to discourage us from talking to her. We were persistent and we did see her—and she was pretty well banged up.” Cardwell claimed that the bruises were from an accident: her son had hit her in the face with a baseball bat. She’d only blamed Bugliosi because she was angry that he’d overcharged her for legal advice concerning her divorce. “This outrageous charge, even though false, can be extremely harmful,” Bugliosi told police.

Cardwell’s brother persuaded her to file a lawsuit against Bugliosi. Bugliosi’s story fell apart before the suit was even filed, and he settled with Cardwell in exchange for her confidentiality—ensuring, he hoped, that his lies to the police, fabrication of evidence, and obstruction of justice would never see the light of day. He was wrong. The Virginia Cardwell story hit the papers in 1974, when his primary opponent in the California state attorney general’s race, William Norris, caught wind of it. (Bugliosi lost that election, too.) Because of his clout in the DA’s office, he was never prosecuted for assaulting Cardwell. Landis, the detective, called him “a whiney, sniveley little bastard,” saying, “I wanted to prosecute the son of a bitch.”

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Pinpointing the exact firing location is a job for the drones

July 11th, 2025

Headlines early on in the invasion of Ukraine warned about the sheer power of Russian artillery, with advances following massive ‘fire curtain’ barrages, but, David Hamblin explains, Ukraine has been successful at countering Russian artillery:

Any gun firing can be spotted by counter-artillery radar, like the U.S. -made AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder, which tracks shells in flight and calculates their source. New Ukrainian-made acoustic detectors which recently went into mass production are likely to figure increasingly.

“The radar is typically the first step. It can detect the approximate area of a firing position, but it’s not precise,” says Michael. “Depending on distance and terrain, it may narrow the location down to a 200-by-200-meter area, which is too broad for a direct strike.”

Pinpointing the exact firing location is a job for the drones.

“Drones are essential for confirming the exact location of artillery,” says Michael. “We use fixed-wing drones, some with real-time video, others capturing high-resolution photos, for wide-area reconnaissance. These platforms allow us to assess whether the artillery is still in position and provide up-to-date imagery.”

[…]

“Artillery is easiest to spot when it’s firing — muzzle flashes, smoke, or movement of the crew make it visible,” says Michael. “Also, we can identify the artillery by its silhouette, even if it’s partially hidden somewhere in the trees or buildings. In covered areas, we look for signs like tracks, disturbed ground, or heat if thermal optics are available.”

[…]

“FPV drones, both quadcopters and fixed-wing types, have become more effective than traditional artillery in terms of precision engagement,” says Michael. “A high-quality FPV drone for now is the most effective way to destroy the artillery system.”

Several different types are used depending on the range, with fixed-wing FPVs typically having longer reach.

Surprisingly, drones are preferred because they are faster. It is highly counter-intuitive that 100 mph drone will reach a target quicker than a 700-mph artillery shell, but what counts is how long it takes to hit the target.

[…]

Dynamic conditions may mean a situation where a self-propelled gun fires off a few rounds and speeds away down a track. An artillery shell arriving after thirty seconds will miss by hundreds of meters. A drone which arrives later can spot the vehicle, follow it, and carry out a precision strike.

Towed guns are less likely to get away. But they are harder targets because they are not packed with fuel and ammunition like self-propelled guns.

[…]

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi says Russia’s long-range striking power has been halved, but on the front line there are still plenty of shells coming down.

Posted in War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’

July 10th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAt the Battle of Friedland, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the French obtained a decisive victory and routed much of the Russian army:

When Ney’s exhausted corps began to fall back, Sénarmont divided his thirty guns into two batteries of fifteen each, with 300 rounds per cannon and 220 per howitzer. Sounding ‘Action Front’ on his bugles, his teams galloped forward, unlimbered and fired first at 600 yards, then at 300, then at 150, and finally, with nothing but canister-shot, at 60. The Russian Ismailovsky Guards and the Pavlovsky Grenadiers tried to attack the batteries, but some 4,000 men fell to their fire in about twenty-five minutes. An entire cavalry charge was destroyed with two volleys of canister. The Russian left was utterly destroyed, and trapped against the Alle river. Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties.

[…]

Heat, exhaustion, nightfall and the pillaging of the town for food have all been advanced as explanations for why there was no Jena-style pursuit of the Russians after Friedland. It is also possible that Napoleon felt a wholesale massacre might have made it harder for Alexander to come to terms, and by then he very much wanted peace.

‘Their soldiers in general are good,’ he told Cambacérès, something he had hitherto not recognized, and which he would have done well to remember five years later.

For sheer concentration of effort, Friedland was Napoleon’s most impressive victory after Austerlitz and Ulm. At the cost of 11,500 killed, wounded and missing, he had utterly routed the Russians, whose losses have been estimated at around 20,000–or 43 per cent of their total–though only around twenty guns.

Percy’s hundred surgeons had to work through the night, and a general later recalled ‘meadows covered with limbs severed from their bodies, those frightful places of mutilation and dissection which the army called ambulances’.

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India’s relationship with China would dominate its foreign policy but for one thing

July 9th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallIndia’s relationship with China would dominate its foreign policy but for one thing, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World) — the Himalayas:

A glance at the map indicates two huge countries cheek by jowl, but a closer look shows they are walled off from each other along what the CIA’s World Factbook lists as 1,652 miles of border.

[…]

India’s response to the Chinese annexation of Tibet was to give a home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement in Dharamsala in the state of Himachal Pradesh.

[…]

As things stand, Tibetan independence looks impossible; but if the impossible were to occur, even in several decades’ time, India would be in a position to remind a Tibetan government who their friends were during the years of exile.

[…]

Another issue between them is the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as “south Tibet.” As China’s confidence grows, so does the amount of territory there it says is Chinese. Until recently, China claimed only the Tawang area in the extreme west of the state. However, in the early 2000s, Beijing decided that all of Arunachal Pradesh was Chinese, which was news to the Indians, who have exercised sovereignty over it since 1955. The Chinese claim is partly geographical and partly psychological. Arunachal Pradesh borders China, Bhutan, and Burma, making it strategically useful, but the issue is also valuable to China as a reminder to Tibet that independence is a nonstarter.

[…]

There are numerous separatist movements, some more active than others, some dormant, but none that look set to achieve their aims. For example, the Sikh movement to create a state for Sikhs from part of both Indian and Pakistani Punjab has for the moment gone quiet, but it could flare up again. The state of Assam has several competing movements, including the Bodo-speaking peoples, who want a state for themselves, and the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam, who want a separate country created within Assam for Muslims. There is even a movement to create an independent Christian state in Nagaland, where 75 percent of the population is Baptist; however, the prospect of the Naga National Council achieving its aims is as remote as the land it seeks to control, and that looks to be true of all of the separatist movements.

[…]

It is the world’s seventh-largest country, with the second-largest population.

[…]

It has nine thousand miles of internal navigable waterways, reliable water supplies, and huge areas of arable land; is a major coal producer; has useful quantities of oil and gas, even if it will always be an importer of all three; and its subsidization of fuel and heating costs is a drain on its finances.

[…]

For decades, India was suspicious that the Americans were the new British, but with a different accent and more money.

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This inverts the historical pattern and creates local variety and global conformity

July 8th, 2025

The most important reason why historical towns produced beautiful architecture without design is vernacular architecture:

When Amalfi was built, everyone used local materials and styles out of practical necessity. If you were building a terraced farm and house, you had to use stone quarried nearby, volcanic ash mortar from the mountains, and local limestone plaster. There were no other options. Similarly, the architectural designs using those materials are kept uniform by greater ignorance of other styles and the physical properties of the few available materials.

Local conformity of style and material was enforced without laws or community meetings. Simultaneously, styles and materials varied greatly across communities. Local conformity was matched by a wonderful global diversity of styles.

Today, people have diverse tastes sourced from global media and more diverse buildings styles and materials available due to globalization. This inverts the historical pattern and creates local variety and global conformity. Within any city you will find dozens of clashing styles: colonial houses abut glass towers and fake-wood 5-over-1s. But across cities, variance is decreased and this same clash of styles is repeated over and over again.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 2 Comments »

You have a better measure of how hard your workout was than your watch or heart-rate monitor can provide

July 7th, 2025

A new study published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance compares seven different ways of calculating training load:

Four of them are variations on a concept known as TRIMP, which is short for “training impulse” and is based on heart rate measurements, using equations that account for lactate levels, breathing thresholds, and other details. A fifth uses heart-rate variability, and a sixth uses a subjective rating of effort. (Most fitness wearables, by the way, likely use a combination of the above methods, though their exact algorithms are typically proprietary.) The seventh method is the NASA questionnaire, which we’ll come back to.

The gold standard against which all these methods were compared is the “acute performance decrement,” or APD. Basically, you do an all-out time trial, then you do your workout, then you do another all-out time trial. Your APD is how much slower the second time-trial is compared to the first one, as a measure of how much the workout took out of you.

[…]

The performance test was running at VO2 max pace until exhaustion. When they were fresh, the runners lasted just under six minutes on average. After the one-hour easy run, their APD was 20.7 percent, meaning they gave up 20.7 percent earlier in the post-workout VO2 max run. After the medium-intensity run, the APD was 30.6 percent; after the long intervals, it was 35.9 percent; after the short intervals, it was 29.8 percent.

So how well were each of the seven training load calculations able to predict this APD? The short answer is: not very well.

[…]

The NASA questionnaire, on the other hand, bears a striking resemblance to the APD data, and the statistical analysis confirms that it’s a good predictor. In other words, it’s the only one of the seven calculations tested that, according to this study, accurately reflects how exhausted you are after a workout.

It’s called the NASA Task Load Index, or NASA-TLX, and was developed in the 1980s. It’s simply a set of six questions that ask you to rate the mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand (how rushed were you?), performance (how well did you do?), effort, and frustration of a task. You answer each of these questions on a scale of 1 to 100, then the six scores are averaged—and presto, you have a better measure of how hard your workout was than your watch or heart-rate monitor can provide.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants

July 6th, 2025

A Sinaloa drug cartel hacker was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday:

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”

The report said “the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

Posted in Crime, Technology, War | 3 Comments »

Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done

July 5th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillAs Tom O’Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) flipped through “Jolly” West’s papers, he found signs that the CIA psychiatrist was associated with the JFK assassination:

According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.”

On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.”

Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public.

[…]

Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.)

[…]

West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.”

In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”

West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.”

From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.”

The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.”

That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. “The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.”

[…]

But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.

“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not… Jolly had a real streak of—I guess you’d call it patriotism. If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.”

“Even if it meant distorting American history?”

“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

[…]

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director. Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms, soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except, presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset” trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important witness.”

In June 1964, Earl Warren and others from the group flew to Dallas to give Ruby a hearing in the interrogation room of the county jail. The bulk of his testimony was a morass of paranoid rambling. He begged Warren to get him out of Dallas. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he warned. “I know I won’t live to see you another time… Do I sound sort of screwy?” He demanded to speak with a Jew, whispering frantically, “You have to get me to Washington! They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso!”

[…]

The group was required to investigate the CIA as a routine suspect in the assassination of a sitting president. Neither Dulles nor Helms ever reported their knowledge of West’s employment by the CIA.

[…]

If the CIA wanted to shut Ruby up, what was it that he had on it? Burt Griffin, an attorney for the Warren Commission, appeared before the HSCA to say that he and his partner had nearly confirmed Ruby’s ties to gunrunning schemes by anti-Castro Cubans, who were shipping arms from the United States to Cuba in hopes of deposing the dictator.

At the time, Griffin had no idea that the CIA sponsored these gunrunning schemes. In March 1964—when Ruby was weeks away from his “examination” by Jolly West—Griffin and his partner approached Richard Helms, requesting all the information the CIA had on Ruby. They believed it was possible “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald.”

Helms offered only a curt reply: “The CIA would be very limited in its possibility of assisting.” Griffin was baffled—this was someone who was supposed to be helping him. He appealed again. By the time Helms mustered a response, months had passed, and West had long since paid his fateful visit to Ruby. “An examination of Agency files,” Helms wrote, “has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”

As for Jolly West, he also did his part to keep Ruby untainted from any whiff of conspiracy. As the Warren Commission tried to divine Ruby’s motive, West sent a confidential letter to Earl Warren himself, a copy of which I discovered in the HSCA’s files. Dated June 23, 1964, and addressed to “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” West’s note contends that his “examinations” of Ruby gave him unique insight into the man’s “motivations for the murder.” (This despite the fact that West had said Ruby was “positively insane.”) He was confident that Ruby had acted in an “irrational and unpremeditated” manner when he shot Oswald, “wanting to prove that the Jews—through himself—loved their President and were not cowards.” Moreover, West asserted that Ruby “had never seen [Oswald] in his life” before his involvement in the Kennedy assassination broke. Without consent from his patient or his patient’s lawyers, West was offering confidential medical assessments tailored to political ends. “Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do to be of assistance,” he added.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Science | No Comments »

They should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

July 4th, 2025

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Let us celebrate the 249th anniversary of the original Secession Day:

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The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy

July 3rd, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsThe Grande Armée had been battered so badly at Eylau, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), that it could not follow up the victory, as it had after Jena:

Soult’s aide-de-camp Colonel Alfred de Saint-Chamans recalled after the battle, ‘The Emperor was passing in front of the troops; in the middle of cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” I heard many soldiers cry “Vive la paix!”, others “Vive la paix et la France!”, others even shouted “Pain et paix!” [Bread and peace!]’ It was the first time he had seen the morale of the army ‘a bit shaken’, which he put down to ‘the butchery of Eylau’.

The day after the battle, Napoleon announced in a bulletin that an eagle had been lost, and said, ‘The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy.’ The reason the unit wasn’t named was that in fact five eagles had been lost.

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Pakistan lacks internal strategic depth

July 2nd, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallIndia and Pakistan can agree on one thing, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World) — neither wants the other one around:

This is somewhat problematic, given that they share a 1,900-mile-long border. Each country fairly bristles with antagonism and nuclear weapons, so how they manage this unwanted relationship is a matter of life and death on a scale of tens of millions.

India has a population approaching 1.3 billion people, while Pakistan’s is 182 million. Impoverished, volatile, and splintering, Pakistan appears to define itself by its opposition to India, while India, despite obsessing about Pakistan, defines itself in many ways, including that of being an emerging world power with a growing economy and an expanding middle class.

[…]

The two are tied together within the geography of the Indian subcontinent, which creates a natural frame. The Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea are respectively to the southeast, south, and southwest, the Hindu Kush to the northwest, and the Himalayas to the north.

[…]

The interior of the frame contains what are modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. The latter two are impoverished landlocked nations dominated by their giant neighbors, China and India. Bangladesh’s problem is not that it lacks access to the sea but that the sea has too much access to Bangladesh: flooding from the waters of the Bay of Bengal constantly afflicts the low-lying territory. Its other geographical problem is that it is almost entirely surrounded by India: the 2,545-mile-long frontier, agreed to in 1974, wrapped India around Bangladesh, leaving it only a short border with Burma as an alternative land route to the outside world.

[…]

The area within our frame, despite being relatively flat, has always been too large and diverse to have strong central rule. Even the British colonial overlords, with their famed bureaucracy and connecting rail system, allowed regional autonomy and indeed used it to play local leaders off against one another. The linguistic and cultural diversity is partially due to the differences in climate—for example, the freezing north of the Himalayas in contrast to the jungles of the south—but it is also because of the subcontinent’s rivers and religions.

[…]

Pakistan tries hard to create a sense of unity, but it remains rare for a Punjabi to marry a Baluchi, or a Sindh to marry a Pashtun. The Punjabis comprise 60 percent of the population, the Sindhs 14 percent, the Pashtuns 13.5 percent, and the Baluchis 4.5 percent.

[…]

Baluchistan is of crucial importance: while it may contain only a small minority of Pakistan’s population, without it there is no Pakistan. It comprises almost 45 percent of the country and holds much of its natural gas and mineral wealth. Another source of income beckons with the proposed overland routes to bring Iranian and Caspian Sea oil up through Pakistan to China. The jewel in this particular crown is the coastal city of Gwadar. Many analysts believe this strategic asset was the Soviet Union’s long-term target when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979: Gwadar would have fulfilled Moscow’s long-held dream of a warm-water port. The Chinese have also been attracted by this jewel and invested billions of dollars in the region. A deep-water port was inaugurated in 2007 and the two countries are now working to link it to China. In the long run, China would like to use Pakistan as a land route for its energy needs. This would allow it to bypass the Strait of Malacca, which as we saw in chapter two is a choke point that could strangle Chinese economic growth.

[…]

In late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on 2,300 acres of land to develop a massive “special economic zone” and an international airport in the port area. The Chinese will build a road from the port to the airport and then onward toward China—all part of a $46 billion investment to create the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor linking China to the Arabian Sea. Because both sides know that Baluchistan is likely to remain volatile, a security force of up to twenty-five thousand men is being formed to protect the zone.

[…]

In effect, Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbor, India.

The first was in 1947, shortly after partition, and was fought over Kashmir, which in 1948 ended up divided along the Line of Control (also known as Asia’s Berlin Wall); however, both India and Pakistan continue to claim sovereignty.

Nearly twenty years later, Pakistan miscalculated the strength of the Indian military because of India’s poor performance in the 1962 India-China war. Tensions between India and China had risen due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, which in turn had led India to give refuge to the Dalai Lama. During this brief conflict the Chinese military showed their superiority and pushed forward almost into the state of Assam near the Indian heartland. The Pakistan military watched with glee, then, overestimating their own prowess, went to war with India in 1965 and lost.

In 1984, Pakistan and India fought skirmishes at an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet on the Siachen Glacier, thought to be the highest battle in history. More fighting broke out in 1985, 1987, and 1995. Pakistan continued to train militants to infiltrate across the Line of Control and another battle broke out over Kashmir in 1999. By then both countries were armed with nuclear weapons, and for several weeks the unspoken threat of an escalation to nuclear war hovered over the conflict before American diplomacy kicked in and the two sides were talked down. They came close to war again in 2001, and gunfire still breaks out sporadically along the border.

[…]

The Kashmir issue is partially one of national pride, but it is also strategic. Full control of Kashmir would give India a window into central Asia and a border with Afghanistan. It would also deny Pakistan a border with China and thus diminish the usefulness of a ChinesePakistani relationship.

[…]

The Indus River originates in Himalayan Tibet, but passes through the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir before entering Pakistan and then running the length of the country and emptying into the Arabian Sea at Karachi. The Indus and its tributaries provide water to two-thirds of the country: without it the cotton industry and many other mainstays of Pakistan’s struggling economy would collapse. By a treaty that has been honored through all of their wars, India and Pakistan agreed to share the waters; but both populations are growing at an alarming rate, and global warming could diminish the water flow. Annexing all of Kashmir would secure Pakistan’s water supply.

[…]

Pakistan lacks internal “strategic depth”—somewhere to fall back to in the event of being overrun from the east—from India. The Pakistan-India border includes swampland in the south, the Thar Desert, and the mountains of the north; all are extremely difficult territory for an army to cross. It can be done, and both sides have battle plans of how to fight there. The Indian army plan involves blockading the port of Karachi and its fuel storage depots by land and sea, but an easier invasion route is between the south and the north—it lies in the center, in the more hospitable Punjab, and in Punjab is Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. The distance from the Indian border to Islamabad is less than 250 miles, most of it flat ground. In the event of a massive, overwhelming, conventional attack, the Indian army could be in the capital within a few days.

[…]

The Afghan-Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line. Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the colonial government of India, drew it in 1893 and the then ruler of Afghanistan agreed to it. However, in 1949, the Afghan government “annulled” the agreement, believing it to be an artificial relic of the colonial era. Since then, Pakistan has tried to persuade Afghanistan to change its mind, Afghanistan refuses, and the Pashtuns on each side of the mountains try to carry on as they have for centuries by ignoring the border and maintaining their ancient connections.

[…]

The Pakistan military and the ISI had to turn on the very Taliban leaders they had trained and formed friendships with in the 1990s. The Taliban groups reacted with fury, seizing complete control of several regions in the tribal areas. Musharraf was the target of three failed assassination attempts, his would-be successor, Benazir Bhutto, was murdered, and amid the chaos of bombing campaigns and military offensives, up to fifty thousand Pakistani civilians have been killed.

[…]

The Americans came up with a “hammer and anvil” strategy. They would hammer the Afghan Taliban against the anvil of the Pakistani operation on the other side of the border. The “anvil” in the tribal areas turned out instead to be a sponge that soaked up whatever was thrown at it, including any Afghan Taliban retreating from the American hammer.

[…]

So the Taliban bled the British, bled the Americans, bled NATO, waited NATO out, and after thirteen years NATO went away.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

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