Cell phones will relieve poverty.
Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, an extraordinary event for all of us to celebrate. Forty years later, there is another extraordinary phenomenon to celebrate – billions of people around the world, including those in the poorest countries, now have computers in their hands that are thousands of times more powerful than the computers that guided the lunar mission.
Over half of the people in poor countries, including more than one quarter of people over the age of 14 in Afghanistan, use these hand-held computers. In many of the places where the devices have proliferated there are still inadequate roads, poor schools, ill-equipped hospitals, unreliable electricity, and no potable water.
But recently, these computers—also known as cell phones—have been helping local people to tackle these challenges.
How has such powerful technology landed in the hands of the poor and why will it continue to reach even more people?
First, the cost of computing power has decreased exponentially during the last 40 years and will likely continue to do so.
Second, computers’ versatility means that they can handle many tasks including voice communication, which almost everyone finds useful. It has mass appeal.
Third, because people waste less time connecting with others and miss fewer opportunities, voice communication allows people to achieve more and earn more. As a result, ordinary people are willing and able to pay for cell phone service.
Serving the masses, profitably
This, in turn, has led to profits for companies that are putting these computers in people’s hands. Companies have invested billions of dollars and built massive cell phone infrastructure in even the poorest countries—based on ordinary people’s advancement resulting in their ability to pay for services.
Why is this so remarkable?
With these computers, even the poorest countries are advancing economically, faster than before. For example, in Africa alone, many countries’ annual GDP growth has reached 5%. While some of this growth is attributable to minerals and commodities, countries lacking such resources are also growing. In fact, annual growth in countries in Africa without mineral wealth was negative between 1980 and 1994, before the introduction of cell phones. However, between 1995 and 2007, these same countries grew at an average rate of 2.5%.
When citizens gain economic clout, institutions are forced to respond to their needs. In this way, these hand-held computers are increasing accountability. Lack of government accountability stems largely from concentration of power, which is exacerbated by mineral wealth or foreign aid to central governments. Cheap and useful computers in the hands of the people represent a dispersion of economic power that provides a countervailing force. According to Freedom House, nearly 70% of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are now rated free or partly-free, up from 40% in 1980. The recent events in Iran—whatever their outcome—demonstrate how increased communication through such devices bolsters democratic pressures.
Finally, after these computers proliferated widely because of the mass appeal of voice communications, their versatility can be used to perform new tasks. Thanks to new applications, they are being used in banking, healthcare, marketplaces, and crowd-sourcing. With the advent of broadband access, voice communication through Internet protocol is possible without depending on the cellular network. Entrepreneurs will continue to capitalize on this versatility, using these computers as a platform for new businesses and technology.
Most importantly, these powerful computers have proven a critical point: productivity tools in the hands of people empower them to take problems—including the problem of bad governance—into their own hands, leading to economic and democratic progress.
Solving poverty, from the bottom up
This should alter our thinking. Instead of taking a top-down view of the two billion people living on less than $2 per day and being daunted by the scale of the “problem,” we should see the bottom-up potential of two billion problem solvers. There must be innumerable affordable innovations for agriculture, energy, and water purification that ordinary people can use to tackle challenges and increase incomes. Increased incomes are an advancement in and of itself. Their dispersed nature makes them not vulnerable to abuse.
The solution to closing the gap between rich and poor lies in the hands of individuals—engineers, scientists, designers, financiers, and entrepreneurs—who can design and deliver productivity tools. The adoption of these tools, made affordable by the increases in productivity and income that they yield, leads to economic growth, entrepreneurship, and accountability. The resulting trajectory of economic and democratic progress for the poor will be no less spectacular than the Apollo 11 mission.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Taliban Kill Anti-Taliban Tribal Leaders in Pakistan's Northwest by Bill Roggio
A Taliban suicide bomber killed a pro-government tribal leader in the Taliban-controlled tribal agency of South Waziristan, and two pro-government tribal leaders were killed in Bajaur.
In South Waziristan, a suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into a car and killed an anti-Taliban tribal leader named Malik Khadeen along with one of Kadeen's relatives and two other persons. The attack took place in a bazaar in Wana.
In the past, Khadeen had "organized tribal meetings and activities to counter the power of the Taliban, particularly Uzbek Taliban, in the area," Geo News reported.
The Wana region is administered by Taliban leader Mullah Nazir. Nazir's forces battled Uzbeks from the Islamic Jihad Union during an intra-Taliban dispute in 2007 and 2008. The government seized upon this dispute to attempt to divide the Taliban and the al Qaeda-backed IJU. Nazir was labeled "pro-government" and the military provided support for his operations.
The dispute was eventually settled by a joint Taliban and al Qaeda shura. Siraj Haqqani and Mullah Dadullah, the former deputy commander of the Afghan Taliban, were among those who mediated the disagreement. Nazir has continued to host al Qaeda training camps and has since joined with Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud and North Waziristan Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadar in an alliance to oppose a military operation in Waziristan.
The Wana suicide attack took place one day after an anti-Baitullah Taliban group known as the Abdullah Mehsud Group battled with Baitullah's forces in Jandola. Haji Turkistan Bhittani, a leader in the Abdullah Mehsud Group, claimed that more than 1,000 of Baitullah's forces attacked villages under Bhittani's control, but were beaten off after the military weighed in with helicopter and artillery support. Bhittani said that more than 100 fighters were killed, nearly all of them Baitullah's forces, but more conservative reports put the total number killed at 14 fighters.
Zainuddin Mehsud, the former leader of the Abdullah Mehsud Group who was killed by one of Baitullah's assassins, had previously allied with Mullah Nazir during his feud with Baitullah. Zainuddin was cast aside by Nazir after the latter allied with Baitullah in February 2009. The Pakistani government backs the Abdullah Mehsud Group despite the group's insistence it will continue to send fighters into Afghanistan to battle US and Coalition forces.
Tribal leaders executed in Bajaur
In the northern tribal agency of Bajaur, two pro-government tribal leaders were executed by the Taliban. The tribal leaders were shot multiple times and their bodies were dumped along the road.
Bajaur is a Taliban stronghold under the control of Faqir Mohammed, a deputy commander under Baitullah Mehsud. Faqir has close ties to al Qaeda, and he has personally sheltered Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, several times over the past eight years.
The military claimed Bajaur was Taliban-free after a brutal six-month-long operation that resulted in the destruction of several towns. But the Taliban have continued attacks and the military has been forced to re-launch operations in an attempt to secure the agency.
Lashkars forming in Lakki Marwat and Kohistan
As the Taliban take out opposing tribal leaders in South Waziristan and Bajaur,
tribal lashkars, or militias, are forming in the districts of Lakki Marwat and Kohistan in the Northwest Frontier Province.
In the Shah Hasankhel region in Lakki Marwat, which borders South Waziristan, tribal leaders said they were raising more than 400 fighters to join a local lashkar. The tribal leaders decided to form the lashkar to keep out the Taliban after their homes were looted during a military operation against the Taliban. Tribal leaders blamed the police for looting their homes.
In Kohistan, tribal leaders threatened to block the roads to an area where the Taliban attacked a military convoy a week ago. One soldier was killed during the Taliban ambush along the vital Karakoram Highway. The tribal leaders threatened to raise a lashkar to block the roads if the local tribes refused to turn over the Taliban fighters responsible for the attack.
The Taliban have viciously responded to efforts by tribal leaders to oppose the spread of extremism in the tribal areas. Tribal opposition has been violently attacked and defeated in Peshawar, Dir, Arakzai, Khyber, and Swat. Suicide bombers have struck at tribal meetings held at mosques, schools, hotels, and homes [see LWJ report, Anti-Taliban tribal militia leader assassinated in Pakistan's northwest, for more information on the dificulties with raising tribal lashkars in Pakistan's northwest].
The Taliban perfected this strategy in North and South Waziristan. Tribal leaders who opposed the Taliban were brutally liquidated. The Taliban would execute the leaders and dump their bodies on the roadside with notes pinned to their chests branding them as "US spies" and traitors. The bodies are often mutilated and beheaded.
The Taliban have made very public examples of local leaders who have dared to resist. Last December, the Swat Taliban executed a local tribal leader named Pir Samiullah, then returned to the village to dig up his body and hang it in the town square. The villagers were warned not to remove his body or they would face the same fate [see LWJ report, Video: Taliban execute Swat tribal leader].
Military strikes Taliban bases in Kurram and Arakzai
Pakistani military helicopters attacked Taliban bases in the tribal agencies of Kurram and Arakzai today. The military claimed 12 Taliban fighters were killed in the helicopter strikes, and several Taliban bases were destroyed.
The camps were run by Taliban commander Hakeemullah Mehsud, a cousin of and senior deputy to Baitullah. The government has claimed that Hakeemullah was killed during a clash last week that allegedly also killed Waliur Rehman Mehsud, a purported rival, during a Taliban shura that was to pick Baitullah's successor. But both Hakeemullah and Waliur have since spoken to the media and denied government reports that Baitullah was killed in an Aug. 5 US Predator airstrike in South Waziristan.
Hakeemullah also promised that Baitullah would release a tape to prove he is alive, but no such tape has yet been received by the media.
In South Waziristan, a suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into a car and killed an anti-Taliban tribal leader named Malik Khadeen along with one of Kadeen's relatives and two other persons. The attack took place in a bazaar in Wana.
In the past, Khadeen had "organized tribal meetings and activities to counter the power of the Taliban, particularly Uzbek Taliban, in the area," Geo News reported.
The Wana region is administered by Taliban leader Mullah Nazir. Nazir's forces battled Uzbeks from the Islamic Jihad Union during an intra-Taliban dispute in 2007 and 2008. The government seized upon this dispute to attempt to divide the Taliban and the al Qaeda-backed IJU. Nazir was labeled "pro-government" and the military provided support for his operations.
The dispute was eventually settled by a joint Taliban and al Qaeda shura. Siraj Haqqani and Mullah Dadullah, the former deputy commander of the Afghan Taliban, were among those who mediated the disagreement. Nazir has continued to host al Qaeda training camps and has since joined with Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud and North Waziristan Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadar in an alliance to oppose a military operation in Waziristan.
The Wana suicide attack took place one day after an anti-Baitullah Taliban group known as the Abdullah Mehsud Group battled with Baitullah's forces in Jandola. Haji Turkistan Bhittani, a leader in the Abdullah Mehsud Group, claimed that more than 1,000 of Baitullah's forces attacked villages under Bhittani's control, but were beaten off after the military weighed in with helicopter and artillery support. Bhittani said that more than 100 fighters were killed, nearly all of them Baitullah's forces, but more conservative reports put the total number killed at 14 fighters.
Zainuddin Mehsud, the former leader of the Abdullah Mehsud Group who was killed by one of Baitullah's assassins, had previously allied with Mullah Nazir during his feud with Baitullah. Zainuddin was cast aside by Nazir after the latter allied with Baitullah in February 2009. The Pakistani government backs the Abdullah Mehsud Group despite the group's insistence it will continue to send fighters into Afghanistan to battle US and Coalition forces.
Tribal leaders executed in Bajaur
In the northern tribal agency of Bajaur, two pro-government tribal leaders were executed by the Taliban. The tribal leaders were shot multiple times and their bodies were dumped along the road.
Bajaur is a Taliban stronghold under the control of Faqir Mohammed, a deputy commander under Baitullah Mehsud. Faqir has close ties to al Qaeda, and he has personally sheltered Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, several times over the past eight years.
The military claimed Bajaur was Taliban-free after a brutal six-month-long operation that resulted in the destruction of several towns. But the Taliban have continued attacks and the military has been forced to re-launch operations in an attempt to secure the agency.
Lashkars forming in Lakki Marwat and Kohistan
As the Taliban take out opposing tribal leaders in South Waziristan and Bajaur,
tribal lashkars, or militias, are forming in the districts of Lakki Marwat and Kohistan in the Northwest Frontier Province.
In the Shah Hasankhel region in Lakki Marwat, which borders South Waziristan, tribal leaders said they were raising more than 400 fighters to join a local lashkar. The tribal leaders decided to form the lashkar to keep out the Taliban after their homes were looted during a military operation against the Taliban. Tribal leaders blamed the police for looting their homes.
In Kohistan, tribal leaders threatened to block the roads to an area where the Taliban attacked a military convoy a week ago. One soldier was killed during the Taliban ambush along the vital Karakoram Highway. The tribal leaders threatened to raise a lashkar to block the roads if the local tribes refused to turn over the Taliban fighters responsible for the attack.
The Taliban have viciously responded to efforts by tribal leaders to oppose the spread of extremism in the tribal areas. Tribal opposition has been violently attacked and defeated in Peshawar, Dir, Arakzai, Khyber, and Swat. Suicide bombers have struck at tribal meetings held at mosques, schools, hotels, and homes [see LWJ report, Anti-Taliban tribal militia leader assassinated in Pakistan's northwest, for more information on the dificulties with raising tribal lashkars in Pakistan's northwest].
The Taliban perfected this strategy in North and South Waziristan. Tribal leaders who opposed the Taliban were brutally liquidated. The Taliban would execute the leaders and dump their bodies on the roadside with notes pinned to their chests branding them as "US spies" and traitors. The bodies are often mutilated and beheaded.
The Taliban have made very public examples of local leaders who have dared to resist. Last December, the Swat Taliban executed a local tribal leader named Pir Samiullah, then returned to the village to dig up his body and hang it in the town square. The villagers were warned not to remove his body or they would face the same fate [see LWJ report, Video: Taliban execute Swat tribal leader].
Military strikes Taliban bases in Kurram and Arakzai
Pakistani military helicopters attacked Taliban bases in the tribal agencies of Kurram and Arakzai today. The military claimed 12 Taliban fighters were killed in the helicopter strikes, and several Taliban bases were destroyed.
The camps were run by Taliban commander Hakeemullah Mehsud, a cousin of and senior deputy to Baitullah. The government has claimed that Hakeemullah was killed during a clash last week that allegedly also killed Waliur Rehman Mehsud, a purported rival, during a Taliban shura that was to pick Baitullah's successor. But both Hakeemullah and Waliur have since spoken to the media and denied government reports that Baitullah was killed in an Aug. 5 US Predator airstrike in South Waziristan.
Hakeemullah also promised that Baitullah would release a tape to prove he is alive, but no such tape has yet been received by the media.
U.S. Seeds New Crops to Supplant Afghan Poppies by Yochi J. Dreazen
The Obama administration is overhauling its strategy for eliminating Afghanistan's flourishing drug trade, a key source of funds for the Taliban. Its plan hinges on persuading farmers like Mohammed Walid to grow something other than poppies.
A Marine in a dried-up poppy field during a mission in Dahaneh, Helmand province, on Thursday. The U.S. has been pushing farmers to switch to other crops.
Mr. Walid's tidy fields here in southern Afghanistan once were full of poppy bulbs, the core ingredient in opium. He replaced the poppy with wheat and corn after receiving free seed from a U.S. government program, starting about two years ago. Today, he grows enough of both crops to feed his family and sell the remainder at a nearby bazaar.
"I tell my friends that I've gone into a different business," he says, looking out at his farm. "It's the same fields, but everything else has changed."
Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other ways of earning a living.
The new $300 million effort will give micro-grants to Afghan food-processing and food-storage businesses, fund the construction of new roads and irrigation channels, and sell Afghan farmers fruit seed and livestock at a heavy discount. The U.S. is spending six times as much on the push this year as the $50 million it spent in 2008.
"We're trying to give the farmers alternatives so they can move away from the poppy culture without suffering massive unemployment and poverty," says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development official leading the drive. "The idea is to make it easier for farmers to make the right choice."
Still, building a viable alternative to Afghanistan's opium economy will be challenging. Corn and wheat can be less profitable than opium. Taliban fighters, who are closely allied with the traffickers, have threatened farmers who drop poppies for other crops. When U.S. officials opened a new distribution center for the seed program last year, Taliban militants promptly rocketed it.
The new U.S. push comes alongside a stepped-up military effort to crack down on Afghanistan's drug lords. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report this week disclosed that the Pentagon had begun hunting 50 drug traffickers suspected of ties to the Taliban. The military is trying to capture or kill each of the men, according to the report.
On Thursday, U.S. aircraft and missiles pounded Taliban mountainside positions around Dahaneh, in Helmand province, the heart of Afghanistan's drug trade, according to the Associated Press.
Senior Obama administration officials say bluntly that earlier U.S. efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's poppy fields have failed. The Bush administration initially envisioned spraying herbicide on the poppies from planes or tractors, but that was vetoed by the Afghan government. Instead, Washington paid American contractors and Afghan security personnel hundreds of millions of dollars to slash and burn individual poppy fields.
The eradication effort has been widely unpopular in Afghanistan and hasn't discernibly hurt the drug industry here. Afghanistan accounted for 12% of the world's opium production in 2001, according to the United Nations. By 2008, it accounted for 93%.
Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington late last month that the U.S. "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars" on eradication. "All we did was alienate poppy farmers," he said. "We were driving people into the hands of the Taliban."
Michèle Flournoy, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for policy, said in a recent interview that the U.S. was focusing on crop substitution as a way of taking advantage of Afghanistan's fertile soil and long history of growing fruit, wheat and other exportable crops.
U.S. officials note that a similar USAID program in eastern Nangarhar province has helped that region go poppy-free. According to U.N. figures, Nangarhar had 18,731 hectares, or about 46,000 acres, of poppy fields in 2007. In 2008, it had none.
U.S. and Afghan officials also argue that the plunging price of opium -- which has dropped from $225 per kilogram of dried opium in January 2005 to $75 per kilo in April -- means many farmers could make more money selling wheat or corn.
"The farmers don't get rich on poppy," said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, in a recent interview. "If you can protect the farmer and give him the ability to get to market he's going to do fine with other crops."
It's easy for poppy farmers to earn a living: Opium traffickers show up at their farms and pay cash for entire harvests. Wheat and corn farmers have to process and store their crops, drive the harvest to the nearest market, and find their own buyers. Local corn and wheat prices have fluctuated wildly in recent months, whipsawing many farmers.
Mr. Walid says converting his fields to corn and wheat has required significant expenditures on equipment, field laborers, and fertilizer. The current price for corn is so low that he is barely covering his costs, he says.
Mr. Walid owns his own tractor, so he can ferry crops to nearby towns. But most of his neighbors have no way of bringing their wares to the markets, he says, adding "With poppy, the buyers come to you."
Mr. Donohoe of USAID sees the antidrug push in both economic and moral terms. "The narcotics industry has completely distorted the local economy," he says.
Mr. Donohoe travels around Helmand province with a notebook full of statistics detailing the potential financial benefits of converting farms to corn and wheat from poppy. At the same time, he says, his work is fueled by the knowledge that drug proceeds help fund an insurgency that is regularly killing U.S. and British soldiers stationed at his small base in nearby Lashkar Gah. "I want to see the drug trade here go down to zero," he says flatly.
Helmand long grew more wheat than any other part of Afghanistan. The widespread cultivation of poppy fields is a relatively recent innovation, and Mr. Donohoe believes the change can be reversed. "The idea that farmers here don't know how to grow wheat is absurd," he says. "They did it for decades."
Still, the extra money in this year's $300 million effort may not be enough to turn the tide in Helmand, where Afghanistan's drug trade has deep roots. In Lashkar Gah, Helmand's most populous city, many of the biggest houses belong to narco-traffickers and poppy farmers.
For many farmers, the question of what to grow comes down to cold economics. According to a recent U.N. report, the average poppy farmer in southern Afghanistan earned $6,194 in 2008. Farmers in the south who grew other crops earned just $3,382. The U.N. and U.S. estimate that $500 million of opium is grown each year in Helmand alone.
Mr. Walid supports 23 people with his agricultural earnings. Corn and wheat prices are so low he will have to plow over his fields and replace them with poppy if market conditions don't improve: "I won't have a choice," he says.
As he spoke, he took a small bag of hashish and a thin box of rolling paper out of his front pocket and began making himself a cigarette.
"For later," he said, winking.
A Marine in a dried-up poppy field during a mission in Dahaneh, Helmand province, on Thursday. The U.S. has been pushing farmers to switch to other crops.
Mr. Walid's tidy fields here in southern Afghanistan once were full of poppy bulbs, the core ingredient in opium. He replaced the poppy with wheat and corn after receiving free seed from a U.S. government program, starting about two years ago. Today, he grows enough of both crops to feed his family and sell the remainder at a nearby bazaar.
"I tell my friends that I've gone into a different business," he says, looking out at his farm. "It's the same fields, but everything else has changed."
Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other ways of earning a living.
The new $300 million effort will give micro-grants to Afghan food-processing and food-storage businesses, fund the construction of new roads and irrigation channels, and sell Afghan farmers fruit seed and livestock at a heavy discount. The U.S. is spending six times as much on the push this year as the $50 million it spent in 2008.
"We're trying to give the farmers alternatives so they can move away from the poppy culture without suffering massive unemployment and poverty," says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development official leading the drive. "The idea is to make it easier for farmers to make the right choice."
Still, building a viable alternative to Afghanistan's opium economy will be challenging. Corn and wheat can be less profitable than opium. Taliban fighters, who are closely allied with the traffickers, have threatened farmers who drop poppies for other crops. When U.S. officials opened a new distribution center for the seed program last year, Taliban militants promptly rocketed it.
The new U.S. push comes alongside a stepped-up military effort to crack down on Afghanistan's drug lords. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report this week disclosed that the Pentagon had begun hunting 50 drug traffickers suspected of ties to the Taliban. The military is trying to capture or kill each of the men, according to the report.
On Thursday, U.S. aircraft and missiles pounded Taliban mountainside positions around Dahaneh, in Helmand province, the heart of Afghanistan's drug trade, according to the Associated Press.
Senior Obama administration officials say bluntly that earlier U.S. efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's poppy fields have failed. The Bush administration initially envisioned spraying herbicide on the poppies from planes or tractors, but that was vetoed by the Afghan government. Instead, Washington paid American contractors and Afghan security personnel hundreds of millions of dollars to slash and burn individual poppy fields.
The eradication effort has been widely unpopular in Afghanistan and hasn't discernibly hurt the drug industry here. Afghanistan accounted for 12% of the world's opium production in 2001, according to the United Nations. By 2008, it accounted for 93%.
Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington late last month that the U.S. "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars" on eradication. "All we did was alienate poppy farmers," he said. "We were driving people into the hands of the Taliban."
Michèle Flournoy, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for policy, said in a recent interview that the U.S. was focusing on crop substitution as a way of taking advantage of Afghanistan's fertile soil and long history of growing fruit, wheat and other exportable crops.
U.S. officials note that a similar USAID program in eastern Nangarhar province has helped that region go poppy-free. According to U.N. figures, Nangarhar had 18,731 hectares, or about 46,000 acres, of poppy fields in 2007. In 2008, it had none.
U.S. and Afghan officials also argue that the plunging price of opium -- which has dropped from $225 per kilogram of dried opium in January 2005 to $75 per kilo in April -- means many farmers could make more money selling wheat or corn.
"The farmers don't get rich on poppy," said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, in a recent interview. "If you can protect the farmer and give him the ability to get to market he's going to do fine with other crops."
It's easy for poppy farmers to earn a living: Opium traffickers show up at their farms and pay cash for entire harvests. Wheat and corn farmers have to process and store their crops, drive the harvest to the nearest market, and find their own buyers. Local corn and wheat prices have fluctuated wildly in recent months, whipsawing many farmers.
Mr. Walid says converting his fields to corn and wheat has required significant expenditures on equipment, field laborers, and fertilizer. The current price for corn is so low that he is barely covering his costs, he says.
Mr. Walid owns his own tractor, so he can ferry crops to nearby towns. But most of his neighbors have no way of bringing their wares to the markets, he says, adding "With poppy, the buyers come to you."
Mr. Donohoe of USAID sees the antidrug push in both economic and moral terms. "The narcotics industry has completely distorted the local economy," he says.
Mr. Donohoe travels around Helmand province with a notebook full of statistics detailing the potential financial benefits of converting farms to corn and wheat from poppy. At the same time, he says, his work is fueled by the knowledge that drug proceeds help fund an insurgency that is regularly killing U.S. and British soldiers stationed at his small base in nearby Lashkar Gah. "I want to see the drug trade here go down to zero," he says flatly.
Helmand long grew more wheat than any other part of Afghanistan. The widespread cultivation of poppy fields is a relatively recent innovation, and Mr. Donohoe believes the change can be reversed. "The idea that farmers here don't know how to grow wheat is absurd," he says. "They did it for decades."
Still, the extra money in this year's $300 million effort may not be enough to turn the tide in Helmand, where Afghanistan's drug trade has deep roots. In Lashkar Gah, Helmand's most populous city, many of the biggest houses belong to narco-traffickers and poppy farmers.
For many farmers, the question of what to grow comes down to cold economics. According to a recent U.N. report, the average poppy farmer in southern Afghanistan earned $6,194 in 2008. Farmers in the south who grew other crops earned just $3,382. The U.N. and U.S. estimate that $500 million of opium is grown each year in Helmand alone.
Mr. Walid supports 23 people with his agricultural earnings. Corn and wheat prices are so low he will have to plow over his fields and replace them with poppy if market conditions don't improve: "I won't have a choice," he says.
As he spoke, he took a small bag of hashish and a thin box of rolling paper out of his front pocket and began making himself a cigarette.
"For later," he said, winking.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
New Army Handbook Teaches Afghanistan Lessons by Tom Shanker
More than a year has passed since an Afghan police commander turned on coalition forces and helped insurgents carry out a surprise attack that killed nine Americans, wounded more than 30 United States and Afghan troops and nearly resulted in the loss of an allied outpost in one of the deadliest engagements of the war.
Within days of the attack, Army historians and tactical analysts arrived in eastern Afghanistan to review the debacle near Wanat, interviewing soldiers who survived the intense battle, in which outnumbered Americans exchanged gunfire for more than four hours with insurgents, often at distances closer than 50 feet.
Now, that effort to harvest lessons from the firefight of July 13, 2008, has contributed to a new battlefield manual that will be delivered over coming days to Army units joining the fight in Afghanistan with the troop increase ordered by President Obama.
The handbook, “Small-Unit Operations in Afghanistan,” strikes a tone of respect for the Taliban and other insurgent groups, which are acknowledged to be extremely experienced fighters; even more, American soldiers are warned that the insurgents rapidly adapt to shifts in tactics.
In page after page, the handbook draws on lessons from Wanat and other missions, some successful and some that resulted in death and injury for American and allied forces. The manual can be read as an effort to push the nuances of the complex counterinsurgency fight now under way in Afghanistan down from the generals and colonels to newly minted privates as well as to the sergeants and junior officers who lead small units into combat.
Copies of the 123-page handbook, produced by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, are being distributed throughout the service and are available to NATO allies and other nations with troops in Afghanistan. A copy was provided in advance to The New York Times by an official involved in the distribution, who said consideration was being given to a broader public release.
The manual includes a chapter titled “Cultural Engagements,” offering guidance to small-unit leaders on building relationships with wavering village elders and trust among distrustful village residents — a process that cannot be left to senior officers who may be back at headquarters.
Implicit in the instructions is a warning that troops are at risk if they are aloof from the locals and uncaring of their needs — and of the certain dangers if intelligence sources are used incorrectly.
One lesson of Wanat was that American troops, who had set up the firebase five days before the attack, were caught unaware of collusion between the district police chief and the Taliban.
The manual describes how to train better for the defense of remote forward operating bases in harsh Afghan terrain, especially in contested areas where the loyalties of local people are uncertain. The detailed “how to” lists include instructions on such battlefield techniques as deploying mortars more effectively than soldiers did at Wanat, where they did not take into account terrain that provided cover for attackers.
In the fight now under way in Afghanistan, even small platoons may be expected to patrol areas and conduct both combat operations and civilian reconstruction missions traditionally assigned to much larger combat units.
“Every soldier or leader involved in command post operations is one less soldier or leader available to send on patrol, provide security, or staff a quick-reaction force,” the handbook says. One lesson of Wanat was that the primitive forward firebase was understaffed.
The handbook’s publication days after the first anniversary of the Wanat battle was first noted by a blog operated by the Combined Arms Center, the Army’s headquarters for advanced learning and leader development at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
The blogger, Frontier 6, said the handbook drew together lessons of successes in Afghanistan, as well as what has been gleaned from operations when Americans left the battlefield badly bloodied.
“Although the losses at Wanat were tragic, a close scrutiny of the action with an eye to lessons learned can save lives in the future,” the blogger wrote, noting that the handbook also built on analysis from an insurgent ambush of American troops this past April in the Korangal Valley, also in eastern Afghanistan.
It is perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets in the Army, but Frontier 6 is the Internet alias of Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the Fort Leavenworth commander and occasional blogger, who previously served as the top military spokesman in Iraq.
Combat commanders acknowledge how much they rely on the analysis and lessons-learned manuals sent from headquarters back in the United States. “The education of our force is the best weapon we have,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new commander in Afghanistan. “Counterinsurgency is complex, nuanced and ever-changing, and success is dependent on a fighting force that can recognize these changes and adapt to them.”
In distilling lessons into practical advice for the troops, General Caldwell is building on an effort brought to popular attention by a predecessor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, now commander of American forces in the Middle East.
Under General Petraeus’s leadership at Fort Leavenworth, the military released a counterinsurgency field manual credited with helping turn around the war in Iraq and ending the armed services’ focus on heavily armored conventional warfare.
With that manual’s release, the American military was forced to embrace the messy irregular warfare that had been the core competency solely of a small specialty branch in the armed services — the Army Special Forces, known as Green Berets.
Within days of the attack, Army historians and tactical analysts arrived in eastern Afghanistan to review the debacle near Wanat, interviewing soldiers who survived the intense battle, in which outnumbered Americans exchanged gunfire for more than four hours with insurgents, often at distances closer than 50 feet.
Now, that effort to harvest lessons from the firefight of July 13, 2008, has contributed to a new battlefield manual that will be delivered over coming days to Army units joining the fight in Afghanistan with the troop increase ordered by President Obama.
The handbook, “Small-Unit Operations in Afghanistan,” strikes a tone of respect for the Taliban and other insurgent groups, which are acknowledged to be extremely experienced fighters; even more, American soldiers are warned that the insurgents rapidly adapt to shifts in tactics.
In page after page, the handbook draws on lessons from Wanat and other missions, some successful and some that resulted in death and injury for American and allied forces. The manual can be read as an effort to push the nuances of the complex counterinsurgency fight now under way in Afghanistan down from the generals and colonels to newly minted privates as well as to the sergeants and junior officers who lead small units into combat.
Copies of the 123-page handbook, produced by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, are being distributed throughout the service and are available to NATO allies and other nations with troops in Afghanistan. A copy was provided in advance to The New York Times by an official involved in the distribution, who said consideration was being given to a broader public release.
The manual includes a chapter titled “Cultural Engagements,” offering guidance to small-unit leaders on building relationships with wavering village elders and trust among distrustful village residents — a process that cannot be left to senior officers who may be back at headquarters.
Implicit in the instructions is a warning that troops are at risk if they are aloof from the locals and uncaring of their needs — and of the certain dangers if intelligence sources are used incorrectly.
One lesson of Wanat was that American troops, who had set up the firebase five days before the attack, were caught unaware of collusion between the district police chief and the Taliban.
The manual describes how to train better for the defense of remote forward operating bases in harsh Afghan terrain, especially in contested areas where the loyalties of local people are uncertain. The detailed “how to” lists include instructions on such battlefield techniques as deploying mortars more effectively than soldiers did at Wanat, where they did not take into account terrain that provided cover for attackers.
In the fight now under way in Afghanistan, even small platoons may be expected to patrol areas and conduct both combat operations and civilian reconstruction missions traditionally assigned to much larger combat units.
“Every soldier or leader involved in command post operations is one less soldier or leader available to send on patrol, provide security, or staff a quick-reaction force,” the handbook says. One lesson of Wanat was that the primitive forward firebase was understaffed.
The handbook’s publication days after the first anniversary of the Wanat battle was first noted by a blog operated by the Combined Arms Center, the Army’s headquarters for advanced learning and leader development at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
The blogger, Frontier 6, said the handbook drew together lessons of successes in Afghanistan, as well as what has been gleaned from operations when Americans left the battlefield badly bloodied.
“Although the losses at Wanat were tragic, a close scrutiny of the action with an eye to lessons learned can save lives in the future,” the blogger wrote, noting that the handbook also built on analysis from an insurgent ambush of American troops this past April in the Korangal Valley, also in eastern Afghanistan.
It is perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets in the Army, but Frontier 6 is the Internet alias of Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the Fort Leavenworth commander and occasional blogger, who previously served as the top military spokesman in Iraq.
Combat commanders acknowledge how much they rely on the analysis and lessons-learned manuals sent from headquarters back in the United States. “The education of our force is the best weapon we have,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new commander in Afghanistan. “Counterinsurgency is complex, nuanced and ever-changing, and success is dependent on a fighting force that can recognize these changes and adapt to them.”
In distilling lessons into practical advice for the troops, General Caldwell is building on an effort brought to popular attention by a predecessor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, now commander of American forces in the Middle East.
Under General Petraeus’s leadership at Fort Leavenworth, the military released a counterinsurgency field manual credited with helping turn around the war in Iraq and ending the armed services’ focus on heavily armored conventional warfare.
With that manual’s release, the American military was forced to embrace the messy irregular warfare that had been the core competency solely of a small specialty branch in the armed services — the Army Special Forces, known as Green Berets.
Much Ado About Something: Terror and Pakistan’s Nuclear Assets by Animesh Roul
Every Pakistan watchers knew about those events. Bill Roggio has highlighted these events in his reports too (esp. in Long War Journal). But, Shaun Gregory (“The Terrorist Threat to Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 2 (7), July 2009) has analyzed these events to expose the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the “pillar of Pakistan’s national security”.
The paper published in the CTC Sentinel (Combating Terrorism Center, West Point) has triggered a pitched debate in the region and in the Western World whether Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructures are secure or not , especially in the face of those (mentioned below) terror attacks that occurred in the last couple of years. Gregory’s article underscores three terror strikes on nuclear weapons facilities in Pakistan, questioning the physical security of the coveted nuclear assets:
“These have included an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly sites.”
(Correction: The twin attack at the Wah Cantonment actually took place on August 21, Thursday, 2008, not on August 20 as chronicled in the paper)
Let’s revisit those terror events, all perpetrated by Taliban and Al Qaeda elements.
* November 1, 2007: Motorbike borne suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a Pakistan Air Force (PAF) bus, killing seven PAF officers and three civilians on the Faisalabad Road in Sargodha (Punjab province). The bus was carrying PAF staff from the Mushaf Mir Airbase to Kirana Ammunition Depot. This Suicide attack was targeted at the air force officials and civilians, no intention to harm or steal nuclear material, or create a radiological emergency.
* December 10, 2007: At least five schoolchildren and three others were injured when a Car borne suicide bomber exploded his vehicle targeting a Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) bus carrying air force employees’ children at Kamra air base. The blast took place on the outskirts of the PAC factories on the Qutba-Attock Road and bus was going to the Attock city.
* August 21, 2008: This was the most severe suicide attack ever carried out against military establishments. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up near the gates of the Pakistan Ordnance Factories located in the military cantonment at Wah (Attock district), killing at least 70 persons. The POF at Wah is a cluster of industrial units producing variety of arms and ammunitions for the armed forces. Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar claimed responsibility of the suicide attacks saying that they had been carried out in retaliation for military operations in Bajaur and Swat.
These terrorist acts mentioned by Gregory, were actually targeted at the security forces or civilians at the highly fortified military bases and not necessarily targeted with the aim of stealing nuclear material or creating nuclear disaster. But he has very rightly pointed out that these attacks highlighted the vulnerability of military/nuclear infrastructures in Pakistan and the myth of safety and security standard. What Gregory has missed here is that previous similar but ‘direct’ attacks on nuclear establishments by Baloch militants, e.g. mortar attack on the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) controlled establishment on the Dera Ghazi Khan-Quetta highway in May 2006. However, this event received scant media attention and subsequent cover up by Pakistan.
In all three attacks, which were very symbolic depicting‘Taliban-Military feud’ in Pakistan, these terrorists never showed the intention to create a nuclear disaster instead they claim responsibility of the mayhems and threaten for more such type of attacks against the military/police in future to avenge anti-terror operations. Of course their Al Qaeda friends have their goals intact for acquiring nuclear weapons or materials.
The point of debate: More than these three events which caught the attention of media, though lately (the paper published online on July 21, 2009) and triggered debates now especially in India, Pakistan and USA (Read News Links below) , the crux of the paper, I believe, somehow ignored or overlooked. The media picked up these terror events to highlight the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear assets (lack of adequate physical security) which might fall in the hand of terrorists or extremists, but missed out the important point of Gregory’ article. The existential threat emanating from Pakistan, the nuclear power with abysmal proliferation track records, lies somewhere else. Gregory points out that Pakistan Army could decide to transfer nuclear weapons to a terrorist group. He mentioned in his paper (citing Philip Bobbitt’s ‘Terror and Consent', and reminding us about Mirza Aslam Beg’s case of passing nuclear weapons technology to Iran in the past) that "states can become pressurized or incentivized to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorist groups because they are responding to threats from an external power but fear the consequences of being identified as the origin of a nuclear strike.” This insinuation should be the point of debate which questions the nexus between the army and its proxy warriors.
Media Reports on the Issue:
"Western, neighboring country media propelling vicious propaganda blitz against Pakistan nuclear assets: F.O", Online - International News Network, August 11, 2009.
"Pakistan Military Denies Nuclear Security Report" , VOA News, August 12, 2009.
"Pakistan denies al-Qaida targeting nuclear facilities," The Guardian, August 12, 2009.
"Pak goes ballistic about report on nuclear complex attacks," Times of India, August 12, 2009.
"Pakistan nuke sites secure, says Pentagon," The News, August 12, 2009.
The paper published in the CTC Sentinel (Combating Terrorism Center, West Point) has triggered a pitched debate in the region and in the Western World whether Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructures are secure or not , especially in the face of those (mentioned below) terror attacks that occurred in the last couple of years. Gregory’s article underscores three terror strikes on nuclear weapons facilities in Pakistan, questioning the physical security of the coveted nuclear assets:
“These have included an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly sites.”
(Correction: The twin attack at the Wah Cantonment actually took place on August 21, Thursday, 2008, not on August 20 as chronicled in the paper)
Let’s revisit those terror events, all perpetrated by Taliban and Al Qaeda elements.
* November 1, 2007: Motorbike borne suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a Pakistan Air Force (PAF) bus, killing seven PAF officers and three civilians on the Faisalabad Road in Sargodha (Punjab province). The bus was carrying PAF staff from the Mushaf Mir Airbase to Kirana Ammunition Depot. This Suicide attack was targeted at the air force officials and civilians, no intention to harm or steal nuclear material, or create a radiological emergency.
* December 10, 2007: At least five schoolchildren and three others were injured when a Car borne suicide bomber exploded his vehicle targeting a Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) bus carrying air force employees’ children at Kamra air base. The blast took place on the outskirts of the PAC factories on the Qutba-Attock Road and bus was going to the Attock city.
* August 21, 2008: This was the most severe suicide attack ever carried out against military establishments. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up near the gates of the Pakistan Ordnance Factories located in the military cantonment at Wah (Attock district), killing at least 70 persons. The POF at Wah is a cluster of industrial units producing variety of arms and ammunitions for the armed forces. Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar claimed responsibility of the suicide attacks saying that they had been carried out in retaliation for military operations in Bajaur and Swat.
These terrorist acts mentioned by Gregory, were actually targeted at the security forces or civilians at the highly fortified military bases and not necessarily targeted with the aim of stealing nuclear material or creating nuclear disaster. But he has very rightly pointed out that these attacks highlighted the vulnerability of military/nuclear infrastructures in Pakistan and the myth of safety and security standard. What Gregory has missed here is that previous similar but ‘direct’ attacks on nuclear establishments by Baloch militants, e.g. mortar attack on the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) controlled establishment on the Dera Ghazi Khan-Quetta highway in May 2006. However, this event received scant media attention and subsequent cover up by Pakistan.
In all three attacks, which were very symbolic depicting‘Taliban-Military feud’ in Pakistan, these terrorists never showed the intention to create a nuclear disaster instead they claim responsibility of the mayhems and threaten for more such type of attacks against the military/police in future to avenge anti-terror operations. Of course their Al Qaeda friends have their goals intact for acquiring nuclear weapons or materials.
The point of debate: More than these three events which caught the attention of media, though lately (the paper published online on July 21, 2009) and triggered debates now especially in India, Pakistan and USA (Read News Links below) , the crux of the paper, I believe, somehow ignored or overlooked. The media picked up these terror events to highlight the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear assets (lack of adequate physical security) which might fall in the hand of terrorists or extremists, but missed out the important point of Gregory’ article. The existential threat emanating from Pakistan, the nuclear power with abysmal proliferation track records, lies somewhere else. Gregory points out that Pakistan Army could decide to transfer nuclear weapons to a terrorist group. He mentioned in his paper (citing Philip Bobbitt’s ‘Terror and Consent', and reminding us about Mirza Aslam Beg’s case of passing nuclear weapons technology to Iran in the past) that "states can become pressurized or incentivized to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorist groups because they are responding to threats from an external power but fear the consequences of being identified as the origin of a nuclear strike.” This insinuation should be the point of debate which questions the nexus between the army and its proxy warriors.
Media Reports on the Issue:
"Western, neighboring country media propelling vicious propaganda blitz against Pakistan nuclear assets: F.O", Online - International News Network, August 11, 2009.
"Pakistan Military Denies Nuclear Security Report" , VOA News, August 12, 2009.
"Pakistan denies al-Qaida targeting nuclear facilities," The Guardian, August 12, 2009.
"Pak goes ballistic about report on nuclear complex attacks," Times of India, August 12, 2009.
"Pakistan nuke sites secure, says Pentagon," The News, August 12, 2009.
Hizb ut-Tahrir America Attempts to Control Dialogue and Spin Public Perception by Madeleine Gruen
Since its July 19th Khilafah conference in Chicago, “The Fall of Capitalism and Rise of Islam,” Hizb ut-Tahrir America (HTA) has attempted to gain control of public discourse through press releases and online events. After the much-publicized conference, HTA was forced to go on the defensive in order to deflect accusations about ties to militancy and terrorism. It had been HTA’s hope that the conference would cause the media to act as its Trojan Horse by circulating the concept of a Khilafah to a wide American audience.
HTA held an online press conference from its base in Chicago last night. Questions were answered by Mohammed Malkawi, who has been HTA’s spokesman to the media since the group's public launch in June. (Malkawi was introduced to the virtual audience by his pseudonym, “Abu Talha”).
In the days leading up to the July 19th conference, some media outlets reported that HT had "ties" to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. In his opening statement, Malkawi denied the accusations that HT had ties to any "militant groups," although he did not mention Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Zarkawi specifically. He also took the opportunity to refute Hudson Institute scholar Zeyno Baran’s assessment that HT is a conveyor belt to terrorism. In response to one participant's question, Malkawi stated emphatically that HT had never “yielded to the influence of militancy.” Malkawi did not discuss the fact that HT has produced several militant offshoots, including al-Muhajiroun, based in London, and Akromiya, which was responsible for organizing protests against the Uzbek government that eventually led to the Andijan massacre in 2005. Nor did Malkawi mention individuals who were involved with HT and who went on to join more militant groups; such as, Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif, who participated in a suicide attack in Tel Aviv in 2003, and 9/11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh.
Hizb ut Tahrir (HT) has made inroads in other parts of the world by framing its boilerplate doctrine in a modern context. HT plays on the frustrations of Muslim populations in order to position itself as the vanguard of the aggrieved. Its blanket solution to all social, political, and economic problems is the establishment of an Islamic government, ruled by a Caliph, and run according to the laws of Shariah.
Much of HT’s strategic success in growing its support base and core membership can be attributed to its ability to control public dialogue through its aggressive production of leaflets and videos, web sites, and its public demonstrations. HT's communication campaigns attempt to stir controversy where there may have been none, attract media attention, and result in causing government agencies to react defensively; putting HT in the seat of control. HTA is clearly attempting to do the same in the United States. However, thus far, HTA has not been successful in assuming control of the tone or content of media reports, or in sparking positive discussions about its ideas.
HTA held an online press conference from its base in Chicago last night. Questions were answered by Mohammed Malkawi, who has been HTA’s spokesman to the media since the group's public launch in June. (Malkawi was introduced to the virtual audience by his pseudonym, “Abu Talha”).
In the days leading up to the July 19th conference, some media outlets reported that HT had "ties" to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. In his opening statement, Malkawi denied the accusations that HT had ties to any "militant groups," although he did not mention Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Zarkawi specifically. He also took the opportunity to refute Hudson Institute scholar Zeyno Baran’s assessment that HT is a conveyor belt to terrorism. In response to one participant's question, Malkawi stated emphatically that HT had never “yielded to the influence of militancy.” Malkawi did not discuss the fact that HT has produced several militant offshoots, including al-Muhajiroun, based in London, and Akromiya, which was responsible for organizing protests against the Uzbek government that eventually led to the Andijan massacre in 2005. Nor did Malkawi mention individuals who were involved with HT and who went on to join more militant groups; such as, Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif, who participated in a suicide attack in Tel Aviv in 2003, and 9/11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh.
Hizb ut Tahrir (HT) has made inroads in other parts of the world by framing its boilerplate doctrine in a modern context. HT plays on the frustrations of Muslim populations in order to position itself as the vanguard of the aggrieved. Its blanket solution to all social, political, and economic problems is the establishment of an Islamic government, ruled by a Caliph, and run according to the laws of Shariah.
Much of HT’s strategic success in growing its support base and core membership can be attributed to its ability to control public dialogue through its aggressive production of leaflets and videos, web sites, and its public demonstrations. HT's communication campaigns attempt to stir controversy where there may have been none, attract media attention, and result in causing government agencies to react defensively; putting HT in the seat of control. HTA is clearly attempting to do the same in the United States. However, thus far, HTA has not been successful in assuming control of the tone or content of media reports, or in sparking positive discussions about its ideas.
As Afghan Vote Nears, Taliban Intimidation Rises by Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak
The Taliban have escalated a campaign of threats and intimidation ahead of the presidential election next Thursday, warning voters in mosques and through leaflets and radio announcements not to vote, or face “strong punishment.”
A leaflet distributed in Kandahar says: Dear citizens, we are telling you people not to participate in the election, unless you fall prey to our operations. We are carrying out different sorts of tactics during the elections." It further warns, "Don't use your houses as election offices; if someone does he will face difficulties in the future."
One Taliban commander stood up in a mosque in the southern province of Zabul and warned people that the Taliban would cut off any finger stained with the indelible ink that marks voters, a witness said.
Until now, the insurgents have refrained from specific violence against the election process and have kept the government and international forces guessing about their real intentions.
But the intimidation campaign, which has just started in the last week or so, is an indication that the Taliban are switching gears and are intent on keeping people away from the polls to demonstrate their influence.
A successful election is critical to the efforts of the Afghan government, as well as of the Obama administration and its allies, to demonstrate that after seven years of war, progress is being made toward securing peace and stability in Afghanistan.
The Taliban campaign threatens to further erode the credibility of the election, which is already rife with problems like duplicate voter registration, raising questions of fraud. Here in the south, where the insurgency is strongest, the effort could also further alienate ethnic Pashtuns from the government if they feel their voices have not been heard in the balloting.
One Taliban announcement posted on the wall of a Kandahar mosque was typical of the threats. “You must not participate in the election because we will be targeting these polling stations,” it said. “And if anyone participates in this election we will give them strong punishment.”
The leaflet, which bears the stamp of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the name the Taliban used for Afghanistan before it was ousted from power, declared the election “fake and not Afghan,” because the country was “under occupation of infidels.”
Other leaflets have been distributed in bazaars in Kandahar and other towns in southern Afghanistan.
Muhammad Nazir, from the Panjwai district, just 10 miles west of Kandahar city, said Taliban militants were driving motorbikes through the streets handing out leaflets. Taliban supporters were issuing warnings in mosques and on illicit radio stations set up in some districts.
“Every day we hear the Taliban leaving threats in every mosque urging the people not to participate in the election or otherwise they will face danger,” said Haji Ahmad Shah Achakzai, a member of Parliament from Spinbaldak, a town on the southern border with Pakistan.
He said the Taliban had the upper hand in rural areas and it would be impossible to hold balloting there. The government controls only the district centers, and the rest is “Taliban land,” he said.
Mahmood Mirza, 35, a villager from the Kajaki district in the adjoining province of Helmand, said the Taliban had rigged up a radio station and were broadcasting to a radius of three to four miles from their base, warning people not to take part in the election or to support a government that they said was destroying their houses and bombing their people.
The Taliban say they have prepared 200 suicide bombers to attack polling stations on election day, Mr. Mirza said. “Now people are scared and won’t take part in elections,” he said. “I myself will not vote and will not leave my home on the day of elections.”
Muhammad Hassan, a villager from Zabul Province, said recently after prayers in a mosque on the outskirts of the provincial capital that a Taliban commander had stood up and told the congregation not to take part in the election, calling it an American exercise.
He warned that those who voted would be recognized by the ink marking their fingers. “We will know those who cast a vote from the ink, and his finger will be cut off,” Mr. Hassan quoted the commander as saying.
President Hamid Karzai spoke blithely of the Taliban threats in a speech in Kabul on Tuesday. “The election will pass peacefully,” he said. “The enemies of Afghanistan will try to create some chaos; you don’t bother about it,” he told his audience, adding that it was vital for Afghans to vote.
His main rival in the election, Abdullah Abdullah, held a campaign rally in Kandahar on Wednesday, making him one of the only candidates to visit the city, which is considered a high security risk. Mr. Karzai opened his campaign here in a tightly controlled event at a government guesthouse last month. Under tense security, Mr. Abdullah was met with cheers when he told a crowd of more than 1,000 gathered under a tent that he would bring peace to the region.
Yet a member of the Taliban, Hafiz Dawood, 22, from the Arghandab district, just north of Kandahar, confirmed that the Taliban was determined to prevent the election from taking place.
Contacted by telephone, he said the government would not be able to hold voting in rural areas, but only in the heavily guarded district centers. “Ballot boxes will only be placed in the buildings of district centers but they cannot put a single box for elections in the villages,” he said.
If Afghan government or international troops try to take ballot boxes to the villages they will face resistance from the Taliban, he said.
“In all villages and towns our fighters are patrolling, and if these occupying forces move toward the villages, we will greet them with bombs and bullets,” he said.
The election is only “in the interest of these infidels” who are occupying this land, he said. Those running as candidates in the presidential and provincial elections are “foreign agents” and the “loudspeakers” of the infidel forces. “They are not Afghans; they are absolutely working for the interests of the foreigners,” he said.
He said many Taliban fighters had obtained voter registration cards on the orders of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, but they did not plan to vote. They had obtained the cards just so they could pass through international and Afghan security force checkpoints, he said.
A leaflet distributed in Kandahar says: Dear citizens, we are telling you people not to participate in the election, unless you fall prey to our operations. We are carrying out different sorts of tactics during the elections." It further warns, "Don't use your houses as election offices; if someone does he will face difficulties in the future."
One Taliban commander stood up in a mosque in the southern province of Zabul and warned people that the Taliban would cut off any finger stained with the indelible ink that marks voters, a witness said.
Until now, the insurgents have refrained from specific violence against the election process and have kept the government and international forces guessing about their real intentions.
But the intimidation campaign, which has just started in the last week or so, is an indication that the Taliban are switching gears and are intent on keeping people away from the polls to demonstrate their influence.
A successful election is critical to the efforts of the Afghan government, as well as of the Obama administration and its allies, to demonstrate that after seven years of war, progress is being made toward securing peace and stability in Afghanistan.
The Taliban campaign threatens to further erode the credibility of the election, which is already rife with problems like duplicate voter registration, raising questions of fraud. Here in the south, where the insurgency is strongest, the effort could also further alienate ethnic Pashtuns from the government if they feel their voices have not been heard in the balloting.
One Taliban announcement posted on the wall of a Kandahar mosque was typical of the threats. “You must not participate in the election because we will be targeting these polling stations,” it said. “And if anyone participates in this election we will give them strong punishment.”
The leaflet, which bears the stamp of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the name the Taliban used for Afghanistan before it was ousted from power, declared the election “fake and not Afghan,” because the country was “under occupation of infidels.”
Other leaflets have been distributed in bazaars in Kandahar and other towns in southern Afghanistan.
Muhammad Nazir, from the Panjwai district, just 10 miles west of Kandahar city, said Taliban militants were driving motorbikes through the streets handing out leaflets. Taliban supporters were issuing warnings in mosques and on illicit radio stations set up in some districts.
“Every day we hear the Taliban leaving threats in every mosque urging the people not to participate in the election or otherwise they will face danger,” said Haji Ahmad Shah Achakzai, a member of Parliament from Spinbaldak, a town on the southern border with Pakistan.
He said the Taliban had the upper hand in rural areas and it would be impossible to hold balloting there. The government controls only the district centers, and the rest is “Taliban land,” he said.
Mahmood Mirza, 35, a villager from the Kajaki district in the adjoining province of Helmand, said the Taliban had rigged up a radio station and were broadcasting to a radius of three to four miles from their base, warning people not to take part in the election or to support a government that they said was destroying their houses and bombing their people.
The Taliban say they have prepared 200 suicide bombers to attack polling stations on election day, Mr. Mirza said. “Now people are scared and won’t take part in elections,” he said. “I myself will not vote and will not leave my home on the day of elections.”
Muhammad Hassan, a villager from Zabul Province, said recently after prayers in a mosque on the outskirts of the provincial capital that a Taliban commander had stood up and told the congregation not to take part in the election, calling it an American exercise.
He warned that those who voted would be recognized by the ink marking their fingers. “We will know those who cast a vote from the ink, and his finger will be cut off,” Mr. Hassan quoted the commander as saying.
President Hamid Karzai spoke blithely of the Taliban threats in a speech in Kabul on Tuesday. “The election will pass peacefully,” he said. “The enemies of Afghanistan will try to create some chaos; you don’t bother about it,” he told his audience, adding that it was vital for Afghans to vote.
His main rival in the election, Abdullah Abdullah, held a campaign rally in Kandahar on Wednesday, making him one of the only candidates to visit the city, which is considered a high security risk. Mr. Karzai opened his campaign here in a tightly controlled event at a government guesthouse last month. Under tense security, Mr. Abdullah was met with cheers when he told a crowd of more than 1,000 gathered under a tent that he would bring peace to the region.
Yet a member of the Taliban, Hafiz Dawood, 22, from the Arghandab district, just north of Kandahar, confirmed that the Taliban was determined to prevent the election from taking place.
Contacted by telephone, he said the government would not be able to hold voting in rural areas, but only in the heavily guarded district centers. “Ballot boxes will only be placed in the buildings of district centers but they cannot put a single box for elections in the villages,” he said.
If Afghan government or international troops try to take ballot boxes to the villages they will face resistance from the Taliban, he said.
“In all villages and towns our fighters are patrolling, and if these occupying forces move toward the villages, we will greet them with bombs and bullets,” he said.
The election is only “in the interest of these infidels” who are occupying this land, he said. Those running as candidates in the presidential and provincial elections are “foreign agents” and the “loudspeakers” of the infidel forces. “They are not Afghans; they are absolutely working for the interests of the foreigners,” he said.
He said many Taliban fighters had obtained voter registration cards on the orders of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, but they did not plan to vote. They had obtained the cards just so they could pass through international and Afghan security force checkpoints, he said.
Modern Medicine: How Tech will Transform Healthcare Delivery by Richard P. Nespola
Nespola thinks mobile is the cure.
Inside her living room, a mother captures her autistic child’s latest behavior on video using her mobile device and sends it to a team of behavior specialists for assessment, diagnosis and treatment.
A radiologist e-mails fresh X-rays of an injured All-American tight end to a sports trainer. Minutes later the trainer views the images through an application on his smartphone and informs the head coach that the star athlete can indeed make it to the playoffs in two weeks.
A family from a rural community in Iowa receives medical consultation and treatment from a specialist in a Chicago hospital 200 miles away via videoconferencing.
These scenarios share a common thread: mHealth – emerging mobile health systems that enable healthcare providers to remotely attend to the needs of patients for little cost. Mobile health systems support fast, easy, scalable and efficient care. Thanks to the technological advancements in wireless broadband – so-called “4G” standards such as WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE) — , patient care is as easy as a few taps on a smartphone.
The adoption of “virtual visits” is already reducing emergency room admissions, hospitalizations and related out-of-pocket patient costs. Telemedicine includes virtual training, mentoring and collaboration among healthcare professionals, remote patient monitoring and electronic medical records filing, access and sharing.
Strong demand for medical apps.
Research shows the top five wireless applications for healthcare are:
Appointment scheduling
Patient information
Patient tracking
Patient records
Patient monitoring
As telemedicine continues to evolve and applications of these long-range technologies become more complex, so does the debate on clinical and technical standards, information security, bandwidth availability, hardware subsidies and Medicare and insurance reimbursements.
The confluence of healthcare and technology is certainly not new. But today, more than ever, how these two industries can be brought together to solve one of this country’s greatest fundamental issues remains to be determined.
Enter the Federal Government. Sheer political will driving new legislation on healthcare reform increased the impetus and incentive to innovate through technology to address the needs of the unserved and the underserved.
Can technology curb healthcare costs?
There is a general consensus from outside and inside the government that healthcare will bankrupt the American economy and the middle class if costs continue to skyrocket.
Technology can be leveraged to help curtail those rising costs. To make that happen, the Obama Administration has pledged an investment of $10 billion a year over the next five years to encourage "broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems."
This call-to-action for technology innovation has sparked a widespread response from telecommunications companies, manufacturers, vertical specialist solution providers and mobile associations who are all working at a furious pace to bring about this technological – and social – change. Their efforts will not only help to solve this country’s health issues, but for consumers, these technological advancements will provide information anywhere, at any time, on any device.
As an example, industry group GSMA has initiated research across the entire mobile ecosystem – from the handset makers to application developers to the wireless operators and others – to explore solutions for the healthcare industry. Similarly, trade association CTIA recently hosted the “mHealth Solutions and Policy Forum” in Washington D.C. where leading medical and policy experts, representatives from Congress, the White House and the Center for Disease Control discussed wireless as a key component to solving the chronic care crisis and eradicating healthcare disparities in America.
This critical confluence of technology and the necessity to cut costs is what makes this opportunity so exciting for the autistic child about whose behavior the specialists are conferring from points across the globe.
As mHealth and other solutions become more widely available and adopted, telecommunications companies, equipment and device manufacturers and content providers will have to consider five driving enablers that can help shape the future of telemedicine:
Standards
Ecosystems
Devices
Applications
Pricing
More dialogue to understand industry trends, to interpret and execute government regulatory policies, and to ensure that patient needs are met is imperative. For example, the dialogue on Pricing will be critical and federally-funded programs will need to be monitored closely to determine which pricing model works best. To that end, federal funding initiatives can help drive down costs incurred by doctors and patients by offering device subsidies in rural areas and finding ways to off-set the capital costs of hospitals adopting telehealth services.
Yet if the government considered subsidizing carriers’ smartphone costs – the savings to consumers might be even more substantial – making life easier for the family in rural Iowa.
Inside her living room, a mother captures her autistic child’s latest behavior on video using her mobile device and sends it to a team of behavior specialists for assessment, diagnosis and treatment.
A radiologist e-mails fresh X-rays of an injured All-American tight end to a sports trainer. Minutes later the trainer views the images through an application on his smartphone and informs the head coach that the star athlete can indeed make it to the playoffs in two weeks.
A family from a rural community in Iowa receives medical consultation and treatment from a specialist in a Chicago hospital 200 miles away via videoconferencing.
These scenarios share a common thread: mHealth – emerging mobile health systems that enable healthcare providers to remotely attend to the needs of patients for little cost. Mobile health systems support fast, easy, scalable and efficient care. Thanks to the technological advancements in wireless broadband – so-called “4G” standards such as WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE) — , patient care is as easy as a few taps on a smartphone.
The adoption of “virtual visits” is already reducing emergency room admissions, hospitalizations and related out-of-pocket patient costs. Telemedicine includes virtual training, mentoring and collaboration among healthcare professionals, remote patient monitoring and electronic medical records filing, access and sharing.
Strong demand for medical apps.
Research shows the top five wireless applications for healthcare are:
Appointment scheduling
Patient information
Patient tracking
Patient records
Patient monitoring
As telemedicine continues to evolve and applications of these long-range technologies become more complex, so does the debate on clinical and technical standards, information security, bandwidth availability, hardware subsidies and Medicare and insurance reimbursements.
The confluence of healthcare and technology is certainly not new. But today, more than ever, how these two industries can be brought together to solve one of this country’s greatest fundamental issues remains to be determined.
Enter the Federal Government. Sheer political will driving new legislation on healthcare reform increased the impetus and incentive to innovate through technology to address the needs of the unserved and the underserved.
Can technology curb healthcare costs?
There is a general consensus from outside and inside the government that healthcare will bankrupt the American economy and the middle class if costs continue to skyrocket.
Technology can be leveraged to help curtail those rising costs. To make that happen, the Obama Administration has pledged an investment of $10 billion a year over the next five years to encourage "broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems."
This call-to-action for technology innovation has sparked a widespread response from telecommunications companies, manufacturers, vertical specialist solution providers and mobile associations who are all working at a furious pace to bring about this technological – and social – change. Their efforts will not only help to solve this country’s health issues, but for consumers, these technological advancements will provide information anywhere, at any time, on any device.
As an example, industry group GSMA has initiated research across the entire mobile ecosystem – from the handset makers to application developers to the wireless operators and others – to explore solutions for the healthcare industry. Similarly, trade association CTIA recently hosted the “mHealth Solutions and Policy Forum” in Washington D.C. where leading medical and policy experts, representatives from Congress, the White House and the Center for Disease Control discussed wireless as a key component to solving the chronic care crisis and eradicating healthcare disparities in America.
This critical confluence of technology and the necessity to cut costs is what makes this opportunity so exciting for the autistic child about whose behavior the specialists are conferring from points across the globe.
As mHealth and other solutions become more widely available and adopted, telecommunications companies, equipment and device manufacturers and content providers will have to consider five driving enablers that can help shape the future of telemedicine:
Standards
Ecosystems
Devices
Applications
Pricing
More dialogue to understand industry trends, to interpret and execute government regulatory policies, and to ensure that patient needs are met is imperative. For example, the dialogue on Pricing will be critical and federally-funded programs will need to be monitored closely to determine which pricing model works best. To that end, federal funding initiatives can help drive down costs incurred by doctors and patients by offering device subsidies in rural areas and finding ways to off-set the capital costs of hospitals adopting telehealth services.
Yet if the government considered subsidizing carriers’ smartphone costs – the savings to consumers might be even more substantial – making life easier for the family in rural Iowa.
Monday, August 10, 2009
A Radical New Router by Lawrence G. Roberts
One of the founders of the Internet says network routers are too slow, costly, and power hungry-and he knows how to fix them.
Router Master
Internet pioneer Lawrence G. Roberts has reengineered the network router to handle streaming media.
The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it. In 1967, I wrote the first plan for the ancestor of today’s Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, and then led the team that designed and built it. The main idea was to share the available network infrastructure by sending data as small, independent packets, which, though they might arrive at different times, would still generally make it to their destinations. The small computers that directed the data traffic—I called them Interface Message Processors, or IMPs—evolved into today’s routers, and for a long time they’ve kept up with the Net’s phenomenal growth. Until now.
Today Internet traffic is rapidly expanding and also becoming more varied and complex. In particular, we’re seeing an explosion in voice and video applications. Millions regularly use Skype to place calls and go to YouTube to share videos. Services like Hulu and Netflix, which let users watch TV shows and movies on their computers, are growing ever more popular. Corporations are embracing videoconferencing and telephony systems based on the Internet Protocol, or IP. What’s more, people are now streaming content not only to their PCs but also to iPhones and BlackBerrys, media receivers like the Apple TV, and gaming consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 3. Communication and entertainment are shifting to the Net.
But this shift is not without its problems. Unlike e-mail and static Web pages, which can handle network hiccups, voice and video deteriorate under transmission delays as short as a few milliseconds. And therein lies the problem with traditional IP packet routers: They can’t guarantee that a YouTube clip will stream smoothly to a user’s computer. They treat the video packets as loose data entities when they ought to treat them as flows.
Consider a conventional router receiving two packets that are part of the same video. The router looks at the first packet’s destination address and consults a routing table. It then holds the packet in a queue until it can be dispatched. When the router receives the second packet, it repeats those same steps, not ”remembering” that it has just processed an earlier piece of the same video. The addition of these small tasks may not look like much, but they can quickly add up, making networks more costly and less flexible.
At this point you might be asking yourself, ”But what’s the problem, really, if I use things like Skype and YouTube without a hitch?” In fact, you enjoy those services only because the Internet has been grossly overprovisioned. Network operators have deployed mountains of optical communication systems that can handle traffic spikes, but on average these run much below their full capacity. Worse, peer-to-peer (P2P) services, used to download movies and other large files, are eating more and more bandwidth. P2P participants may constitute only 5 percent of the users in some networks, while consuming 75 percent of the bandwidth.
So although users may not perceive the extent of the problem, things are already dire for many Internet service providers and network operators. Keeping up with bandwidth demand has required huge outlays of cash to build an infrastructure that remains underutilized. To put it another way, we’ve thrown bandwidth at a problem that really requires a computing solution.
With these issues in mind, my colleagues and I at Anagran, a start-up I founded in Sunnyvale, Calif., set out to reinvent the router. We focused on a simple yet powerful idea: If a router can identify the first packet in a flow, it can just prescreen the remaining packets and bypass the routing and queuing stages. This approach would boost throughput, reduce packet loss and delays, allow new capabilities like fairness controls—and while we’re at it, save power, size, and cost. We call our approach flow management.
To understand how flow management works, it helps to describe the limitations of current packet routers. In these systems, incoming packets go first to a collection of custom microchips responsible for the routing work. The chips read each packet’s destination address and query a routing table. This table determines the packet’s next hop as it travels through the network. Then another collection of chips puts the packets into output queues where they await transmission. These two groups of chips—they include application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, as well as expensive high-speed memory such as ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) and static random access memory (SRAM)—consume 80 percent of the power and space in a router.
During periods of peak traffic, a router may be swamped with more packets than it can handle. The router will then pile up more packets in its queue, establishing a buffer that it can discharge when traffic slows down. If the buffer fills up, though, the router will have to discard some packets. The lost packets trigger a control mechanism that tells the originator to slow down its transmission. This self-controlling behavior is a critical feature of the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, the primary protocol we rely on with the Internet. It’s kept the network stable over decades.
Indeed, during most of my career as a network engineer, I never guessed that the queuing and discarding of packets in routers would create serious problems. More recently, though, as my Anagran colleagues and I scrutinized routers during peak workloads, we spotted two serious problems. First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall. Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays, significantly reducing throughput (TCP throughput is inversely proportional to delay). These two effects hinder traffic for all applications, and some transmissions can take 10 times as long as others to complete.
Flow Control
The Anagran FR-1000 can be plugged into existing networks and can manage up to 4 million simultaneous flows.
As I talk to network operators all over the world, I hear one story after another about how the problem is only getting worse. Data traffic has been doubling virtually every year since 1970. Thanks to the development of high-capacity optical systems like dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM), bandwidth cost has been halved every year, so operators don’t have to spend more than they did the year before to keep up with the doubling in traffic. On the other hand, routers, as pieces of computing equipment, have followed Moore’s Law, and the cost of routing 1 megabit per second has decreased at a slower pace, halving every 1.5 years. Without a major change in router design, this cost discrepancy means that every three years a network operator will have to double its spending on infrastructure expansion.
Flow management can solve this capacity crunch. The concept of data flow might be more easily understood in the case of a voice or video stream, but it applies to all traffic over the Internet. Key to our approach is the fact that each packet contains a full identification of the flow it belongs to. This identification, encapsulated by the packet’s header according to the Internet Protocol version 4, or IPv4, consists of five values: source address, source port, destination address, destination port, and protocol.
All packets that are part of the same flow carry the same five-value identification. So in flow management, you have to effectively process—or route—only the first packet. You’d then take the routing parameters that apply to that first packet and store them in a hash table, a data structure that allows for fast lookup. When a new packet comes in, you’d check if its identification is in the hash, and if it is, that means the new packet is part of a flow you’ve already routed. You’d then quickly dispatch—the more accurate term is ”switch”—the packet straight to an output port, thus saving time and power.
If traffic gets too heavy, you’ll still have to discard packets. The big advantage is that now you can do it intelligently. By monitoring the packets as they’re coming in, you can track in real time the duration, throughput, bytes transferred, average packet size, and other metrics of every flow. For example, if a flow has a steady throughput, which is the case with voice and video, you can avoid discarding such packets, protecting these stream-based transmissions. For other types of traffic, such as Web browsing, you can selectively discard just enough packets to achieve specific rates without stalling those transmissions.
This capability is especially convenient for managing network overload due to P2P traffic. Conventionally, P2P is filtered out using a technique called deep packet inspection, or DPI, which looks at the data portion of all packets. With flow management, you can detect P2P because it relies on many long-duration flows per user. Then, without peeking into the packets’ data, you can limit their transmission to rates you deem fair.
Since the early days of the ARPANET, I’ve always thought that routers should manage flows rather than individual packets. Why hasn’t it been done before? The reason is that memory chips were too expensive until not long ago. You need lots of memory to store the hash table with routing parameters of each flow. (A 1 gigabit-per-second data trunk often carries about 100 000 flows.) If you were to keep a flow table on one IMP of 40 years ago, you’d spend US $1 million in memory. But about a decade ago, as memory cost kept falling, it started to make sense economically to design flow-management equipment.
In 1999, I founded Caspian Networks to develop large terabit flow routers, which I planned to sell to the carriers that maintain the Internet’s core infrastructure. That market, however, proved hard to crack—the carriers seem satisfied with overprovisioning, as well as techniques like traffic caching and compression, which ameliorate congestion without addressing the roots of the problem. In early 2004, I decided to leave Caspian and start Anagran, focusing on smaller flow-management equipment to solve the overload and fairness problems. We designed the equipment to operate at the edge of networks, the point where an Internet service provider aggregates traffic from its broadband subscribers or where a corporate network connects to the outside world. Virtually all network overload occurs at the edge.
Anagran’s flow manager, the FR-1000, can replace routers and DPI systems or may simply be added to existing networks. It supports up to 4 million simultaneous flows—a combined 80 Gb/s in throughput. Its hardware consists of inexpensive, off-the-shelf components as opposed to ASICs, which increase development costs. We implemented our flow-routing algorithms in a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, and the router’s memory consists of standard high-speed DRAM. The FR-1000 sells in different models, starting at less than $30 000.
Like a regular router, the FR-1000 has input and output ports. But the similarities end there. Recall that in a traditional router the routing and queuing chips consume 80 percent of the power and space. By routing only the first packet of a flow, the FR-1000’s chips do much less work, consuming about 1 percent of the power that a conventional router requires.
Even more significant, the FR-1000 does away entirely with the queuing chips. During congestion, it adjusts each flow rate at its input instead. If an incoming flow has a rate deemed too high, the equipment discards a single packet to signal the transmission to slow down. And rather than just delaying or dropping packets as in regular routers, in the FR-1000 the output provides feedback to the input. If there’s bandwidth available, the equipment increases the flow rates or accepts more flows at the input; if bandwidth is scarce, the router reduces flow rates or discards packets.
By eliminating power-hungry circuitry, the FR-1000 consumes about 300 watts, or one-fifth the total power of a comparable router, and occupies one unit in a standard rack, a tenth of the space that other routers fill. We estimate that the equipment allows network operators to reduce their operating costs per gigabit per second by a factor of 10.
How Flow Routing Works
Flow managers keep track of streams of packets and can protect voice and video transmissions while reducing peer-to-peer traffic.
Measurements of the FR-1000 in our laboratories and by customers showed that networks equipped with the flow manager were able to carry many more streams of voice and video without quality degradation.
Another important capability we tested was whether the equipment could maintain quality of transmissions during congestion. The test involved a 100-Mb/s data trunk using a conventional router and another that included the Anagran flow manager. We progressively added TCP flows and measured the time required to load a specific Web page. The conventional router began to discard packets once traffic filled the trunk’s capacity, and the time to load the Web page increased exponentially as we kept adding flows. The Anagran flow manager was able to control the rate of the flows, slowing them down to accommodate new ones, and the load time increased only linearly. The result: At 1000 flows, the flow manager delivered the page in about 15 seconds, whereas the conventional router required nearly 65 seconds.
Another capability we tested was fairness controls. Currently, P2P applications consume an excessive amount of bandwidth, because they use multiple flows per user—from 10 to even 1000. But services like cloud computing, which rely on Web applications constantly accessing servers that store and process data, are likely to expand the problem. We conducted measurements at a U.S. university whose wireless network was overwhelmed by P2P traffic, with a small fraction of users consuming up to 70 percent of the bandwidth. Early attempts to solve the problem using DPI systems didn’t work, because P2P applications often encrypt packets, making them hard to recognize. The Anagran equipment was able to detect P2P by watching the number and duration of flows per user. And instead of simply shutting down the P2P connections, the flow manager adjusted their throughputs to a desired level. Once the fairness controls were active, P2P traffic shrank to less than 2 percent of the capacity.
The upshot is that directing traffic in terms of flows rather than individual packets improves the utilization of networks. By eliminating the excessive delays and random packet losses typical of traditional routers, flow management fills communication links with more data and protects voice and video streams. And it does all that without requiring changes to the time-tested TCP/IP protocol.
So is the Internet really broken? Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. But the 40-year-old router sure needs an overhaul. I should know.
Router Master
Internet pioneer Lawrence G. Roberts has reengineered the network router to handle streaming media.
The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it. In 1967, I wrote the first plan for the ancestor of today’s Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, and then led the team that designed and built it. The main idea was to share the available network infrastructure by sending data as small, independent packets, which, though they might arrive at different times, would still generally make it to their destinations. The small computers that directed the data traffic—I called them Interface Message Processors, or IMPs—evolved into today’s routers, and for a long time they’ve kept up with the Net’s phenomenal growth. Until now.
Today Internet traffic is rapidly expanding and also becoming more varied and complex. In particular, we’re seeing an explosion in voice and video applications. Millions regularly use Skype to place calls and go to YouTube to share videos. Services like Hulu and Netflix, which let users watch TV shows and movies on their computers, are growing ever more popular. Corporations are embracing videoconferencing and telephony systems based on the Internet Protocol, or IP. What’s more, people are now streaming content not only to their PCs but also to iPhones and BlackBerrys, media receivers like the Apple TV, and gaming consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 3. Communication and entertainment are shifting to the Net.
But this shift is not without its problems. Unlike e-mail and static Web pages, which can handle network hiccups, voice and video deteriorate under transmission delays as short as a few milliseconds. And therein lies the problem with traditional IP packet routers: They can’t guarantee that a YouTube clip will stream smoothly to a user’s computer. They treat the video packets as loose data entities when they ought to treat them as flows.
Consider a conventional router receiving two packets that are part of the same video. The router looks at the first packet’s destination address and consults a routing table. It then holds the packet in a queue until it can be dispatched. When the router receives the second packet, it repeats those same steps, not ”remembering” that it has just processed an earlier piece of the same video. The addition of these small tasks may not look like much, but they can quickly add up, making networks more costly and less flexible.
At this point you might be asking yourself, ”But what’s the problem, really, if I use things like Skype and YouTube without a hitch?” In fact, you enjoy those services only because the Internet has been grossly overprovisioned. Network operators have deployed mountains of optical communication systems that can handle traffic spikes, but on average these run much below their full capacity. Worse, peer-to-peer (P2P) services, used to download movies and other large files, are eating more and more bandwidth. P2P participants may constitute only 5 percent of the users in some networks, while consuming 75 percent of the bandwidth.
So although users may not perceive the extent of the problem, things are already dire for many Internet service providers and network operators. Keeping up with bandwidth demand has required huge outlays of cash to build an infrastructure that remains underutilized. To put it another way, we’ve thrown bandwidth at a problem that really requires a computing solution.
With these issues in mind, my colleagues and I at Anagran, a start-up I founded in Sunnyvale, Calif., set out to reinvent the router. We focused on a simple yet powerful idea: If a router can identify the first packet in a flow, it can just prescreen the remaining packets and bypass the routing and queuing stages. This approach would boost throughput, reduce packet loss and delays, allow new capabilities like fairness controls—and while we’re at it, save power, size, and cost. We call our approach flow management.
To understand how flow management works, it helps to describe the limitations of current packet routers. In these systems, incoming packets go first to a collection of custom microchips responsible for the routing work. The chips read each packet’s destination address and query a routing table. This table determines the packet’s next hop as it travels through the network. Then another collection of chips puts the packets into output queues where they await transmission. These two groups of chips—they include application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, as well as expensive high-speed memory such as ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) and static random access memory (SRAM)—consume 80 percent of the power and space in a router.
During periods of peak traffic, a router may be swamped with more packets than it can handle. The router will then pile up more packets in its queue, establishing a buffer that it can discharge when traffic slows down. If the buffer fills up, though, the router will have to discard some packets. The lost packets trigger a control mechanism that tells the originator to slow down its transmission. This self-controlling behavior is a critical feature of the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, the primary protocol we rely on with the Internet. It’s kept the network stable over decades.
Indeed, during most of my career as a network engineer, I never guessed that the queuing and discarding of packets in routers would create serious problems. More recently, though, as my Anagran colleagues and I scrutinized routers during peak workloads, we spotted two serious problems. First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall. Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays, significantly reducing throughput (TCP throughput is inversely proportional to delay). These two effects hinder traffic for all applications, and some transmissions can take 10 times as long as others to complete.
Flow Control
The Anagran FR-1000 can be plugged into existing networks and can manage up to 4 million simultaneous flows.
As I talk to network operators all over the world, I hear one story after another about how the problem is only getting worse. Data traffic has been doubling virtually every year since 1970. Thanks to the development of high-capacity optical systems like dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM), bandwidth cost has been halved every year, so operators don’t have to spend more than they did the year before to keep up with the doubling in traffic. On the other hand, routers, as pieces of computing equipment, have followed Moore’s Law, and the cost of routing 1 megabit per second has decreased at a slower pace, halving every 1.5 years. Without a major change in router design, this cost discrepancy means that every three years a network operator will have to double its spending on infrastructure expansion.
Flow management can solve this capacity crunch. The concept of data flow might be more easily understood in the case of a voice or video stream, but it applies to all traffic over the Internet. Key to our approach is the fact that each packet contains a full identification of the flow it belongs to. This identification, encapsulated by the packet’s header according to the Internet Protocol version 4, or IPv4, consists of five values: source address, source port, destination address, destination port, and protocol.
All packets that are part of the same flow carry the same five-value identification. So in flow management, you have to effectively process—or route—only the first packet. You’d then take the routing parameters that apply to that first packet and store them in a hash table, a data structure that allows for fast lookup. When a new packet comes in, you’d check if its identification is in the hash, and if it is, that means the new packet is part of a flow you’ve already routed. You’d then quickly dispatch—the more accurate term is ”switch”—the packet straight to an output port, thus saving time and power.
If traffic gets too heavy, you’ll still have to discard packets. The big advantage is that now you can do it intelligently. By monitoring the packets as they’re coming in, you can track in real time the duration, throughput, bytes transferred, average packet size, and other metrics of every flow. For example, if a flow has a steady throughput, which is the case with voice and video, you can avoid discarding such packets, protecting these stream-based transmissions. For other types of traffic, such as Web browsing, you can selectively discard just enough packets to achieve specific rates without stalling those transmissions.
This capability is especially convenient for managing network overload due to P2P traffic. Conventionally, P2P is filtered out using a technique called deep packet inspection, or DPI, which looks at the data portion of all packets. With flow management, you can detect P2P because it relies on many long-duration flows per user. Then, without peeking into the packets’ data, you can limit their transmission to rates you deem fair.
Since the early days of the ARPANET, I’ve always thought that routers should manage flows rather than individual packets. Why hasn’t it been done before? The reason is that memory chips were too expensive until not long ago. You need lots of memory to store the hash table with routing parameters of each flow. (A 1 gigabit-per-second data trunk often carries about 100 000 flows.) If you were to keep a flow table on one IMP of 40 years ago, you’d spend US $1 million in memory. But about a decade ago, as memory cost kept falling, it started to make sense economically to design flow-management equipment.
In 1999, I founded Caspian Networks to develop large terabit flow routers, which I planned to sell to the carriers that maintain the Internet’s core infrastructure. That market, however, proved hard to crack—the carriers seem satisfied with overprovisioning, as well as techniques like traffic caching and compression, which ameliorate congestion without addressing the roots of the problem. In early 2004, I decided to leave Caspian and start Anagran, focusing on smaller flow-management equipment to solve the overload and fairness problems. We designed the equipment to operate at the edge of networks, the point where an Internet service provider aggregates traffic from its broadband subscribers or where a corporate network connects to the outside world. Virtually all network overload occurs at the edge.
Anagran’s flow manager, the FR-1000, can replace routers and DPI systems or may simply be added to existing networks. It supports up to 4 million simultaneous flows—a combined 80 Gb/s in throughput. Its hardware consists of inexpensive, off-the-shelf components as opposed to ASICs, which increase development costs. We implemented our flow-routing algorithms in a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, and the router’s memory consists of standard high-speed DRAM. The FR-1000 sells in different models, starting at less than $30 000.
Like a regular router, the FR-1000 has input and output ports. But the similarities end there. Recall that in a traditional router the routing and queuing chips consume 80 percent of the power and space. By routing only the first packet of a flow, the FR-1000’s chips do much less work, consuming about 1 percent of the power that a conventional router requires.
Even more significant, the FR-1000 does away entirely with the queuing chips. During congestion, it adjusts each flow rate at its input instead. If an incoming flow has a rate deemed too high, the equipment discards a single packet to signal the transmission to slow down. And rather than just delaying or dropping packets as in regular routers, in the FR-1000 the output provides feedback to the input. If there’s bandwidth available, the equipment increases the flow rates or accepts more flows at the input; if bandwidth is scarce, the router reduces flow rates or discards packets.
By eliminating power-hungry circuitry, the FR-1000 consumes about 300 watts, or one-fifth the total power of a comparable router, and occupies one unit in a standard rack, a tenth of the space that other routers fill. We estimate that the equipment allows network operators to reduce their operating costs per gigabit per second by a factor of 10.
How Flow Routing Works
Flow managers keep track of streams of packets and can protect voice and video transmissions while reducing peer-to-peer traffic.
Measurements of the FR-1000 in our laboratories and by customers showed that networks equipped with the flow manager were able to carry many more streams of voice and video without quality degradation.
Another important capability we tested was whether the equipment could maintain quality of transmissions during congestion. The test involved a 100-Mb/s data trunk using a conventional router and another that included the Anagran flow manager. We progressively added TCP flows and measured the time required to load a specific Web page. The conventional router began to discard packets once traffic filled the trunk’s capacity, and the time to load the Web page increased exponentially as we kept adding flows. The Anagran flow manager was able to control the rate of the flows, slowing them down to accommodate new ones, and the load time increased only linearly. The result: At 1000 flows, the flow manager delivered the page in about 15 seconds, whereas the conventional router required nearly 65 seconds.
Another capability we tested was fairness controls. Currently, P2P applications consume an excessive amount of bandwidth, because they use multiple flows per user—from 10 to even 1000. But services like cloud computing, which rely on Web applications constantly accessing servers that store and process data, are likely to expand the problem. We conducted measurements at a U.S. university whose wireless network was overwhelmed by P2P traffic, with a small fraction of users consuming up to 70 percent of the bandwidth. Early attempts to solve the problem using DPI systems didn’t work, because P2P applications often encrypt packets, making them hard to recognize. The Anagran equipment was able to detect P2P by watching the number and duration of flows per user. And instead of simply shutting down the P2P connections, the flow manager adjusted their throughputs to a desired level. Once the fairness controls were active, P2P traffic shrank to less than 2 percent of the capacity.
The upshot is that directing traffic in terms of flows rather than individual packets improves the utilization of networks. By eliminating the excessive delays and random packet losses typical of traditional routers, flow management fills communication links with more data and protects voice and video streams. And it does all that without requiring changes to the time-tested TCP/IP protocol.
So is the Internet really broken? Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. But the 40-year-old router sure needs an overhaul. I should know.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Al Qaida: Western Spies Multiply "Like Locusts" by Asymmetric Warfare (Internet | OSINT | HaYishuv)
The jihadis - undoubtedly responding to al-Libi's recently released book "Guidance on the Ruling of the Muslim Spy" - have launched a counter-intelligence effort aimed at exposing the many spies in their midst, starting with this alleged Jordanian intelligence asset.
Of course, one can't rule out that the "spy" is a real jihadi, and that the erstwhile spy-catchers are really working for Jordanian intelligence.
Remember kids, just because it's non-kinetic doesn't mean it's not lethal. If we convince you that your brother is a spy - that's non-kinetic. If you act on that conviction and kill your brother - that's lethal.
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