I figured this (geo)graphic from Digital Globe’s WorldView satellite was worth putting in oversized.

Thanks to my friend Jeff Kerridge from Digital Globe for getting me this image, even though he was in London for the DGI 2009 conference.  This shot came from the WorldView satellite with its panchromatic sensor.  Quickbird was not over DC at the time.

This shot must have been taken pretty early after dawn (I don’t have the acquisition time), as the Mall was packed to capacity before 11am.  I was on the parade route in front of the White House (thank you to the Gibbses for the tickets), in order to get picture of my nephew marching as part of the T.C. Williams JROTC.

As for my favorite part of the inauguration speech:

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers … our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

As for remote sensing, it will be interesting to see what the Obama Administration does about the BASIC satellite program.  Perhaps if they follow previous White House policy on remote sensing (sorry, the old White House website is gone as of noon yesterday, so I can’t yet find a link to it), they will launch more commercial satellites to meet the BASIC Tier 2 requirements.  In my opinion, this is one Bush Administration policy that should definitely carry over.  Frankly, just make it part of the Stimulus Plan!

Then, for the next inauguration, we will have better commercial satellite coverage.

This (geo)graphic is another WWW orphan, but is the best cartographic representation I could find of Alexander the Great’s exploits.

As I read about the growing quagmire in Afghanistan, I find that journalists and opinionmakers offer different historical premises for their narratives.  For instance, that foreign powers have tried to conquer what is now Afghanistan for centuries, and that everyone since Alexander the Great has failed. (That is, it can’t be won, so don’t try.)  Or that Afghanistan is part of a strategically indefensible Central Asian landmass, which has seen would-be conquerors come and go for millennia, with the people’s occupying the Afghan wilderness persisting. (That is, you may conquer the territory, but the people will just wait you out until you leave, so why try in the first place.)

Actually, this wilderness has been invaded and settled by many – from the Persians, ancient Macedonians (Alexander the Great), and Indians (far before Christ or Muhammad walked the Earth, mind you) to the Ghaznavid Empire and the Mongols (Genghis Khan) – each with different motivations, different strategic considerations.  Just peruse this 29 part chronology of the powers that have sought or achieved control the territories in which modern Afghanistan resides.  Many have controlled this area for as long as the US has been around.

As for the notion that the Af/Pak border peoples have persisted despite the comings and goings of conquering armies, I need to dig for some  mitochondrial population genetics results to better understand the impacts of these invasions on the gene pool of the current day Afghans with whom we are engaged in armed conflict.  Somehow, I bet genetic anthropologists have not been wondering about the Af/Pak border over much of the past decade.

What I find most interesting is that there seems to have been a higher level of religious tolerance in the region in the past than current is exercised by the folks in the region today.  Commentators often talk about how the Taliban seek to take the country back to some medieval past.  If only they wished to take the region back to its ancient past, we would all be better off.

This (geo)graphic was developed by Doug Suisman in a 2005 RAND Report.

As the crisis in Gaza transforms into a ground operation that is likely to be much more costly than the air strikes, someone needs to be thinking of the end game.  I am unconvinced that anyone is.  All we do know is that violence breeds more violence, and that this operation will make a new generation of Palestinians (and indeed Muslims worldwide) prone to anti-Israel and anti-Western violence – unless something very bold and different is done.  So, why don’t we try something new.  President-elect Obama should evaluate a 100% commitment to the immediate implementation of Doug Suisman’s Arc – the boldest land use planning exercise I have ever seen.

It is a concrete idea flowing from a study by the RAND Corporation’s Center for Middle East Public Policy, entitled “The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State”.  The study was financed by 87 year old American property developer, Guilford Glazier, who remembered the transformational power of the Tennessee Valley Authority during the Great Depression.  Glazier wanted an answer to the challenge of how to accommodate the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees created by the 1948 war.

Suisman met that challenge, and more.  The study was not done with any timeline in mind (as the original research was done primarily during the second intifada).  Indeed, times have changed since then, and I believe that Suisman’s Arc proposal is ready made for the New Year.  A proposed Palestinian national infrastructure corridor linking Gaza and the West Bank, Suisman’s Arc offers a vision of a thriving Palestinian state inclusive of urban centers connected by a rapid rail line, a national water carrier, energy generation and transmission, telecommunications lines, and a national park system of parks, forests, reserves, and farmlands.  Palestinian’s have expressed great interest.  Who wouldn’t?

A $40 billion price tag has been estimated, which I believe could quickly be raised from the US ($10B, Saudi Arabia $10B, India $5B, Israel $5B, EU $5B, China $5B – given the global recognition of the criticality of the Palestinian situation to a variety of global conflicts.  And, there’s even a video explaining the proposal on Suisman’s website (www.suisman.com)…which is much more than most policy proposals in Washington, DC can say for themselves.  The Milken Institute hosted a nice discussion on the topic.

I, like many, have been reading all of the reporting and commentary since the truce came to an end.  But, I find the entire dialogue completely unsatisfactory, as there is no affirmative vision for an end-game.  I don’t know that diplomats and security professionals can articulate a meaningful end-game without that which only a land use planner can bring.  “Design Meets Diplomacy” is the title of one Business Week article on the Arc proposal.  The title couldn’t be better.  Rather than having politicians and diplomats hammer out the sovereign state of Palestine, why don’t we focus on what it could look like after a peace accord is signed.

President-elect Obama could change the game forever by making Suisman’s Arc real.

This map demonstrates that the Library of Congress Federal Research Division needs a budget increase.

The other day, I lucked upon a discussion with David Kaplan on National Public Radio, who has written extensively on the topic of international and transnational organized crime.  In the wake of the recent Mumbai attack, the discussion addressed the link between terrorism and criminal syndicates.  But, toward the end of the 40 minute program, a somewhat different theme took hold.  Rather than talking about the relationship between terrorism and organized crime, Kaplan began to talk of terrorism as criminal groups, engaged in illegal activity/racketeering, but with ideological motivations.  After having the world’s troubles framed in terms of the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) for so long, it was interesting to hear a somewhat more nuanced take on complexity of the threats we face.  I have always been more of a “struggle against fast changing, transnational networks of nefarious actors”, but it doesn’t make much of an acronym.  It has always seemed that it is hard to meaningfully separate terrorism, proliferation, illicit finance, organized crime, human trafficking, and even genocide.  One often fuels another, though perhaps from another spot on the globe.

This report (from which the map above was clipped) on the Tri-border Area (TBA) between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina captures the co-dependence between nefarious actors of all types.  Contrast it with this DoD GWOT type analysis on the same region.  While the former may open up the aperture too much for some, I believe it at least gives one a better sense of the actual mechanisms/levers that must be worked in order to dampen bad actors.

Perhaps we could evolve beyond GWOT as an organizing concept.  It would require more intelligence and properly targeted development resources, but characterizing the problem too narrowly will ensure failure.