ALGIERS, Algeria — The Pentagon held a screening in 2003 of ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ a movie about French troops winning control of the Algerian capital. President Bush says that he recently read Alistair Horne’s authoritative history on the war, ‘A Savage War of Peace.’ And last fall, Christopher Harmon, who teaches a course on the Algerian war at the Marine Corps University (MCU) in Washington, lectured marines in Iraq about the Algerian model. Here in Algeria, some of those who participated in that war find little use in the comparison. But the US military – and the American public – continues to study the 1954-62 Algerian war of independence for lessons on how to fight the insurgency in Iraq. ‘There are very, very few examples of modern insurgency, and for urban [insurgencies] it’s basically this [war],’ says Thomas X. Hammes, a US insurgency expert and author of a book on guerrilla warfare, ‘The Sling and the Stone.’ While France ultimately withdrew from Algeria, ‘the French did much of the counterinsurgency very skillfully,’ says Mr. Harmon, who is the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at MCU. ‘The American military has been intrigued by the […]
DELHI — Anyone wishing to escape the human crush of India’s teeming capital to visit the marble splendour of the Taj Mahal can travel by train in just two painless hours. Alternatively, they can struggle to negotiate the crowded single-lane road that heads south to the city of Agra in a journey that can take up five hours. But if India’s roads seem cluttered and inadequate, things are set to get much worse. Over the coming months, a series of car manufacturers are set to unveil new models aimed at India’s burgeoning middle class. Remarkably, some of the new cars designed to entice the wallets of India’s newly wealthy consumers will be priced as cheaply as $3,000 (£1,500). One model, due to be available as early as next year, has been dubbed the ‘People’s Car’. This explosion of new affordable vehicles is poised to have a number of dramatic effects on the country – most visibly adding further traffic to roads that are often filled with rickshaws, bicycles, people and animals. Yet while consumer demand for such vehicles is high, there are also considerable concerns about the environmental impact these countless thousands of new cars will have, […]
Arctic ponds that have hosted diverse ecosystems for thousands of years are now disappearing because of global warming, according to a new study. These ponds, which lie atop bedrock, freeze solid in the winter and then melt for a few months each summer, becoming hot spots of activity in the forbidding Arctic terrain. ‘If you fly over, you see them everywhere,’ said study leader John Smol of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. The ponds brim with moss, algae, fairy shrimp, and other organisms that need liquid water to live during the summer. The ponds vary in size, with some reaching three feet (a meter) deep and around several hundred feet across. But now these ponds have reached a tipping point, according to a study that appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. Some of these ponds are going bone dry in the summer or shrinking to tiny puddles, while others are a fraction of their former size, because of global warming believed to be caused by humans. The wetlands around some of the ponds are also disappearing, threatening the creatures that […]
Disbelieving laughter was the early reaction when a senior official told hundreds of junior U.S. diplomats gathered for an emergency State Department meeting yesterday that their country needed them to spend the summer in New Orleans and Portsmouth, N.H. Smiles quickly faded as Patrick Kennedy, the department’s director of management policy, assured them he was serious. They were all being placed on passport duty, detailed to help reduce a half-million backlog in issuing travel documents that has left many Americans with ruined overseas travel plans this summer, he told them. New passport regulations this year have led to an overwhelming demand for passports, extending the normal six-week turnaround time to many months. ‘We are mobilizing the State Department’ to fulfill a responsibility it has held since 1789, Kennedy said. More specifically, the State Department is mobilizing about 300 junior officials without the clout to say no. They include all the members of the prestigious Presidential Management Fellows program, the department’s main entry portal for top-flight recruits with graduate degrees and leadership potential. Participation in the two-year program almost guarantees a diplomatic career. New hires in a separate career-entry program were also informed that they have been dragooned […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
