Indians in Afghanistan

Here's the Indian former High Commissioner to Pakistan getting all in a tizz about how those incompetent foreigners (Americans, Europeans, anyone not Indian) have made such an awful mess in Afghanistan.

India recently got very upset when the second Indian engineer working on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan was murdered by the Taliban. Obviously very sad, but curious all the same, given the enormous numbers of Indians killed every year within Indian territory thanks to various insurgencies, Naxal (Maoist) attacks, etc.

His ranting (I think that's the word for it) only illustrates the looming conundrum for India, as it grows into a reluctant regional and world power. He complains about everything -- the Americans trust Pakistan too much, the Americans are once again using their pro-Pakistan relationship to sell India down the river, the Afghan military aren't being trained properly, the NATO forces are full of weak-kneed cowards who have no stomach for combat, etc, etc.

Thus raising the obvious question -- why doesn't India do something about it, since the unwritten subtext in complaining about all these other nations is that they're not doing a very good job "compared to us". But when he gets to it, he skips quickly over the question of deploying Indian forces in Afghanistan as an immediate non-starter. And doesn't explain it any more beyond that. Because of course, India doesn't do that sort of thing. It just sits on its ass and whines about how everyone else is messing it up, like the fat kid in PE class sitting on the boundary of a cricket match and criticising all other players, while refusing to strap on some pads himself.

Here are some unpleasant realisations that I predict will slowly dawn on the Indian political class once old men like this one fade from the scene and take their non-aligned snobbery with them. 1: Great powers are nations that act. 2: If India does not act, within its immediate region, then its security fate will ALWAYS be to sit on its ass and complain that other people aren't doing a very good job. 3: This will inevitably mean that India will have to do some things that are highly unpopular with the neighbours, the UN... hell, possibly even the Americans. That's what national interest means.

This notion that India might actually have to do something for itself one day is very unpalatable within Indian political classes, thanks to a lifetime's study of anti-American socialism. The idea that India might have to do the "American thing" one day and deploy forces to foreign conflicts in the name of national security gives men such as this the jitters precisely because such behavior is seen as American.

Now, there are some very good reasons not to send Indian troops into Afghanistan. It would surely upset the Pakistanis, who won't like being surrounded by Indians on two sides, thus jeopardizing the Indo-Pakistan peace process. That peace process is a very good thing, and is probably the best hope of moderating the Islamists in Pakistan over the long term, by encouraging Pakistan's already-impressive return to economic growth, and the cultural liberalisation that usually accompanies it. But clearly, from reading this article, it's clear the Indian political class wouldn't commit troops even if the Pakistanis were begging them to.

India has a big army, with its foundations in British-style discipline, and it's modernising as fast as the booming economy can afford. They didn't have a great record in WW2 (I recall an Australian soldier who fought in Burma telling stories about the 'Galloping Guwahatis', so-called because they ran like hell at the first sign of gunfire) but fighting for an independent India against Pakistan, their record is fairly robust -- three straight victories, four if you count the 1999 Kargil crisis. If they ever actually wanted to send a few thousands, or even tens of thousands, to Afghanistan, they could certainly do so, and would probably be very effective.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes the next generation of Indian leaders to shed the non-aligned mindset. India is currently one of the biggest contributors to UN peacekeeping missions, but peacekeepers operate in straight jackets, and I'm sure the former-High Commissioner would protest very loudly if Afghanistan were left to UN blue helmets. If you expect to actually fight, best not send the UN. What Indian unilateralism will actually look like, when it finally arrives, is a question that could change a lot of equations in that part of the world... and possibly some others, in time.

Soldiers of the Future

Here's a post from Strategy Page about a concept the US military called Land Warrior, for making US ground forces more high tech. It caught my eye because a lot of the concepts in Land Warrior are remarkably similar to an idea I arrived at for the Cassandra Kresnov Series. I called it tac-net.

Tac-net is essentially a series of elaborate software programs that integrate all battlefield units, enabling them all to operate off the same page. It's a highly encrypted network that works as an 'information sponge', absorbing every available piece of information from every available source, and forming it into a single battlefield overview that is redisseminated out to every combatant, giving them instant situational awareness. Of course, my soldiers are operating five hundred years from now, have radically advanced processing power and neural uplinks that feed the information directly into their brains... but from the Strategy Page article, it looks like the military's working on a more basic version right now, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

Tac-net loves information. From soldiers' GPS data, it knows to within a few meters where every tank, helicopter and infantryman is on the battlefield. It can then cross-reference this with visual-recognition software, taking feeds from small cameras on vehicles, or on soldiers' helmets or rifle-scopes. It recognises features from satellite scans of the terrain (in a long war in Afghanistan or Iraq, I don't doubt they've made topographical maps down to the finest detail) a road here, a field there, a patch of trees... figures distances, cross-references them from the feeds from other sources, and from there is able to pinpoint everyone's location down to the millimeter. Everyone knows, in real time, exactly where everyone else is. This is excellent if you don't want your own guys to shoot you -- an all too-common occurrence even on modern battlefields.

It also gathers information on the enemy. If visual recognition software spots an enemy combatant, it highlights the location on the map, so that everyone can see -- not just the one guy who spotted him (the Strategy Page article says Land Warrior maps are viewed projected onto an eyepiece. Obviously officers would spend more time looking at maps than anyone else -- lower ranks being too busy shooting at people). If a target is sighted, then disappears, tacnet could change that 'blip's' colour, so soldiers know it's a 'last sighted location'. Extra feeds from UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), satellites, manned recon aircraft, etc would all be integrated together to add to the picture. If anyone IDs an enemy, or an unidentified, everyone on tac-net immediately knows about it, without a need for time-consuming, and sometimes confusing radio communications warning about the bad guy behind the next wall.

This tactical picture is integrated further into individual soldiers' targeting sights. Rifles carry laser-sighters, not necessarily to help soldiers to aim (most well trained infantry are pretty crack shots without that stuff) but to let tac-net know what you're shooting at. If you highlight a friendly, immediately it squawks at you. If it has any information on something else you highlight, it'll immediately show you on the eyepiece display. Also, I guess audio-recognition software is going places these days too -- if soldiers identify things about the enemy tac-net doesn't already know, and say so within range of a microphone, tac-net will hear and make further updates. If you wanted to get really fancy, I'd guess tac-net could triangulate the position of unseen gunmen by listening to the sound of gunfire from one location, cross-referencing that against the same gunshot from another location, then figuring out where the shots came from based on the known location of both microphones against the constant of the speed of sound.

When you have instant situational awareness, the possibilities are endless. If it knows the position of gunmen (although obviously it can only know what some source has actually identified) then tac-net could display danger zones, or 'kill zones' that would appear as a red haze across a patch of empty air. For example, it if knows for certain there's a sniper on a particular rooftop, it can calculate every spot on the topographical map that the sniper could theoretically hit. If a soldier comes close to one, tac-net will let him know, and show him where the fire-shadow is so he can stay out of sight. Here of course is where it becomes problematic for combat vets -- it reaches a point where it starts telling you how to fight. Obviously experienced vets will find that annoying -- being a vet is about being able to judge relative risks from experience, and no vet wants a software program thinking it knows better. Vets will turn those settings way down, while inexperienced soldiers will turn them up, and hopefully be saved from fatal rookie mistakes (standing in the wrong spot with a sniper around, for example).

I'm sure hundreds of additional applications would come to light once it began to be used, and feedback from soldiers would be crucial. But I'd reckon it would become a 'soldiers' system', something that is constantly upgraded according to their feedback, and is flexible enough for each of them to use according to their own preferences. Probably the military would end up giving it some military-esque concept name like a 'knowledge multiplier' or whatever. It just seems to me that the biggest battlefield conundrum yet to be solved by modern technology is something that allows the average soldier to know what the hell's going on, and to make sure that his knowledge of what the hell's going on is the same as every other guy's.

Bloody Servers

My server was to blame for the very long downtime, it wouldn't let me post for about a week due to upgrades. All fixed now, I think... and I was THAT close to just switching servers.

Wie-cked

So Michelle Wie made the cut in a men's golf tournament. Yeah, it wasn't a top-quality field, and she didn't do so well on the final day, but it does continue the ongoing trend of Wie continuing to achieve the things that her critics assured everyone she couldn't, and those critics continuing to shift the goalposts further and further back, instead of just admitting they were wrong. So what else is new.

I'm not much of a golf fan, and I don't particularly feel like joining the bandwagon of mass-worship and adulation for any new pop-culture icon, but this is pretty interesting. What's so interesting about it for me, as an SF writer, is that not all amazing future developments in society will be predicated on whizz-bang new technology or visits by alien spacecraft, but will rather be a continuation of the same old thing that's always gone on -- social evolution. Amazing to think, for example, that the difference between some male and female sportspeople is far less than previously thought. And very, very threatening to a lot of people, male and female alike, because it would mean that our present understandings of gender are not universally accurate, nor genetically pre-determined, and that a lot of this stuff is pretty free-form in nature.

I'm suspicious about a few sports too, not just golf. Cricket, for example (non-Commonwealth readers can tune out here if they wish, at the risk of missing some brilliant insight). I recall Australia's recently-retired best female player, Belinda Clarke, saying that no female batsmen she knew could play against the men, primarily because they lacked the wrist-strength. But then, I recall it being said of women's basketball that women would never have good pullup jumpers because they lacked the leg strength. As participation of girls in basketball boomed, it became apparent that there were elite athletes out there who DID have what most did not, and could do pretty much everything except dunk. Women's participation in cricket, however, remains tiny, so there's no way even Belinda Clarke is anywhere near what the best female players COULD be... if there were a few hundred thousand juniors, like there are for the men. Most women can't do these things, no, but elite female athletes are no more representative of most women than Kobe Bryant or Tiger Woods are representative of most men. That's why they're elite, and we pay them millions to watch them play. But elite female athletes are always having to battle against this silly mentality where women are judged by what they supposedly CAN'T do, rather than what they can.

So what can Michelle Wie do? Well, as a 16-year-old, she can hit a ball over 300 yards. Apparently that's good. It's also the only aspect of the game of golf that could be conceivably limited by gender. If she can do that, there's no reason I can see why she shouldn't just play against men all the time, if she chooses. Of course, there's no guarantee she'll succeed -- she might miss puts and fluff bunker shots under pressure, but that'll just be good old fashioned human failure, not a female one.

As for cricket, I'd love to see the girls given all the same opportunities as the boys, instead of being forcibly segregated at certain ages. It's real Dark Ages stuff, really. I mean, how good would Ricky Ponting be (Australia's best batsman) if segregated from boys at age 15, (or whatever it is) not given a chance to face the fastest bowlers, play on the best pitches, receive the best coaching, etc, etc, etc? His development would have suffered enormously. In fact, he'd probably play like a girl. So what would a top girl play like, if selected from a huge junior talent pool, and given all the same development opportunities that the top boys are? I wonder.

One thing's for certain -- the fuss made by Michelle Wie in the PGA, or Danica Patrick in the IRL, is nothing compared to what would happen if a girl made a half-century for Australia in Islamabad against Pakistan. In the men's competition.

Crossover Quote

So Tobias S Buckell read Crossover recently, and said it was "An awesomely zesty adventure set amongst a nicely realized
multiethnic future. A blast to read"

Or at least, that's what I thought he'd said, but it turns out Lou Anders knows differently, writing in a recent post (the direct link to which mysteriously doesn't work) -- "Tobias S. Buckell wrote to let me know that he thought Joel Shepherd's upcoming Crossover, for which he kindly provided a blurb, was "a [expletive deleted] blast" - wish I could put that on the cover!-"

Thanks Tobias!

He goes on to praise David Louis Edelman's Infoquake too. It's just an all round love fest here in SF world...