Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
I bet Al Qaeda would make its Companies House filings on time
Quite interesting, if amazingly wordy for the content, document from the RAND corporation. Apparently AQI was a fairly standard insurgency operation almost exactly in line with Che Guevara's book on guerilla warfare, and it had quartermastering, payroll and means for "living off the land", in terms of channelling the proceeds of crime and robbery into the struggle. I'm always very wary of treating things like this as complete records (they're unaudited, and we really don't know how much off-the-books looting the AQI gangs carried out, so the numbers for individual income of insurgents have to be regarded as very shaky), but it's interesting withal. They also act quite surprised at the idea that terrorist groups have fixed costs and overheads, which IMO is probably more likely to account for the kinda-sorta experience curves/power law relationships that Aaron Clauset finds in terrorist attacks than anything interesting about self-organised criticality.
This is the sort of central organisation that we don't think exists in Afghanistan, btw; but I must admit I was surprised at how easy it apparently was for AQI to organise a shadow payments system based on cash couriers moving around the place.
this item posted by the management 12/22/2010 12:33:00 AM
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