The Mound of Sound

It looks as though Britain is having second thoughts about the viability of the Karzai government and its prospects for ever putting an end to the Taliban threat.

Afghanistan has just ordered two Westerners out, identified in the Sydney Morning Herald as “the acting European Union mission head, Michael Semple, of Ireland, and a senior UN official, Marvin Patterson, of Britain.” An Afghan government source is said to have told the paper that the officials not only met with Taliban representatives but also gave them money.

Now word is out that British intelligence agents have also been dealing with the Taliban.

AGENTS from MI6 held secret talks with Taliban leaders despite a pledge by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that his country would not negotiate with terrorists.
Officers from the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6’s official name – held discussions, or jirgas, with senior insurgents several times in the northern summer.

“The SIS officers were understood to have sought peace directly with the Taliban, with them coming across as some sort of armed militia,” a source said. The British would also provide “mentoring” for the Taliban.

The disclosure came just two weeks after the Prime Minister told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

Meanwhile, Canadian defence minister Peter MacKay dished up turkey in Kandahar. Go get’em, Pete!

Peter MacKay accuses Iran of giving weapons to the Taliban for use against NATO forces in Afghanistan.

MacKay, who is not known to suffer the burden of excessive credibility, failed to explain why Shiite Iran would be interested in helping a fundamentalist Sunni radical group in neighbouring Afghanistan. Nor did he provide any evidence of Iranian weaponry nor any credible military expert to verify his claim.

If MacKay is to be believed, however, it’s curious that he didn’t explain just what he’s going to do about the threat to Canadian forces. Maybe he and Harpo ought to fly right into Tehran and tear a strip off the mullahs and ayatollahs who run Iran. Perhaps he ought to seal off the Iranian border. Surely he’s got to do something. Or not.

A few months back I saw an interview with a Canadian army ordinance expert who lamented that there was such an abundance of discarded explosives and other materials littering Afghanistan that the only key part to build IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, in short supply were the household batteries required to power the detonators. Those, he said, were being brought in quite easily from Pakistan.

A former employee of a British security contractor in Iraq says his company deliberately withheldfrom British officials information about the infiltration and corruption of the police services.

The company, ArmorGroup, was hired to train Iraqi police in the Basra area. One of its employees, turned whistle-blower, says the company told its employees not to pass on intelligence they acquired in their daily visits to the Iraqi police stations. Colin Williamson told British MPs about a source he cultivated within the Iraq police.

“This officer was a brilliant source of information in the Basra region. At one stage I was moved to a very dangerous place in the city called the Old State Building. This officer used to let me know in advance when there would be a mortar attack on the base. Each time he gave me prior warning I would go to a certain company commander, a major in the British army, and in turn warn him about it.”

…we were told not to report back any intelligence we picked up there, not to hand it over to the British military. Why? Because our bosses and probably, in turn, the FCO didn’t want to expose how corrupt and infiltrated by the militia the police were.”

The British Army has now turned the Basra region over to Iraqi security forces, the very outfits said to now be dominated by sectarian militias.

The Guardian reports a study of wounded Vietnam vets has found that certain types of head wounds appear to prevent soldiers from developing post traumatic stress disorder.

The unexpected side-effect emerged from a study of nearly 200 former US soldiers in Vietnam, which found that those who had suffered shrapnel injuries to specific regions of the brain did not go on to develop the psychiatric illness.

Jordan Grafman, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Maryland, and his team took brain scans of 193 veterans, all of whom had brain injuries from fragments of shrapnel, either from incoming shells or from explosive devices rigged up to booby traps.

They also scanned 52 war veterans who had been in combat but did not suffer any brain injuries.

“Some of our patients could remember events that were very traumatic, such as attacking villages and seeing comrades dying, but it didn’t seem to affect them in the same way,” said Grafman, whose study was published in Nature Neuroscience yesterday.

Following the brain scans the veterans were divided into two groups, depending on whether they had a history of PTSD or not. When they looked at the distribution of brain injuries among the two groups the doctors realised that troops with damage to one of two parts of the brain were extremely unlikely to have PTSD.

One of the brain regions involved was identified as the amygdala, an almond-sized bundle of neurons in the seat of the brain that is important for interpreting fear and anxiety.
The second region is known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC, a larger structure found nearer the front of the brain, which is also thought to be involved in processing fear.

…none of the 50 men who suffered damage to the amygdala had ever experienced PTSD. Those who sustained a shrapnel wound to the vmPFC were also less likely to have PTSD, with 18% affected. In comparison, some 48% of those with no brain injuries and 40% of men with any other kind of brain injury had been diagnosed with PTSD.

What if you called the fire department and only one guy showed up? A fire truck with one firefighter and that’s it. Ridiculous, never happen, right?

That is happening in cash-strapped towns in Massacheusetts. From the Boston Globe:

At a fatal fire in Gloucester earlier this month, a single ladder operator drove to the blaze alone – a situation that officials there say is common. In the financially troubled town of Randolph, firefighters have been forced to ride alone as well, said Captain Jim Hurley.

And firefighters in other communities say they routinely roll to fires with as few as two people onboard ladder trucks or fire engines, leaving one to go into the burning home alone while the other mans the water pumps outside.

The combination of municipal employee healthcare costs, pension costs, and rising utility rates, as well as voters’ reluctance to approve property tax increases through Proposition 2½ overrides, means that Massachusetts communities have had little choice but to make cuts to services, including fire protection.

It’s a phenonmenon that’s typically Japanese – death by working.

The official stats show that the average Japanese worker puts in 1,780 hours per year, just under the 1,800 logged by American workers. What doesn’t enter into these calculations, however, are the hundreds of hours of “free overtime” expected to a lot of Japanese workers. From The Economist:

“…one in three men aged 30 to 40 works over 60 hours a week. Half say they get no overtime. Factory workers arrive early and stay late, without pay. Training at weekends may be uncompensated.

During the past 20 years of economic doldrums, many companies have replaced full-time workers with part-time ones. Regular staff who remain benefit from lifetime employment but feel obliged to work extra hours lest their positions be made temporary.

The survivors of Karochi victims are now going to court. When they succeed they can recover upwards of $1-million from the employer and a $20,000 annual payment from the Japanese government.

“…a recent court ruling has put companies under pressure to change their ways. On November 30th the Nagoya District Court accepted Hiroko Uchino’s claim that her husband, Kenichi, a third-generation Toyota employee, was a victim of karoshi when he died in 2002 at the age of 30. He collapsed at 4am at work, having put in more than 80 hours of overtime each month for six months before his death. “The moment when I am happiest is when I can sleep,” Mr Uchino told his wife the week of his death. He left two children, aged one and three.

As a manager of quality control, Mr Uchino was constantly training workers, attending meetings and writing reports when not on the production line. Toyota treated almost all that time as voluntary and unpaid. So did the Toyota Labour Standards Inspection Office, part of the labour ministry. But the court ruled that the long hours were an integral part of his job. On December 14th the government decided not to appeal against the verdict.

The ruling is important because it may increase the pressure on companies to treat “free overtime” (work that an employee is obliged to perform but not paid for) as paid work. That would send shockwaves through corporate Japan, where long, long hours are the norm.