Posted by
Marcus G. Daniels-3 on
Aug 06, 2006; 7:12pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Friam-Digest-Vol-38-Issue-3-tp522318p522337.html
Phil Henshaw wrote:
> It seems to have been an error to trust our gut feelings about that, but
> we got worked up and did it anyway. Potentially complex system theory
> could design measures to give people an outside view of these things we
> get swept up in.
Here are a couple of documents describing counter terrorism strategy of
the White House:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050425/25roots_3.htmhttp://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/counter_terrorism/counter_terrorism_strategy.pdfCompare page 13 in the latter (as labeled in pages of the document, or
15 in the page selector) with this RAND project, e.g. page 11 (page 19
in the page selector).
http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2005/RAND_CF212.pdfFive pages later, some "marker issues" are listed that "locate Islamic
groups ideologically", namely democracy, human rights, Shari'a law vs.
civil law, rights of minorities, status of women, legal rights, public
participation, segregation, and "lifestyle" issues. The next page goes
on to describe examples of different groups on this spectrum and then
gives suggestions on how to use it in a divide and conquer propaganda
battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic moderates.
These sorts of ideas could be extended into agent models to think about
the rates at which such aid and propaganda efforts might progress or
backfire. Searching some newspapers or blogs could give some ideas on
how such efforts are likely to be resented, e.g.
http://zeitgeistgirl.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_zeitgeistgirl_archive.html.
In contrast, in today's New York Times, the front page has an article on
Hezbollah, _Holding a Gun, Lending a Hand_, which describes the loyalty
of Hezbollah fighters due to the support given to them and their
families by the organization. Seems like US aid could undermine
terrorist organizations by doing better at the same job. All these
forces could be considered in an agent model.
It probably wouldn't matter if such a simulation had 1e4 or 1e7 agents
of different persuasions, but rather the mixing ratios of just enough
agents so that the dynamics would be the smooth and similar in a larger
simulation of similar demographics for the same relative configuration.
Personally, I'd rather have political scientists and technical people
developing crude models of various international stability situations
than flushing billions of tax dollars down the drain on a gut feeling
Maybe provide real time updates to one of those CNN ticker lines showing
odds of success, cumulative cost, and expected value. :-)
Marcus