Five links from 2011: 'Twitter'

I am picking out a few of the more interesting links from my 2011 delicious bookmarks. On Monday, I selected five from my 'war reporting' tag. 

Today, I've selected another five from among the bookmarks I labelled 'Twitter' in my delicious account. 

Enjoy!

1. 'Visualising the New Arab Mind'

Computational historian Kovas Boguta visualises the Twitter influence network around the revolution in Egypt.

2. 'The man who tweeted the attack on Osama Bin Laden - without knowing it'

In May, computer programmer Sohaib Athar provided Twitter updates of the US mission to kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Athar was unaware of the significance of what he was tweeting at the time but he knew something was up:

"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."

The Washington Post collected his tweets using Storify. 

3. 'Taliban join the Twitter revolution'

Meanwhile, Twitter's rapid uptake by all and sundry included the Taliban in May and Somali insurgent group Al Shabaab by December. 

A rather surreal interactive war of words online now accompanies serious military activity on the ground as ISAFMedia and alemarahweb engage in disputes over Afghanistan while HSMPress take on Kenya's military spokesperson Major Emmanuel Chirchir.    

4. Libya air strikes: NATO uses Twitter to help gather targets

"Potentially relevant tweets are fed into an intelligence pool then filtered for relevance and authenticity, and are never passed on without proper corroboration. However, without "boots on the ground" to guide commanders, officials admit that Twitter is now part of the overall "intelligence picture"."

5.  British Prime Minister considers curbing Twitter use after UK riots

August's riots in the UK prompted consideration of whether the use of Twitter and social media should be restricted.

As it turned out, BlackBerry Messenger appeared to be the communication tool of choice and recent research by the LSE/Guardian claims that Twitter was more useful in the aftermath to organise clean ups than to incite disorder. 

NATO troops in Afghanistan - the ins and outs

Lots on Afghanistan in the news today after David Miliband and Condoleezza Rice visited Afghanistan to try to patch up relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Back in Europe, US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, is in Vilnius trying to convince the other 26 defence ministers in the NATO alliance to step up their commitment.

Background:

• Here's all you need to know about the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. How many troops there are, where they are, where they're not...
• The Guardian (UK) looks at the problems facing the NATO mission, including NATO tensions, deployment issues, testy relations, Taliban and drugs.
  

Mainstream Coverage:

• Robert Gates in Vilnius urges NATO members to at least some send equipment if they can't send troops into combat. (AFP)
• Should we stay or should we go: the Canadians are due to vote on an indefinite commitment to Afghanistan. But only if NATO agrees to deploy an extra 1,000 troops. (National Post)
• It's all quiet on the northern front, which is why Germany want to send an extra 200 troops there rather than anywhere else. (Deutsche Welle)
• The Economist (UK) says its time for the sniping to stop. Internal sniping that is, not Taliban sniping...
  

From the Blogs:

• Meanwhile, far away from the diplomatic circus 'Sensei Katana', a member of the RAF, has been settling into his new temporary home in Kandahar. He offers his own assessment of troop numbers at the base he is at and, in the final sentence of the extract here, inadvertently gets to the heart of the problem:

"Kandahar is definately an American base with nearly as many Canadian forces as well. Next in size would be the Dutch, with us Brits coming in at 4th place. There are also Romanians & Estonians too. There are a couple of other nations but they really don’t have enough of a presence to make any real impact."

Afghanistan on BBC's Newsnight

I've just watched the Afghanistan piece that Newsnight have done on BBC 2. They decided to go with the angle that the US have agreed to help out reinforced British troops in Helmand province.

So the Newsnight team opted to have US General Wesley Clark (who spoke a lot of sense by the way) and former UK Secretary of Defence, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, discussing US and British military roles after a package by Diplomatic Editor, Mark Urban.

The problem was that this all became a bit of an Anglo-American love-in with Rifkind and Clark interrupting one another to pay tribute to US and British military strategy, forces, equipment etc respectively.

Presenter Kirsty Wark floundered around trying to bring up some sort of disagreement between the pair, pressing the line that US troops have better technological support compared to most British infantry units. Interesting? (To a specialist perhaps). But how relevant is this to the real news story here?

As I was watching, I felt that this discussion had become a poor sideshow to the two main issues: namely NATO's organisation and military structure in Afghanistan and the role of NATO's member states in implementing military strategy.

I wanted to hear from the Danes or the Germans or the Italians. I wanted to hear from a senior member of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Basically, I wanted to hear from somebody, (almost) anybody representing a different point of view on the story, not two people batting for the same team.

But then you can't always get what you want...not least when it comes to Afghanistan, as the UK and US governments are finding out.