Aghanistan geospatial analysis

[Steve the Planner]

I put together a powerpoint slide of Ninewa from 1950s to today, showing the many provincial, district, and subdistrict changes.

One slide with about 10 major layers. Te;lls the whole story in a minute.

It is consolidated from a huge amount of field research on the ground, and through provincial and ministerial governments. Collecting maps. Legislative enactments, governmental service boundary maps, etc... Dahuk (KRG) carved out in the north, Shirqat transferred to Salah ad Din (formerly Baghdad Province). The abolition of desert provinces, which brought Hatra and Ba'aj districts in. The disection of Irbil, which shifted Mahkmour to Ninewa, and other districts to Tam'im. Then, the internal re-disections of districts and sub-districts. Just in one province. Incredible.

I learned a while ago not to cast pearls before swine. NGA is great for geo-physical analysis, but his no capacity to provide geographic support for political/administrative boundaries, census data, etc...the non-combat stuff. I gave up long ago trying to explain how pop displacement tracking might help them know something about the place and people, or how, regardless of what system is used, land records and cadestral info tell as much as anthropology (people always record land transactions---even the bad guys).

(I would say non-mil stuff, but the military is so heavily involved in things civilian that the civ/mil distinction is one without a difference).

Send me an email if you would like a copy of the Ninewa ppt, or an accurate admin/pol map of Northern Iraq. (Too big to post).

Don't get me started on the crappy population/demographic data (my actual expertise). There are soldiers on the ground who knew more about how many people were where than the big shot decision-makers, but no systematic mechanism to collect and consolidate the data for real-time use. (Sure, you'll here from some spooky people here who might suggest it's somewhere else. Been there, done that. It ain't. Just a big intel/decision gap).

In a recent report, the Kagans cited that Afghanistan has a pop of between 26 and 30 million. The pundits usually say 33 million. They all make this stuff up and cross-cite each other. If the Afghan pop is plus or minus 7 million, how accurate do you think the local pop data is.

[Spud]

Entropy

any chance you could add the Oruzgan/Dai Kundi provincial boundary in (shouldn't change your data too much as the green bit is essentially Dai Kundi) ... I could then very definitely use these at work in an UNCLAS project we have going.

Jas

[Ron Humphrey]

Glad to see it went well.

[Entropy]

Entropy

any chance you could add the Oruzgan/Dai Kundi provincial boundary in (shouldn't change your data too much as the green bit is essentially Dai Kundi) ... I could then very definitely use these at work in an UNCLAS project we have going.

Jas

Unfortunately, I don't have shapefiles for the other, newer boundary models. I could probably wag the Daykundi provincial boundary, but the districts would mostly be wrong.

[Steve the Planner]

Entropy:

Please don't create a line on a map based on a wild ass guess.

That's what NGA did in Iraq in 1993 for provincial boundaries, and, once created, became gospel to anyone who got the maps. And the same happened after 2003 when the did the same for district and subdistrict boundaries. A complete fiasco.

Anyone with a GIS capability to create a map line should be reminded that, in many of these places, lines are drawn in blood, and creating maps based on wild ass guesses is where the flow starts. Most people don't understand that these oh-so-very-official-looking-maps in most of these conflict areas, are just made up.

I have a compendium of so-called "Green Lines"- demarcations of Kurdish territories, which people downloaded from the internet (from sites like this), and 10 years later, are the root of a crisis. Every one was different.

I come out of the tradition of school attendance boundaries, where any proposed change can bring out hundreds of "concerned" citizens, because a change of a few hundred feet change really will affect something that matters to them---where their kid goes to school, their property value, their definition of community and their place within it.

Just remember that when we move official political and administrative boundaries by potentially miles, it affects perhaps hundreds of people, and in a far more threatening way than just a school boundary change.

Sorry if that got to lectury, but there is too much of this going on in these very dangerous areas.

[Steve the Planner]

Check out this Iraq province map from a banner on this SWJ site.

http://www.understandingwar.org/file...ovinces.01.jpg

First, Ninewa and Irbil are incorrect (Makhmour).

Second, Baghdad, which is a province in its own right, is incorrectly shown as a microspec of red, and the actual Baghdad province land shown as a part of each adjacent province.

Third, Salah ad Din province (Tikrit) is north of Baghdad. Can you find the lines that delineate Salah ad Din's southern boundary? I can't. But the best extrapolation would put Taji, a part of Baghdad province, in Salah ad Din.

It is this map, (as repeated by everyone once incorrectly "published") that creates confusion and boundary disputes in the Ad Dujayl area (the portion of southern Salah ad Din that is primarily Shia) in which some would much rather affiliate with Baghdad vs. Sunni Salah ad Din. Note: Until Sadaam created Salah ad Din, all of it was a part of Baghdad province, so there is a lot of bewildering history.

Junk maps that create more confusion than they are worth.

I am increasingly coming to the belief that admin/pol maps in these areas are better provided as a layered power point slide vs. a static map, so they can see it as a dynamic element and understand the realities and issues in these places.