Hi Mike,

Quote Originally Posted by MikeF View Post
Everyone fell along the lines of each sheik...I solved the scenario my own way- I became the greatest sheik w/ a $10,000 bounty on my head...

60% of all my operations were spent on intelligence collection (recon, surveillaince, etc) to continually update the problem set.

How would you define the problem set???
Nicely done!

One of the things I really like about this thread (and a couple of related ones), is that we are starting to get into the issue of why semantics matters and, at the same time, some of the pragmatic implications of semantics.

Semantics is really about systems of sense making and meaning, usually embedded in language and cultural narratives. A lot of current operations - COIN, FID, SFA, etc. - require that people operate in a cultural landscape (a semantic environment) that they don't "know" at a gut level. This means that we have to be able to construct some type of semantic "translation matrix", although there are rarely 1:1 correspondences in meaning.

Basically, what you did was to "translate" your position in the human terrain (Gods, I hate that phrase!), into something that "they" could understand at a gut level. "They" now "knew" how to make sense of you and predict your future actions.

One of the things I see as causing a lot of problems is when the "translation" either makes no "sense" to the population or has an inverted emotional connotation (i.e. X is a "good thing" for us and a "bad thing" for them). For example, my suggestion to Bob's World on how to reconfigure his "governance axis" is based on that problem.

Take the idea of a central government providing "security". I would suggest that it is "obvious", at least to most Afghans, that this is "impossible": if it was the case, then they would be living under a regime that they could not stand and, historically, have never accepted. It is also "impossible" because their everyday life experience has shown that it cannot be done (NB: even the Taliban never tried to do this). So any claims made that "security" is "of course" a government responsibility will have both a negative emotional connotation ("a tyranny? No way, we've fought them before and always won!"), are rejected by life experience (which re-inforces the tyranny image), and influence how other messages produced by the same group will be received (a "bleed-over" effect).