Archive for December 2, 2009

Author’s Subtext: AFGHANISTAN

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Though it is unlikely to show in the body of writing in these APN pages, I have been drawn to Barack Obama’s innate ‘potentials’.  However, my impression from before he ran for president was that he was applying himself in the wrong place.   As an ‘American’ in a world leadership position, YES, … but as an ‘American leader’ positioning the world, NO.

‘Wag-the-dog leadership’:  If the tail is to the dog as the leader’s baton is to the body public, the job of the natural leader is to capture, articulate,  nurture and sustain the resonances/rhythms emerging freely in the body public (the natural leader’s dynamic is the RESULT of the collective dynamic), whereas ‘wag-the-dog’ leadership is to make the body public captive of the leader’s own top-down imposed rhythms , the result of which is a kind of goose-stepping mono-rhythm  (in wag-the-dog leadership, the leader is the CAUSE  of the collective dynamic). (more…)

An Aboriginal Physics View on AFGHANISTAN

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But what are the underlying assumptions?

But what are the underlying assumptions?

An aboriginal physics viewpoint on Afghanistan is on a level deeper than the mainstream news reporting.  It is at the level of our basic understanding of dynamics.  Any dynamic situation can be examined from the point of view wherein we no longer look at dynamics in terms of ‘causal agents’, but instead acknowledge that the causal agents are not ‘causal’ but are the ‘result’ rather than the ‘cause’ of the (turbulent) flow they are included in.

The analogy which has been discussed elsewhere in these pages is in medicine, where Pasteur and Béchamp argued that ‘the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything’.  If we take ‘Al Qaeda’ and ‘the Taliban’ to be the pathogens, we would say that these pathogens are nothing, the global dynamic is everything.  Their proliferation is the result of conditions in the terrain being fertile for their proliferation.

What are the implications of this ‘inverted’ view of the situation?

This means that one cannot examine issues starting from what the current ‘cast of players’ (Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the US, the other ISAF countries, the Afghan government and the Pakistan governments) are doing.

The Taliban is the ‘result’ of turbulence in the region, not the cause.

The historical origins of conflict in Afghanistan go back to the so-called ‘Great Game’ (more…)

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