Month: June 2014

Last week, the Pakistani military launched a major operation to clear Taliban extremists from the lawless region of North Waziristan, after five years of prodding from the United States. Shuja Nawaz expects it to fail:

Pakistan still lacks any national strategy in which the government and armed forces together fight Islamist militancy and terrorism. In North Waziristan, the army is re-using the blunt force approach it has used before: clear out the local population, then use air strikes, artillery, and ground forces to clean out any insurgents that remain. This tactical, rather than strategic, approach means that the North Waziristan battle will not be definitive, but rather just another fight in Pakistan’s inconclusive long war.

To build a national strategy, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government needs to bring the military out of what has been a long silence to share with the Pakistani public its vision of what will work. The government must then include the military’s view in a way it has not so far. In February, for example, Sharif’s administration released an embryonic National Internal Security Policy that had been prepared with no visible participation by the military and that has already hit snags in its implementation.

Hassan Abbas fears that Pakistan is underestimating the sophistication of its enemies:

Only recently, Pakistan’s security ‘wizards’ have started realizing that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) (the really ‘bad Taliban’) benefits in many ways from logistics, infrastructure and even funding sources of ‘good Taliban.’ What Pakistan still avoids to fully acknowledge is that TTP today is a far more dangerous group than it was when it emerged in late 2007.  Now, its tentacles are reaching deep into Pakistan and it has close links with the remnants of al Qaeda as well as organized crime. …

Pakistan will not be able to defeat, dismantle, and discredit the TTP through military means alone in [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas]. It should be ready to deal with them through civilian law enforcement methods inside the mainstream Pakistan, especially Punjab and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province. Pakistan’s recent security policy brief shows little indication that it has any plans to invest in reform and modernization of its police and broader criminal justice system. Change in this arena will be the most potent sign of real shift in Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy.

And Muqtedar Khan argues that securing Waziristan should be a regional initiative, not a solo project by Karachi:

The Waziristan region in Pakistan has become a watering hole for extremists who threaten many countries. Besides Pakistan, India, Iran, and Afghanistan have strong interests in eliminating threats that emanate from this area. The problem is that most countries in the region feel that Pakistan is hunting with the hound and running with the hare at the same time. Pakistan’s intelligence is suspected of nurturing many of the same groups for geopolitical reasons even as they threaten its own stability. This perception prevents Pakistan from developing closer relations with its neighbors who have the resources, the will, and the interest to help Pakistan become terror free.

A regional coalition will make the struggle against extremism more potent, more durable and less expensive, but it will take more than deft diplomacy to achieve. Pakistan must convince its neighbors that the alleged ties between the Pakistani state and the Taliban have been severed irreparably.

Sullum says Washington’s blood-THC limit effectively prohibits medical marijuana users from driving at all:

Washington’s five-nanogram rule, modeled after the per se standard for alcohol, was meant to reassure voters worried about the threat posed by stoned drivers. But like all per se standards, it treats some people as unsafe to drive even when they’re not.

Last year experiments by KIRO, the CBS station in Seattle, and KDVR, the Fox affiliate in Denver, showed that regular cannabis consumers can perform competently on driving courses and simulators at THC levels far above five nanograms. The lack of correspondence between the new standard and impairment is especially unfair to medical marijuana users, some of whom may be above the five-nanogram limit all the time, meaning they are never legally allowed to drive in Washington. …

“The five-nanogram rule doesn’t make sense,” says Mark Kleiman, a University of California at Los Angeles drug policy expert who was hired to advise Washington’s cannabis regulators. “It doesn’t correspond to impairment, and for regular users, they’re always going to be over the limit. It would be absurd to say you can smoke pot but then you can never drive.”

Along with Kleiman, Amy Weiss-Meyer reviews research on driving under the influence:

In 2000, researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands gave driving tests to subjects who had consumed various amounts of alcohol and/or marijuana. While all subjects both drank and smoked in each round of the study, some were given placebos, so that the researchers were able to test the effects of each substance on its own as well as their combined effect. They measured drivers’ “standard deviation of lateral position” (SDLP), or the distance they drifted out of their lane, and also the time out of lane (TOL).

The study found that alcohol on its own increased SDLP by 2.2 centimeters (as compared to double-placebo conditions). Marijuana, depending on the dosage of THC (100 or 200 micrograms per kilogram of body weight), increased SDLP from placebo conditions by 2.7 and 3.5 centimeters respectively. In other words, drivers who had smoked pot were less able to drive in a straight line than drivers with an elevated BAC. (Most drivers’ BACs fluctuated around 0.04 grams per deciliter, below the legal limit of 0.08.)

The researchers concluded that the percentage of TOL was not significantly affected by either alcohol or marijuana alone, but that it was much higher when both substances were used together.

Abby Haglage joins the conversation:

The truth is, after decades of analysis, we still don’t have a firm grasp on how THC impairs driving. Laboratory studies have confirmed that THC (officially, Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) impairs many motor skills necessary for driving. But actual driving simulation studies have not mimicked these results. One sound example is a 2004 study in which three researchers found THC to inhibit attention, reaction time, hand-eye coordination, short-term memory, time and distance perception, and concentration.

But when tested in actual driving simulation, the authors found the results did not “replicate” their laboratory evidence. In other words, researchers were able to prove that THC should, technically, impair driving, but not that it does. Their explanation for the discrepancy: Drivers with THC are likely cognizant of their impairment and are thus able to “compensate…by driving more slowly and avoiding risky driving maneuvers.”

Historian Joanna Bourke, the author of The Story of Pain, recalls that physical discomfort was once thought to be an affliction of the elite:

In many white middle-class and upper-class circles, slaves and “savages,” for instance, were routinely depicted as possessing a limited capacity to experience pain, a biological “fact” that conveniently diminished any culpability among their so-called superiors for acts of abuse inflicted on them. Although the author of Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (1811) conceded that “the knife of the anatomist … has never been able to detect” anatomical differences between slaves and their white masters, he nevertheless contended that slaves were better “able to endure, with few expressions of pain, the accidents of nature.” This was providential indeed, given that they were subjected to so many “accidents of nature” while laboring on sugar-cane plantations. …

But what was it about the non-European body that allegedly rendered it less susceptible to painful stimuli?

Racial sciences placed great emphasis on the development and complexity of the brain and nerves. As the author of Pain and Sympathy (1907) concluded, attempting to explain why the “savage” could “bear physical torture without shrinking”: the “higher the life, the keener is the sense of pain.” There was also speculation that the civilizing process itself had rendered European peoples more sensitive to pain. The cele­brated American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell stated in 1892 that in the ‘process of being civilized we have won … intensified capacity to suffer.” After all, “the savage does not feel pain as we do: nor as we examine the descending scale of life do animals seem to have the acuteness of pain-sense at which we have arrived.”