Broad Overview of Long War

The Long War can be divided into two parts: A) the battle zones controlled by the CIA and B) the battle zones controlled by the Pentagon. So we should look at them separately in our broad overview.

A) CIA's War: Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Tribal Pakistan are battle zones that are seeing good guys winning. Mali is a battle zone where the bad guys are winning. Nigeria is a stalemate between good and bad.

It is impossible to know what the CIA is doing inside Iran until the shit hits the fan and Iran is somehow clobbered, such as the Stuxnet computer virus which disabled parts of Iranian nuclear weapons program. Since then CIA viruses have attacked oil pumping equipment. Probably there are new viruses attacking Iranian infrastructure that we don't know about.

We are seeing Israel jerk around like its being pulled by a string as far as settler policy in Palestinian territory. First Israel is cutting back settlement. Then it says it is expanding settlement. This has the feel of the CIA somehow attacking and pressuring Israel but there is no visible sign of what these attacks might be.

B) Pentagon's War: The summer fighting season in Afghanistan is turning out to be more ferocious than expected. Yesterday 40 civilians were killed in Taliban attacks and NATO counter strikes. This is the nastiest start to the summer fighting season for several years. However, last year the Taliban opened with a showy start featuring conventional pitched battles, and it then fizzled out to an only average fighting season. So we might be seeing a bit of a Roman candle effect with the big showy start this year.

The Taliban needs to take ground away from NATO for there to be a major reversal to the situation in Afghanistan. Which hasn't happened yet. The big picture is what happens when NATO leaves in less than two years.

Obviously Afghanistan will then move from B to A, from Pentagon responsibility to CIA responsibility. On that score the CIA last week announced that it is pulling almost all of its assets out of Iraq. It didn't say that these assets are going straight into Afghanistan but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see it was hinting this would be the case.