Stealthy? Yes.  Fashionable?

Well, what do I know.

Citing a desire to explore "the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance," New York artist Adam Harvey will be unveiling a line of "drone-proof" clothing next week designed to help those seeking an escape from the all-seeing eyes.

The four-piece line, dubbed "Stealth Wear," as reported by RT, includes an anti-drone scarf and an anti-drone hoodie, designed to throw off the thermal imaging systems often used by unmanned planes, a shirt with a shield that protects the wearer's heart against x-ray radiation, and an accessory Harvey has called the "Off Pocket," which lets the user "instantly zero out" a phone signal to protect against GPS tracking.

It's not Harvey's first time using art to investigate ways to shake off big brother: his master's thesis at NYU looked at ways to interfere with facial recognition software.  The clothing line is a response to the growing use of domestic surveillance drones (there are expected to be as many as 30,000 in U.S. skies by 2020) but still, it's not hard to think of some people outside the U.S. who might be interested in acquiring some anti-drone wear. No word yet on how much an anti-drone scarf will cost.

Stealth Wear will be unveiled at a London studio next week along with videos explain the technology behind the garments.

In today's Morning Brief, I noted that French President François Hollande had vowed to intervene to prevent Islamist fighters from making further inroads into government-controlled territory in Mali. That intervention now seems to be official:

French soldiers were intervening alongside the Malian army and other troops from Western African countries, Mr. Hollande said in a short televised address.

"This afternoon, French armed forces lent support to units of the Malian army to fight against terrorists," Mr. Hollande said. "This operation will last as long as needed."

Mr. Hollande's decision to dispatch soldiers to Mali marks a shift in France's strategy. Paris had earlier said it wouldn't send troops to Mali, though it said it was ready to help coordinate a multilateral intervention in the country.

Although the intervention comes at the request of interim President Dioncounda Traoré, the idea of French troops on the ground in a country that was a French colony until 1960 (not to mention fighting on behalf of a military-installed government) is sure to make many uneasy. It's France's second intervention into Francophone Africa in recent years, following the operation to arrest recalcitrant former Ivoirian President Laurent Gbagbo in 2011. Given that it's Hollande championing the Mali operation, it's also a sign that the newfound military interventionism of Nicolas Sarkozy's final months -- the Ivory Coast operation and the international intervention spearheaded by France in Libya -- was not just an election-year fluke. 

Peter Chilson's new FP ebook, We Never Knew Exactly Where, which features vivid firsthand accounts of his travels in the very areas where internationally backed government forces are now clashing with Islamist militants, also revisits France's role in Mali's history, looking at how colonialism shaped the region's political geography and led to many of its current problems: 

TO UNDERSTAND THE BROADER picture of Mali's problems, it helps to look back to 1904, when the French organized 1.8 million square miles of rainforest, savanna, and desert -- and some 10 million people -- into eight colonies. The French dreamed of exploiting mineral and agricultural wealth by building a railroad from the Mediterranean Sea south across the Sahara into its sub-Saharan territories. Little stood in France's way. Its great competitor, Britain, showed scant interest in colonizing the Sahara. So France went ahead and defined its colonies on paper, proverbial lines in the sand crisscrossing West Africa. The French redrew the lines countless times, dividing land according to stability and wealth but never carefully verifying the borders on the ground. Those colonies are now countries. Here they are, including their colonial names:

Benin (formerly Dahomey)

Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)  

Guinea                              

Ivory Coast

Mali (formerly French Sudan)

Mauritania

Niger

Senegal

From Dakar, Senegal's capital, the French ran the colonies as one block called l'Afrique-occidentale française, or AOF. On maps, the French shuffled and reshuffled West Africa in chunks big and small. They even used scissors. Take, for instance, the colony of Upper Volta, whose territory was reorganized and parceled out to Niger, French Sudan, and Ivory Coast a total of seven times. The French made the last change in 1947, establishing the borders that still frame independent Burkina Faso, which shares a 600-mile border with Mali. To add to the confusion, the French never planned for the independence of their African colonies, which means they poorly marked the ground between colonies that bordered each other. They drew the lines on paper without keeping track of the changes, as if they were writing a sloppy epic novel. Much of that paperwork is now lost. Even a 1963 U.S. State Department study of "boundaries in former French Africa" warns that "almost every local and French map is at variance on detail."

There's much more fascinating material in the book. Check it out now.

There are major developments in Mali's civil war today after Islamist fighters reportedly took the central town of Konna. The BBC calls it the most serious fighting the country has seen since government forces were routed from Northern Mali in April, 2012.

Mali's violence is a complicated story that has gotten precious little coverage in the Western media. To get up to speed on the conflict, you'll want to start with Peter Chilson's new ebook "We Never Knew Exactly Where,"  which features both gripping first-hand reporting from rebel-held territory and an illuminating history going back to the colonization of West Africa. It's the first of our new "Borderlands" series of ebooks produced in cooperation with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. 

As he's wont to do, Matt Drudge has kicked up a fuss today by plastering photos of Hitler and Stalin above the headline "White House Threatens 'Executive Orders' on Guns." FP contributor Michael Moynihan has a good piece at Tablet looking into what's accurate and inaccurate in the commonly cited narrative that Nazi laws curtailing Jewish gun ownership were a prelude to the Holocaust. But Godwin's law violations aside, I was curious about whether there's any evidence in the modern world for the old notion that a well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny. Do countries with high gun-ownership rights tend to be more democratic? Or more likely to overthrow dictatorships?

I haven't been able to find any published academic studies to this effect (if readers know of any, please post in the comments), but from a look at the Small Arms Survey's international rankings from 2007, it's hard to detect a pattern. (I wrote about this data in greater depth here.)

The top 10 gun-owning countries in the world (after the United States) include both democracies like Switzerland and Finland, as well as authoritarian countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

With 34.2 guns per 100 people, Iraq is ranked eighth on the survey. More to the point, the country already had a well-established gun culture and a high rate of gun ownership before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. We can't know for sure if a well-armed population could have stopped Hitler's genocide, but it certainly didn't stop Saddam's.

Given the advanced deadly weaponry available to governments these days -- as opposed to the late 18th century -- most tyrants aren't all that threatened by citizens with conventional weapons. Like the Iraqis, Libyans were fairly well armed under Muammar al-Qaddafi -- 15.5 guns per 100 people as of 2007 -- but it still took an assist from NATO air power to finally bring him down.  

On the other extreme, the country ranked last on the survey -- with only 0.1 guns per 100 people -- is Tunisia, which as you'll recall was still able to overthrow a longtime dictator in 2011. With only 3.5 guns per 100 people, the Egyptian population that overthrew Hosni Mubarak was hardly well armed either. On the other hand, Bahrain, where a popular revolution failed to unseat the country's monarchy, has 24.8 guns per 100 people, putting it in the top 20 worldwide. A relatively high rate of 10.7 guns per 100 people in Venezuela hasn't stopped the deterioration of democracy under Hugo Chávez.

I don't mean to suggest there's a negative correlation between dictatorship and gun ownership. The countries where there are virtually no guns in private hands include places like North Korea and Eritrea along with places like Japan and Lithuania. I'd love to see a more sophisticated analysis on this, but from looking at the data, it's hard to see a trend either way.

There's a ridiculous debate going on in the wonkosphere about an outlandish idea: minting a trillion-dollar coin so that President Obama can avoid the upcoming debt ceiling, which Republicans are threatening to use as leverage to extract major entitlement cuts. To make a long story short, there's supposedly a loophole in the law that allows the Treasury Department to mint platinum coins of any denomination, so the president could order up a trillion-dollar coin to pay the federal government's bills. Et voilà -- no worries on the debt ceiling.

I'm convinced that nobody -- not even Paul Krugman -- is actually serious about this, and in any case Kevin Drum succinctly dispenses with the idea here, here, and here. He writes:

Like it or not, the debt ceiling is legal. Congress has the power of the purse. On the other hand, using a ridiculous loophole in a statute about commemorative and bullion coins in order to evade the debt limit isn't legal. Seriously, folks: just forget it. I know I'll never have to pay up on a bet over this since it will never be tested, but this would go against Obama 9-0 if it ever made it to the Supreme Court.

But there's a much more serious debate going on in Washington right now, one that could ultimately prove a lot more important: the debate over another trillion-dollar COIN operation, the war in Afghanistan. In a nutshell: How many troops will the United States leave behind after 2014, and what will they do? The White House is said to be deciding between 3,000 and 9,000 troops, according to the New York Times. David Barno, the retired lieutenant general who headed the U.S. war effort from 2003 to 2004, writes this week that President Obama might decide to go down all the way to zero -- and White House Ben Rhodes acknowledged Tuesday that the "zero option" is on the table.

Supporters of the war in Afghanistan are apopleptic about this possibility. One of them told me today that even 6,000 U.S. troops would essentially be zero, since they would be generally confined to Bagram Air Base and Kabul. In his estimation, the CIA's base at Khost would become untenable, and then the United States would have to conduct drone strikes inside Pakistan from much further away, with a concomitant decline in effectiveness. In other words, the notion that we'd be able to simply continue doing counterterrorism work at the same level is a chimera.

I have some sympathy for this view. There are a lot of bad dudes across the Durand Line in places like Waziristan, and they want to kill Americans. It would be naive to think that they would simply give up the fight because we left. Jihadi groups, including al Qaeda, will undoubtedly proclaim a huge victory, boosting their recruiting. They'll be right.

And here's where historical analogies break down. When the United States withdrew from Vietnam, we weren't worried about North Vietnamese communists and Viet Cong cadres blowing up car bombs in American cities. They took over the South, and that was a shame, but the so-called domino effect proved vastly overblown. You know the story: Henry Kissinger cleverly exploited the "Sino-Soviet split." And today, Vietnam is a budding American ally against a rising China.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, the bad guys really will come after us. That may sound alarmist. But left unmolested, they will increasingly have the means to do so. Drones are hugely unpopular in Pakistan; they don't seem like a sustainable long-term option, particularly after the United States leaves. And what, then, will prevent al Qaeda and friends from coming back? The Afghan military? Eventually, the region's poison will drain. But there will be many dangerous years ahead of us before then.

I'm not saying we should stay in Afghanistan. After all, it's been more than a decade, and the U.S. military and intelligence community have achieved precious little for all the blood and treasure that has been expended there. It hardly makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars propping up an ungrateful, kleptocratic narcostate. This ain't postwar Germany or Japan, or even South Korea, however hard war supporters try to sell that analogy. "The juice ain't worth the squeeze," as one officer put it. But recognizing that doesn't solve our problem across the border in Waziristan.

Staying in Afghanistan doesn't make much sense. Leaving doesn't make sense either. What should we do?