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Stories of systems
Have you seen this map before? It often crops up in talks and presentations about systems mapping.
It was created to inform a new American military strategy in Afghanistan in 2009, and was unleashed on the world sometime later as a PowerPoint slide. US military General Stanley McChrystal famously declared: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war”.
The Guardian newspaper joked: “Well you can see why NATO hasn’t cracked Afghanistan yet”, and questioned whether the map makes the military any smarter or any better at what it does (Should be doing it at all? that’s another story).
The Guardian continued…
The diagram has an undeniable beauty. Done the right way (embroidered perhaps) it would make a lovely wall hanging and an ideal gift for the foreign policy-maker in your life.
The New Yorker also chose to comment on the beauty of the map, and to question if it actually made any sense:
It’s actually strangely beautiful, and, as a piece of graphics, if not war planning, very clever. The designers seem to have clustered things by color in a way that roughly mimics a map of the world — a landscape of continents — which is about the only thing that makes it readable… We are used to looking at world maps, and the visual echo gives the chart a feel of making sense. Whether it…
