Comments with BDR corruption accusations

Ref: http://www.newsfrombangladesh.net/view.php?hidRecord=269578

Thanks to Major (Retd.) Zaman for going over the trouble in tabulating data on seized goods, including drugs, arms and ammos, by our BDR forces stationed around the border with India and Burma. Like most of our honest Army officers he is very concerned with any negative publicity or stereotype about our defense forces. One may recall that during the early hours of the BDR mutiny some rebel jawans read out a laundry list of their grievances against Army officers that were on deputation. This included charges of corruption, esp. against late Maj. Gen. Shaqil and his wife. In the absence of government probing to find the veracity of such accusations, we can only pray and hope that such accusations of corruptions are baseless and are not true.

As some of you may already know, as a certified six sigma master black belt, I get excited with numbers. The problem with these limited data, something that has also been acknowledged by Zaman, is that they do not help us one way or another to prove any claim, neither for nor against. If we were interested in proving that BDR has been doing a wonderful job in recent years, say, e.g., in the 2002-06 period, what we needed was the ratio of goods seized against total entering and exiting due to smuggling. But we don't have such figures, and what we have is just some raw numbers on what had been confiscated on our side. We have also only 5 data points (for all but value of seized goods), which is too little for any statistical inference.

Does higher number there mean, better or weaker performance by our BDR? We can't say without making some crude and irrational assumptions, which may be absolutely wrong. The yearly trends are not helpful here. There was a downward trend in value of goods seized since 2004 and falling to its lowest value in 2007 (after extrapolating the last data point on a yearly average). BTW: the bomb data had an outlier in 2006. What could explain such a big catch in that year in 2006, as against previous years? Was the BDR doing a lousy job before, and all on a sudden became extra alert that year? Or, that too much bombs entered/exited the country that year? Only the heroin had a somewhat upward trend overall. Does that mean, BDR was catching more as more heroin was coming in to meet greater addiction demand inside Bangladesh, or that they really were lucky with some big catches while the internal demand remained the same?

Nevertheless, I tried to find any correlation between the various variables. I failed to find any strong correlation between most of these factors. The only strong ones are: between phensidyl and wine, followed by heroin and ammo, followed by revolver and wine. So, here is a caveat for our wine drinkers: you are very prone to take phensidyl, and use revolver to settle your disputes; and the heroin users are more prone to collect ammo!

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