When other people do your thinking for you

Let's take a look at edicts to recently come from authoritative religious scholars, shall we? The majority are from Islam--which, lacking a central authority, encourages a range of remarkably stupid edicts from charismatic leaders--but there's plenty of room for everyone. For more, see a list from Foreign Policy (1):

For one thing, Pokemon is evil. So says Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority. It has also been blamed for encouraging gambling (that nasty card game, I suppose), labeled a front for "international Zionism," identified as "demonic" (by the Catholic Church in Mexico), and condemned for promoting the theory of evolution, "a Jewish-Darwinist theory that conflicts with the truth about humans and with Islamic principles." I never did trust Pikuchu.



(1) July 2007

The value of "walk-ins" and the cost of intangibles

A reminder from the Cold War of how America's image as the "good guy" encouraged people to defy their government and risk execution in order to help the US. The full article is here.

JOHN Guilsher, the Central Intelligence Agency field
officer in Moscow who handled one of the West's greatest espionage
coups of the Cold War in the classic traditions of the spy trade,
has died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Arlington in the US.
He was 77.

The CIA almost blew its chance to recruit the specialist
engineer Adolf Tolkachev in the late 1970s, but once he had been
"landed", Guilsher's professionalism and bravery helped build a
bond that yielded military secrets of incalculable importance.

Tolkachev, a senior engineer for Phazotron, provided key details
of the research and development of the all-important radar systems
for the Soviet's front-line fighters from the MiG-29 and MiG-31 to
the Sukhoi Su-27, as well as for cruise missiles and avionics. His
secret revelations more than matched the importance of another
"volunteer" spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the Soviet military
intelligence service,who provided the CIA with key information in
1960.

HUMINT has never been a strong point for the US, if by that you mean the laborious job of identifying and running potential human agents. Some of the most important agents the US had were people who literally "walked in", often several times and after being rejected, with critical information.

It seems to me the Cold War was, at least in part, a war of ideas and a war of reputations. The US had tremendous advantages, especially after the brutality of the Soviet system grew too obvious to deny (except, perhaps, by the New York Times). Today we seem to assume that people see us as the good guys. At the same time we disappear people, support dictators, train paramilitaries, and act in ways--at home and abroad--that puts a lie to the rhetoric.

I'm not saying the US has to be beyond reproach. Foreign policy can get tough, and on occasion there is a need to kill people and break things. Most people understand that. But not like we have been. Going too far gives an advantage to people who should have nothing to offer. Even now, the best intelligence on adversaries comes from the locals who have come to see our common enemies as a common enemy. Soft power translates into, and supports, the more obvious instruments. Overall, we seem to be intent on throwing away our good reputation.

Welcome to the future

For a blast from the past, take a look at Popular Mechanics' forecast forty years into the future, to the year 2008:



You can check out the full article here. I for one, miss that future. What happened to it?

DHS surveillance

The Washington Post reports that DHS (1) is pushing "to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon," despite opposition from Congressional Democrats.

I'm not sure what I should be more concerned about: that these idiots are going to have access to more advanced spying technology, or that this technology is in the hands of idiots. It's sad when the most redeeming feature of an administration is the possibility that they are too incompetent to take advantage of what the technology makes possible.

(1) The people that brought you the management of post-Katrina reconstruction.

The American economy is now No. 2

...in terms of GDP, when compared to the Eurozone.

PARIS (Reuters) - The U.S. economy lost the title of "world's biggest" to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets.

Taking the gross domestic product of both economies in 2007, the combined GDP of the 15 countries which use the euro overtook that of the United States when the European currency surged to a record high of more than $1.56 per euro.

"The curious outcome of breaching this latest milestone is that the size of the euro zone's annual output has now exceeded that of the U.S.," the economics department of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, said in a note to clients.

Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP -- $13,843,800 billion for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone -- the economy of the latter passed the United States once converted into dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56.

Blame the falling dollar, if you must, but remember the dollar's fall is only a recognition of more deep-seated problems.

Defense guidance

The National Security Archive at GW has published to the web a set of declassified documents tracing the development of the 1992 "Regional Defense Strategy" which eventually served as a foundation for G.W. Bush foreign policy. For geeks like me with an interest in the process and politics of how this kind of planning is done, it's a good source for insight.

Tibet

The story in Tibet flared for a brief time, and left the news when the pictures stopped coming out. A precis of the events can be obtained from John McCreary's Nightwatch newsletter. A key section:

As in Burma and Cameroon, Chinese authorities tolerated the initial marches commemorating the anniversary of the uprising. This was the underreaction period. Unlike the Burmese and Cameroonian security authorities, the Chinese escalated to the over reaction phase at the first sign of disorder. The initial escalation by committing riot police failed to restore order. This is interesting because it indicates local analysts misjudged the gravity of the outrage.

The callout of the army including military convoys driving through the cities compensated for the earlier error of judgment. The situation is in solidly in overreaction and the protests will be suppressed because the Han Chinese have the monopoly of weapons and no outside help is coming for the Tibetans, from anywhere.

The brief Tibetan uprising is a world class loss of face for the commissars in Beijing who have worked mightily to craft China’s benign face to the world in the run up to the summer Olympics. Just when the Chinese want to show how modern, tolerant and civilized they have become, they fall back on the tools for population control prescribed by communist orthodoxy.

Some more photos:

Playing to tie

This fits with what I've seen elsewhere, as well as Freedman's recent analysis on Stratfor. I get it from the Security Framework Project. I wish people in authority would admit it, and let the public in on the secret:

I think we need to refocus our priorities on al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda is strongest in Afghanistan, and the border of Pakistan. We need to make sure we're doing what's necessary to go after the person and the organization that killed 3,000 innocent Americans back on 9-11 of 2001. But I've talked to senior members of the Bush administration who have told me, off the record, that we're playing for a tie in Afghanistan, which is not acceptable in my view.

- Rep. Patrick Murphy, the only Iraq War veteran in Congress

Actually, I can see playing for a tie if you expect the opposition to fall apart on its own, but that doesn't seem to be the case this time.

More generally, much of what's wrong is we still don't identify the enemy, or our allies. While alliances are always imperfect, Pakistan barely even qualifies as an ally. Pakistan is not and never was a complete ally, because Pakistan is not and never was a complete country. At best, some elements in Pakistan have worked with the US (of elements thereof) on limited issues of mutual gain, or as a result of personal payoffs.

So long as there are safe havens for the enemy in Pakistan, as I suspect there will be for a long time to come, the US can't have a traditional military or political victory in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has its own identity problems. The center of gravity in Afghanistan has never been the cities, and the sense of national identity has always been very weak. You can't defend someone who isn't really there.

So what's to do? We can (and sometimes do) play people against one another. We can (and sometimes do) develop good intelligence and act on it. We can (and sometimes do) maintain a dirty, invisible "war". We can declare a local "victory" and shift our military resources elsewhere.

Maybe I'm just tired today.

The impotence of proofreading

Self-determination and Kosovo

Once upon a time, the principle of maintaining state borders unless, and until, all the people on each side of a border agreed to redraw it, was a guiding principle of international law. Not just customary international law, but agreements like the Helsinki Accords.

Israel's occupied territories remain "occupied" because they were won in a preemptive war, and nobody would accept that the first to use force could incorporate the territory it won.

During the Nigerian Civil War, almost everyone was willing to watch Biafra fail rather than open the door to a precedent of redrawing borders by force.

The coalition for the first Gulf War was united by a principle that Iraq could not incorporate Kuwait by force.

In Yugoslavia, the consensus began to break. By engaging in "humanitarian intervention" against Serbia and for Kosovo, the US and NATO involved itself in what was essentially a civil war. As a Serbian friend of mine put it at the time, it was a violation of CIL. He was right. What he failed to see (or accept) was that the law was changing.

Now Kosovo declares its independence, and several major powers (including the US) recognize it. As a practical matter, this is less than it appears: KFOR stays in place, the provisional government (set up with the help of the UN) keeps on provisionally governing. As a symbolic matter, it is enormous. Who else is free to declare their independence in response to perceived mistreatment?

Transdenistra is calling for international recognition, claiming Kosovo as a precedent.

Chechnya would of course want a state of its own.

Palestine--a no-brainer. But a two-state solution, or three?

Why shouldn't Muslim territories leave China? And how about independence for Taiwan?

Are there any African states with borders that are even close to the borders of their nations?

How about the Amerindian nations?

Follow this to its logical conclusion, and the world will have thousands of states. And, maybe, that's not such a bad idea. If you like small government (as I do), the best way to keep them small is to keep them divided. But a "velvet divorce" is rare among states. Governments tend to have a fetish about maintaining territorial integrity. Majority nations like to remain in charge of minorities. As the norm for unalterable borders loses legitimacy, we either need a new mechanism to manage the transitions--deciding which are legitimate and which are not--or we'll see even more "interesting times."