Month: July 2011
Beyond Rupert Murdoch
The Murdoch scandal may look like a domestic UK affair, with repercussions for the media also domestically in Australia and the U.S., where his News Corp is a big player. But it is really an international affair about electronic information technology, one that continues a prior pattern: the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping and Wikileaks come to mind.
The sad fact is that no electronic communications are genuinely secure. That’s why the Pentagon has all but declared war in cyberspace. Individuals are vulnerable, but the government is also vulnerable, as are companies and all the institutions of a modern open society. Closed systems don’t do much better. I can’t wait until the day some Chinese hacker turns his skills on the Communist Party. Even Osama bin Laden’s extensive efforts at infosec proved vulnerable partly because his couriers used the internet.
The only reasonable way to respond to this vulnerability is to limit the extent of what we try to keep secret, and intensify the efforts to build a wall around that truly high value turf. Ninety-eight per cent of what most of us say and write should be said and written with the understanding that it might be heard or conveyed to the public. Not that hacking into cell phones is justified. Just difficult to prevent.
That has not however been the general impulse. Institutions everywhere are trying to cast a broader net to protect a wide swathe of information. Security officers are requiring that more and more computers and offices be swept for bugs, passwords changed, visitors screened and documents shredded. I am not talking here about classified government information, but unclassified, publicly available data that I might post on www.peacefare.net.
When I was science counselor in the U.S. embassy in Brasilia, an American intelligence product published as secret photographs of a rocket launch facility that I had visited several times. It was used every two years to launch U.S. Air Force sounding rockets but someone at the Pentagon imagined it so sensitive that they needed to take overhead photographs of it from outer space. They were not amused when I offered to smile for the cameras next time I stood on the launch pad.
Don’t get me wrong: there are some real secrets out there, including secrets about what is secret, since sources and methods are often as valuable as specific data. I wouldn’t want our enemies knowing everything about us. Loose lips used to sink ships. Now even tight lips may do it, if they are attached to someone who uses email.
Murdoch and his sidekick Rebekah Brooks denied yesterday to a parliamentary committee that they had authorized or knew about hacking by News Corp. It’s possible they did not know. No great resources are needed to do the dirty deed, and any employee with sense would not tell the boss, to provide plausible deniability. That doesn’t jibe of course with Murdoch’s infamous attention to detail in his operations, but the one employee so far willing to speak up on this subject has expired of unknown causes.
Somehow it is fitting that Murdoch, who stands to lose billions as a result of the scandal, elicited the first whiff of sympathy when some low life in a plaid shirt (who wears a plaid shirt in London?) doused him with shaving foam (or was it really whipped cream?), and got clocked by Murdoch’s wife in turn. Taste and behavior worse than Murdoch’s is hard to come by. But there is always someone prepared to push the envelope:
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
No harm done, maybe some good
The State Department has let it be known that Assistant Secretary Jeffrey Feltman met with Libyan government (as in Gaddafi) representatives in Tunisia over the weekend to underline that Gaddafi must go. Gaddafi and Co. are suggesting that this is the beginning of a negotiation.
I certainly hope that isn’t really so. Sure there are things that might be negotiated–like where in the desert Gaddafi can pitch his tent, or which mode of transport he’ll use to go to Sudan, where President Bashir, also indicted by the International Criminal Court, can welcome him. But from the way the information was leaked it is clear the State Department understands perfectly well that Gaddafi’s leaving power is a sine qua non.
The only thing that makes me scratch my head about this is that Ambassador Gene Cretz was present. If we have recognized the National Transitional Council as the legitimate authority in Libya, as we did on Friday, he should be getting himself to Benghazi as quickly as possible and shunning contact with the Gaddafi regime, until it is ready to get out of Tripoli. It might have been better given the diplomatic signal intended if Cretz had not been there.
Others have raised the question of why Derek Chollet, the National Security Council’s strategic planning director, was there rather than dealing with more important issues than Libya, like relations with the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). This is just the latest example of how the urgent overtakes the merely important. But if Chollet can help straighten out policy towards Libya, I’m all for it. The BRICs will be around for a long time after Gaddafi is gone.
We’ve been less than decisive from the first on Libya and it hasn’t helped: clarity and forcefulness from the United States still count for a lot around the the world, including in Libya. So if the message was clear and forceful, I imagine no harm was done, and maybe a bit of good.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Nonviolent discipline is still vital
While I am afraid I’ve written this all before, it is important to reiterate now that sectarianism is rearing its ugly head in Syria: maintaining nonviolent discipline is vital. You can kill a few Alawites (the heterodox minority to which President Bashar al Assad belongs), but the regime can kill many more protesters.
There is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost from violence, especially if it is directed at the security forces. You want them to come over to your side. They won’t do that if they are being attacked. Instead, they’ll use the violence as justification for cracking down, and the uncommitted portion of the population will likely lean towards law and order.
What about the regime thugs? Don’t demonstrators get to respond to them in kind? Unfortunately for those of us who are not principled pacifists, the answer is no. Violence is their favored terrain; you want to contest them on terrain that favors you, not them. Best is in public, under the glare of TV cameras.
This is particularly difficult in Syria, which has managed to control the presence of international journalists and will presumably make life hard for those who report too enthusiastically about the demonstrations or too disapprovingly about the regime. One of the few ways to get a regime to rein in its thugs is international reporting on their abuses.
The Syrian protesters have demonstrated a remarkable degree of unity and cleverness in confronting a regime that has numerous advantages: it has no reason to fear military international intervention, it has Iranian backing, the Syrian middle class in Damascus and Aleppo has hesitated to go to the streets, the international community is reluctant to get involved, and the security forces appear to have backed the regime so far in all but a relatively few, isolated circumstances.
There is, nevertheless, a growing sense that Assad will not be able to restore the status quo ante. He is in trouble even if he manages to weather the current wave of protests, which still seems to be growing and spreading. On the merits, his regime should collapse soon. But if it fails to cooperate, the only option is to keep up the protests, and keep them nonviolent.
A demonstration, allegedly in Damascus yesterday (no sign of the security forces that I see). The Youtube caption reads: Chants of “Our Blood Won’t Be Sold” ring out through the Midan neighborhood of Damascus, Capitol of Syria as these youth march for the overthrow of the fascist Dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad on Saturday night, July 17, 2011:
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
The real budget losers won’t be military
After several days of Casey Anthony, Carmeggedon, and Rebekah Brooks, my TV finally produced something worth watching: the U.S./Japan women’s World Cup match. The two fading powers of the late 20th century produced a super ball game, which should remind us that even in decline great powers have a lot of clout left.
This is the trick the Americans need to learn in foreign policy. Britain lost its empire more than 30 years ago but still punches above its weight. Its military prowess is not the only reason. The Foreign Office and the Department for International Development are serious operations. I am not a great admirer of the Quai d’Orsay. If you want to see a Foreign Ministry other than the British one that makes a difference, visit The Hague, capital of another lost empire.
Jim Lindsay in yesterday’s Washington Post was in full angst over the impact of how the debt issues are handled and the impact on the U.S. military. That is not what worries me. I’ll bet the Defense Department gets a relatively small cut, after a decade of having its budget doubled, without counting war expenditures. The Obama Administration and House Republicans have both proposed -3.5%, but the Senate is likely to insist on a smaller number.
It is the State Department and USAID that are likely to get whacked. They have finally produced a blueprint for dealing with current national security challenges that begins to make sense: the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. What are the odds of much of it being implemented in the current budget environment? Sure, they can move a few people around, but there is no hope for Foggy Bottom without a top to bottom reform that would require a good deal of money. House Republicans proposed a 43% cut in the 150 account (“international affairs”) relative to the Administration’s dead-on-arrival 2012 proposal. That’s likely worse than what will actually happen, but the State Department and AID are in for a shock.
One reason is that half the country thinks they already have a lot of money–25% of the Federal budget, and wants that reduced to 10% (see http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/nov10/ForeignAid_Nov10_quaire.pdf). The real number is well under 1.5%, and declining for several decades. Could it be that State and AID have not handled their relationship with the American people as well as the Pentagon has?
A friend commented after the soccer game, “the Japanese have had an even worse year than we’ve had. It’s good they won.” I did not agree–I wanted the Americans to win. But like my friend I’ll be cheering for the civilian underdogs in the budget battles. They’ve had a bad couple of decades. It is time to correct the absurd imbalance between the military arm of our government, which is healthy and well-exercised, and the civilian arm, which is weak and getting weaker.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
The damndest problem
Somehow this invitation to a discussion of India/Pakistan relations prompts me to ask a different but related question: how should the United States deal with Pakistan?
I confess to colossal ignorance when it comes to anything east and south of the Durand line. All I really know is that Pakistan is populous (170 million), ethnically complex (Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and many others) and mostly poor (about $1000 per capita GNP). It has nuclear weapons and an enduring existential fear of India. The army plays an often outsized role, but civilian politics can be dauntingly agitated as well.
So why should this matter? It is the nuclear weapons that really count to the United States–they are approaching 100 warheads. Their main purpose seems to be to prevent an Indian attack, or to respond to one. American concern is not only that Pakistan might use them, triggering an unpredictable but likely devastating series of events, but that they might fall into the hands of terrorists. Pakistan has a record of having exported nuclear technology to North Korea and elsewhere.
For at least as long as U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, there will be another concern: terrorists harbored in the Pakistan’s border areas. We can quarrel about whether the Pakistani government knew Osama Bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, but it is clear that at least some religious extremists have de facto permission from the Pakistani government to destabilize the southern and eastern provinces of Afghanistan, in order to gain “strategic depth” for Islamabad (that is, deny India a foothold in a stable Afghanistan). Our many drone strikes inside Pakistan, with something like tacit permission from Islamabad, are the current stopgap in deal with this problem.
What are our options in dealing with Pakistan?
1. Walk away. Too complicated, too difficult, too far away. We’ve tried this several times over the last few decades. We always end up regretting it and going back, whether because of the nukes or the border with Afghanistan.
2. Get engaged. Pakistan has lots of problems: political, economic, security. We could try to engage more actively in resolving some of these. Dick Holbrooke is said to have thought we needed to help resolve the India/Pakistan conflict, especially over Kashmir, if we wanted Pakistan to help us out more against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But what makes us think we can have much impact on Pakistan’s internal political and economic problems, never mind its more than 60-year conflict with India?
3. Get selectively engaged. So some things are too hard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ante up to get Pakistan to do the things we need done, like police its border with Afghanistan more effectively and guard its nuclear weapons more carefully. This is pretty much current policy, plus the drone strikes. We don’t know if the American assistance on guarding the nuclear weapons is effective, but we do know that the Pakistani military has been pocketing a lot of our assistance and doing very little in return. So we’ve cut off some of that assistance and they are cozying up to the Chinese.
4. Go with India and contain Pakistan. India is Pakistan’s natural regional rival. We could just throw in our lot with the Indians and use them as a counterbalance to Pakistan, which in turn would become a Chinese surrogate. This kind of “offshore” balancing is much the rage these days among those who resist American intervention abroad but recognize the national security problems that motivate it. But offshore balancing in this case amounts to putting our interests in the hands of New Delhi–does that sound wise? And it might do nothing to prevent nuclear war or nuclear terrorism, and certainly nothing to prevent Pakistan from destabilizing Afghanistan, which are our main concerns.
5. Go regional. Rather than splitting Asia between American and Chinese spheres of influence, we could try to promote the kind of regional cooperation that has proved so effective in Europe and Latin America. Freer trade and investment would eventually lead India and Pakistan to have a bigger stake in peace and stability that they would maintain themselves. But at best this is a long-term bet, not one that produces results in the next year or two, or even five or ten.
Having trouble choosing your preferred option? That’s what I said: the damndest problem.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Does recognition make a difference?
The United States today joined 32 other countries at what is being called a “contact group” meeting in Istanbul in recognizing the National Transitional Council (NTC) as the “legitimate governing authority” in Libya. What difference will that make?
Obviously it is a big psychological boost to the NTC, but the real difference is money. If the UN and U.S. lawyers can figure out how to unfreeze Libyan assets (more than $30 billion in the U.S. alone) and move even a fraction of them to Benghazi, the NTC would have all the financial resources required not only to defeat Gaddafi but also to govern the country far more effectively than he ever did. Of course what they actually do with the money is another question, but they aren’t going to be able to do a whole lot without some of it.
The devil, as always, is in the details, not only the lawyerly ones. Secretary of State Clinton’s statement was importantly nuanced:
…I am announcing today that, until an interim authority is in place, the United States will recognize the NTC as the legitimate governing authority for Libya, and we will deal with it on that basis.
Behind the quiet reference to an interim authority lies concern that the NTC is not fully representative. How could it be? Tripoli is still under Gaddafi’s control, so the Tripoli representatives on the current NTC are people who have left the capital with their families and gone to Benghazi. As the rebels succeed in “liberating” territory, Washington expects them to expand the NTC and eventually to reformulate it entirely as an “interim authority,” including representatives from throughout Libya. This is consistent with the NTC’s own declared intention not to become the government of Libya (and with its reported pledge that its members will not seek future offices, but no one seems to take that entirely seriously).
Precisely how this and other important steps–like writing a constitution–will be done, is unclear, even if two well-informed Libyan Americans tried to explicate it yesterday. What is clear to me is that Libyans are not going to accept a hastily drafted constitution prepared by 15 experts behind closed doors without extensive public discussion and debate. Have a look at this NDI report from early May: the people who have agitated and organized themselves so quickly and well are unlikely to swallow someone else’s handiwork without getting their fingerprints on it.
Yes, recognition as a legitimate governing authority by the people who are sitting on a lot of your money makes a difference. But Libya still has a long way to go before it has a government whose legitimacy is not based on the use of force, but rather one whose use of force is legitimate. It is the Libyan people’s recognition that will make the really big difference, when the time comes.
RSS - Posts
