Beacon

Netanyahu Approaches

2011-05-17T06:45:00.001-07:00

Benjamin Netanyahu is due here in DC shortly to address Congress and talk with President Obama. While some see the U.S. as hamstrung on the Israeli-Palestinian process and distracted by the Arab Spring, I see Israel itself as in its weakest position in years, and thus badly in need of a friend:

Relations with Turkey, Israel's counterweight to Syria, have been cooling for years.
Amidst its instability, Syria has rattled Israeli nerves by letting its Palestinians be Palestinian: ticked off and marching toward Palestine.
Fatah and Hamas have somehow forged a unity government.
Egypt's new government could really care less about keeping Gaza sealed off.
The EU is distracted and the Obama administration cool since Israel's refusal to stop West Bank settlements.

The U.S. has some large fish to fry and shouldn't have to care much about non-existential threats to Israel; but Israel has to care very much about everything, and might be in the mood to deal. While Netanyahu will undoubtedly talk tough and receive his usual adoration in Congress, now might be a very good time for U.S. negotiators to bring up those West Bank settlements again.

The Post Goes for Its Pulitzer

2010-07-20T04:01:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has anted up for a 2011 Pulitzer Prize with a sprawling, days-long series titled "Top Secret America." Its stories, written primarily by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, attempt to describe the size and scale of the American intelligence community, taking as a starting point the 854,000 or so people who hold top-secret clearances.

The series documents how the U.S. intelligence community's explosive post-9/11 growth has created waste and redundancy, and may now lie beyond any single person's ability to grasp. The series has started out well, focusing on the government's role Monday and contractors' role today, and while I don't know much about Arkin, I'll read anything Dana Priest writes the moment I come across it.

But the Post stories also describe how the sheer size of the national-security community causes it to have some banal, clock-punching characteristics, as in these grafs from Monday's article:

In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

...

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

While the Hollywood idea of intelligence agencies as tightly knit teams of supersleuths and assassins has particles of truth, the reality is that the agencies also contain huge numbers of workaday cube dwellers who look forward to each Thursday, when the cafeteria within their heavily secured installation serves that delicious carrot cake.*

* Ongoing thanks to Jack Boulware for lodging this enduring image of quiet desperation in my mind.

Exporting Their Way to Prosperity

2010-07-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

GERMANY AND CHINA PUNCTURE MYTHS ABOUT U.S. HIGH-TECH "LEADERSHIP."

In April I wrote about the pointlessness of the U.S. leading in the production of "specialty" steel when it's a loser in manufacturing nearly everything else that people around the world want.

In this morning's Post, columnist Harold Meyerson takes up this refrain and explains that Germany's and China's coherent industrial policies give them an edge in the manufacturing and export wars. Here he looks at the German example:

Germany has increased its edge in world-class manufacturing even as we have squandered ours because its model of capitalism is superior to our own. For one thing, its financial sector serves the larger economy, not just itself. The typical German company has a long-term relationship with a single bank -- and for the smaller manufacturers that are the backbone of the German economy, those relationships are likely with one of Germany's 431 savings banks, each of them a local institution with a municipally appointed board, that shun capital markets and invest their depositors' savings in upgrading local enterprises. By American banking standards, the savings banks are incredibly dull. But they didn't lose money in the financial panic of 2008 and have financed an industrial sector that makes ours look anemic by comparison.

Depressed yet?

Meyerson also notes that despite the self-perception of the U.S. as a high-tech leader, it's actually running annual high-tech deficits that reached $61 billion in 2008, quoting Clyde Prestowitz's new The Betrayal of American Prosperity. See Simon & Schuster's promo page for that book and notice the first stat: China's number-one export to the U.S. is now computer equipment, while our number-one export to China is waste paper and scrap metal.

Not rice, not aircraft parts, not Levi's, not Coca-Cola, not financial services. Junk.

Silver linings, anyone?

Prepping for the Pain, Part I

2010-06-24T04:28:00.000-07:00

BRITAIN AND IRAN'S PAINFUL STEPS BRACE THEM FOR THE FUTURE. HOW ABOUT THE U.S.?

For very different reasons, Britain and Iran were in the news this week for macroeconomic decisions that cause their citizens pain in the near term while positioning each country better to face looming hazards.

In Britain, the Conservative-led unity government unveiled a budget that will cut nearly all public spending by a quarter over the next five years while re-jiggering the country's tax structure to spare the poorest and squeeze the wealthiest. The lone bright spot is a reduction in corporate taxes to encourage job creation in the hope of not sending the country spilling back into recession. The move helps soothe bond-rating agencies chary of a Greece-style meltdown in northern Europe, and puts the country onto a more solid financial footing in the future.

Meanwhile Iran has been rationing gas and increasing its refining capacity in response to potential U.S. sanctions targeting fuel imports. The new sanctions would probably have little effect on Iran, and none at all on Iranian leadership, but workaday Iranian citizens are undoubtedly grumbling. (The story above notes that Tehran may even use U.S. sanctions as an excuse to remove an economically inefficient fuel subsidy, which will turn the grumbles into screams, but will still improve Tehran's economic posture in the long run.)

Britain's moves may still hurt its poorest citizens while Iran's help continue the country's outlaw nuclear program, but both countries are acting to ensure their longer-term good.

One can only hope U.S. federal government—which like the UK is laden with debt, legacy wars and an aging workforce—will somehow find a way to take unpopular but necessary economic steps to get out of debt and right its sagging balance sheet.

Love Letter to Northern China

2010-06-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

CHINA SHOWS A MODERN SIDE IN THE "KARATE KID" REMAKE.

Saw the remake of Karate Kid over the weekend. The plot is the same as the 1984 original: Young Jaden Smith, fresh off the plane from Detroit, embarks on a coming-of-age slash hero's journey after being bullied at his new middle school in Beijing. He needs to learn self-defense and who better to teach him than the gracefully aging, universally popular Jackie Chan?

Doubts are overcome, skills learned, discipline inculcated etc. with a merciful lack of the soundtrack-driven montages parodied so viciously in Team America: World Police.

But as Chan leads Smith hither and yon to learn the True Meaning of Kung-Fu, the movie's uncredited costar emerges: northern China.

Visually, the movie is a love letter to the north; the credits should have a notice from the China National Tourist Office thanking you for watching. A half-hour into the movie we've already seen Beijing's modern airport in all its glory, the Olympic "bird's nest" stadium, daring new buildings, construction cranes dotting the skyline, idyllic crowd scenes of Beijing residents doing tai chi, playing ping-pong and otherwise looking both peacable and industrious, and a potential Chinese love interest for 12-year-old Jaden.

Now, though, Chan and Smith take a train journey that leads them past rice paddies hemmed in by dramatic mountains, to training atop the Great Wall of China, to drinking from a "dragon fountain" at a mountaintop temple that's so photogenic you want to put down your popcorn and walk into the frame.

Combine those beautiful visuals with the movie's ending, where Smith's tormentors turn out to be okay guys--they not only present him with the winner's trophy but pay respect to Jackie Chan's character, implicitly renouncing their current, cruel sensei--and you've got a very nice boost for PRC soft power around the world.

Old Recipe: European Muslim Stew

2010-06-14T05:13:00.001-07:00

Perhaps I was a bit hasty last December when I wrote that France is eager to welcome everyone.

While the country's official face is still welcoming, country officials are not, especially Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux. He wants to amend France's constitution to make it easier to strip (Muslim) welfare cheats of their French nationality and send them back to wherever they came from.

The recipe for coverage of European Muslims always, always, always starts with either a veil, a hijab or a minaret, and this morning's story in the Post is no exception. Throw in what reads like a green-card marriage and a healthy dose of polygamy, and you've got a meal.

The Powers That Beijing

2010-04-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

HOW'S IT FEEL TO BE COLONIZED? ASK RADIO LISTENERS IN COASTAL TEXAS.

Yesterday's Post brought the occasionally tragic, occasionally hilarious "From China's Mouth to Texans' Ears," which documents Texan reaction to Chinese international broadcasting from a station in Galveston:

Cruise southeast out of Houston, past the NASA exits and toward the Gulf of Mexico, and you pick up something a little incongruous on the radio, amid country crooners, Rush Limbaugh, hip-hop and all the freewheeling clamor of the American airwaves.
"China Radio International," a voice intones. "This is Beyond Beijing."

Way, way beyond Beijing.

Sandwiched between a Spanish Christian network and a local sports station, broadcasting at 1540 on your AM dial, is KGBC of Galveston, wholly American-owned and -operated, but with content provided exclusively by a mammoth, state-owned broadcaster from the People's Republic of China.

Call it KPRC. Or as the locals quip: Keep Galveston Broadcasting Chinese.

The little Texas station may be modest, but it is part of a multibillion-dollar effort by the Chinese government to expand its influence around the world. As China rises as a global force, its leaders think that their country is routinely mischaracterized and misunderstood and that China needs to spread its point of view on everything from economics to art to counter the influence of the West.

Tragic because China is essentially using U.S. consumers' money to influence them (I know, I know, Hey Paul, enough already about Chinese economic dominance and trade surpluses) and hilarious because the PRC isn't exactly nimble about competing in the home of the First Amendment.

In their inimitable, Five Year Plan fashion, the powers that Beijing have decided to use coastal Texas as the springboard for achieving information dominance in the U.S. (What is it about superpowers wanting to influence oil-rich desert nations, which is how at least west Texans might characterize themselves?)

It's good to hear that someone besides the U.S. is having difficulty getting their foreign-influence story straight. Turns out that AM broadcasts from Galveston don't really reach metro Houston, which was the PRC's intention, and it also turns out that the tension between following the Party line in Beijing and reporting anything that anyone in the U.S. actually wants to hear is rather high, all of which sounds familiar to those who follow U.S. international broadcasting.

"Specialty" Steel and Economic Recovery

2010-04-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

SO WHAT IF THE U.S. MAKES THE BEST AIRCRAFT PARTS?

As I emerge from beneath a pile of work, I see I'd set aside "Geithner Asserts 'Critical Role' of Manufacturing" from last Thursday's Post. In it, the Treasury secretary visits Allegheny Technologies Inc., which makes specialty metal products in Pennsylvania and elsewhere for aerospace, automotive and other applications.

The story quotes Geithner thusly:

"This is a sector that will play a critical role in helping to spur our economic recovery and contribute to our long-term prosperity."

The story then notes that the company has remained profitable through the economic downturn.

All well and good, but Allegheny is profitable not because it makes things everyone wants and can use, but because it makes relatively exotic items that other countries can't produce yet; for example, titanium is notoriously difficult to work in anything more complex than a mountain bike and if other countries can't use it to make aviation parts, Allegheny has pricing power and thus profitability for the time being.

But this doesn't change the fact that, as the article also notes, there has been

"a steady loss of jobs as the production of textiles, consumer electronics and other products has shifted overseas."

This is a polite way of saying that the U.S. is permanently, completely non-competitive in making things that everyone wants, from t-shirts and shoes to cell phones and TVs to my Apple laptop ("designed in California" its packaging whines, as if that matters).

Try this experiment: Find a parking meter near you and read what's written on the steel post holding the meter up. If it was installed 20 years ago, the steel is probably from Korea; 10 years ago, from Thailand.

The U.S. can't settle for just being the best at making things no one else makes (yet); it needs to find ways to be the best at making things everyone else makes and thus everyone wants. This is what will actually contribute to U.S. prosperity in the long term: a decades-long reindustrialization where the U.S. turns the tables on its foreign competitors and uses their technologies as the basis for building new, even more efficient factories in the U.S.

U.S. Consular Official Killed Returning from Mexico

2010-03-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

IT BEGINS?

I'd worried in print three weeks ago about Mexican traffickers retaliating against U.S. targets, now that the U.S. is becoming more involved in Mexican efforts to target the gangs. Now it appears that a U.S. consular official, Lesley Enriquez, and husband Arthur Redelfs were intercepted by an armed gang and shot dead on Saturday afternoon.

The couple were returning home to El Paso from a child's birthday party across the border in Ciudad Juarez; the attackers spared the couple's own infant.

Random violence? Could be, except that a Mexican man driving a similar car--the husband of a Mexican national who also works at the consulate in CJ--left the same party that afternoon and he, too, was shot dead. His two kids are wounded.

The FBI is investigating. President Calderon will come by to show the flag on Tuesday, brimming with American support. The consulate will be closed the same day for a period of mourning. Meanwhile, folks at U.S. consulates in Mexico would be advised to stop driving white SUVs for the duration.

Philip Seib Critiques State's New PD Plan

2010-03-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

SO I DON'T HAVE TO.

USC CPD head Philip Seib describes State's new PD roadmap as "so lacking in imagination, so narrow in its scope, and so insufficient in its appraisal of the tasks facing U.S. public diplomats that it is impossible to understand why its preparation took so many months."

And he's just getting warmed up. Ouch.

Urgent Evoke

2010-03-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

Alternate-reality game designer Jane McGonigal has a new one: Urgent Evoke, a World Bank-sponsored ARG that attempts to port the addictive qualities of games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville to the social-innovation realm. Planning to give it a look and take it for a spin, given that what I've read so far makes players feel that they're a sort of Mission Impossible super-agent, but without the international killings and kidnappings. Stay tuned.

U.S. Goes COIN in Mexico?

2010-02-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

NOT QUITE YET.

The U.S. and allies have moved to a counterinsurgency (COIN) focus in Afghanistan, which could be encapsulated as "protect the people from the insurgents." The same cannot yet be said for U.S. activities down Mexico way, judging from this morning's "U.S. to Place Agents Within Mexican Units to Aid Drug Fight" in the Post:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- For the first time, U.S. officials plan to embed American intelligence agents in Mexican law enforcement units to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in the most violent city in Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

The new mission is apparently a logical extension of the DEA's old-school decapitation strategy, a.k.a. counterterrorism a.k.a. CT, which could be encapsulated as "kill or capture top bad guys."

In the U.S. drug-war context, CT has failed utterly to affect U.S. drug consumption and its collateral effects, never mind the burgeoning business in domestic pot and imported narcotics; insert your own metaphor about the narcotics business as Hydra-headed monster. I don't know why a strategy that hasn't worked in the U.S. is projected to work in Mexico.

Now, in my last post in this space, I came out heavily for a CT mission and against a COIN focus in Afghanistan--but differences between the Mexican and Afghan contexts abound:

By more directly involving U.S. agents in Mexican operations, the U.S. may inspire notoriously thin-skinned Mexican cartels to strike across a porous U.S.-Mexico border on a scale that the Taliban et al. simply cannot. (Actually, this has already happened.) Mexico absolutely will not tolerate the deployment of U.S. troops into Mexico to counterattack following any such cartel action.
Unlike Afghanistan, Mexico has a relatively effective and increasingly democratic central government that can run a COIN operation on its own, or perhaps with U.S. cash such as promised in the story above.
Mexican stability is a vital U.S. national-security interest and deserving of more than half-measures such as a CT mission.

Taking these factors into account, I figure it would be cheaper for now for the U.S. to fund Mexican COIN efforts and simply continue its current cop-training and border-interdiction missions. The alternative is to venture down a slippery slope in which DEA and other intelligence advisors become military advisors become SEAL teams become ... what?

Against COIN, for CT in Afghanistan and Elsewhere

2010-01-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

A COROLLARY TO THE OLD "NO LAND WAR IN ASIA" MAXIM: DON'T INVADE SICILY, EITHER.

While I mostly use this blog to comment on soft power, sometimes I venture into hard power—and this is one of those times.

Over the winter break I had an epiphany about the interrelation of U.S. hard and soft power: I now oppose a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan and advocate a purely counterterror (CT) strategy (PDF link) there instead.

Blame history—or histories—that I've read recently, starting with Livy's works on early Rome (books I-V) last spring and Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War at the end of 2009. I've taken occasional dips back into Robert Kaplan's Warrior Politics and his source materials (Churchill, the Federalists, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and several others).

What I've taken from that reading is that the U.S. must pull back from its current efforts to remake Iraq and Afghanistan in the image of a Western democracy, or risk long-term political and economic exhaustion.

What follows is not an argument about morality, and readers may find much of it amoral. It is about making cold-blooded political and economic calculations about where U.S. national interests will lie in the next decade. They do not lie in an open-ended COIN mission.

The history of the Peloponnesian War is particularly relevant here. Athens began fighting Sparta with the resources of an empire and thousands of talents of silver in the bank—enough to fight expensive, far-flung naval and land campaigns for three years without lasting financial consequences.

Athens was rich, and if peace with Sparta had come by the end of the third year, Athens would have continued to prosper and rule over much of the Mediterranean. (Athens had a "hard"—conquered or cowed—empire as opposed to the "soft" empire of alliances and treaties the U.S. currently has.)

But the war with Sparta dragged on for decades, despite occasional peace overtures by both sides. By war's end—despite the spoils of battle and increased taxes and tribute extracted from its shrinking dominion—Athens was broke, depopulated by fighting and plague, bereft of its empire, and could no longer project power into the Mediterranean. Where its former interests ranged from Black Sea Turkey to southern Italy, it spent decades as a small-bore power and never regained its former strength or influence.

I worry that the U.S. is similarly locked into an open-ended commitment to democratize a nation that is of regional rather than global importance—a parallel to Athens convincing itself that it had to conquer distant, militarily insignificant Sicily.

"Winning" in Afghanistan
The U.S. could "win" in Afghanistan where victory is defined as a stable, legitimate central government that can project power within its own borders. I don't doubt that the U.S. and its allies could accomplish this given enough time and resources. But I think—as many COIN experts also do—that it will take at least another decade or more of blood and treasure to produce such a result, if ever.

Of course I'd like to see the results of a successful COIN campaign: a stable democracy, women's rights, and general prosperity for Afghans, who among all Asia's peoples surely deserve those things. I certainly want to end al-Qa'ida's ability to operate freely in South Asia and elsewhere.

The U.S. is the only country that would both conceive of these missions and attempt to carry them out. But goals beyond keeping al-Qa'ida on the run don't serve the long-term interests of the U.S., and I am more interested in regaining and preserving U.S. hard power than I am in the rewards that would come from "winning" a lengthy COIN war.

I fear the U.S. people and government becoming exhausted from the costs of a lengthy COIN effort, just as they are already exhausted from (and have largely forgotten about) the Iraq war. I worry that if this fatigue sits in, the U.S. will abandon foreign-policy leadership as it has done periodically throughout history.

This outcome would be worse than a resurgent Taliban, worse than Afghan women and men being further oppressed, and worse than al-Qa'ida having plentiful additional caves to plot in.

Here are some signs of an exhaustion of U.S. power: The U.S. is already overextended, with commitments in Iraq (shrinking for now), Afghanistan (expanding), Yemen (pending) and Iran (TBD). At home, the U.S. economy remains feeble and in the long term is increasingly hostage to other nations for goods and services it no longer produces (and increasingly, no longer can produce).

Even more worrisome is the U.S. credit situation. The wars, and much other U.S. government spending, are now heavily underwritten by other countries' purchases of debt the U.S. issues. It has borrowed trillions from foreign countries and especially China, which continues its steady, highly rational policy of promoting exports while freeriding under the American security umbrella (just as the U.S. once rode for free beneath Britain's).

Over time, those countries accrue enough debt to have a say in U.S. policies that may threaten the dollar's value, which is why you now see high U.S. officials flying to Beijing to soothe PRC nerves and explain why America keeps borrowing money.

At home, there are few resources to apply following a major disaster, such as a Katrina-style hurricane or a major earthquake.

The U.S. needs to start rebuilding its reserves—of capital, of credit, of political goodwill abroad, of military force—to be ready for these and more serious crises, for which we currently have few resources to spare. Such challenges may involve humanitarian crises (think Darfur, a Rwanda-style genocide, Indian Ocean tsunamis); Latin American instability (Mexico, Venezuela, post-Castro Cuba); rogue-state nuclear development (Iran, North Korea); or complex challenges from a rising power (China, a reinvigorated Russia).

What a CT Focus Means
Focusing on a counterterror-only mission means admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq—and Yemen and Iran—are not, and will not likely become, threats to the U.S. that require tens of thousands of troops. Individuals from those countries (as well as their alleged British, Nigerian or Virginian lackeys) may be threats, but threats that can mostly be handled by a CT strategy, intensified border protection, and other measures. The countries themselves will remain militarily negligible outside their own neighborhood.

A CT strategy would mean keeping a few heavily fortified bases in Afghanistan and Iraq to maintain the "B-52 effect" of being able to suppress large-scale fighting via airpower, while pulling all our other troops out. We would then keep up Predator decapitation strikes and occasional bombing of insurgent hideouts, while providing air support for the Afghan National Army and police.

We would also do what we could—and no more—to strengthen the Kabul and Islamabad governments. Sooner or later that will mean standing back while an unsavory strongman takes charge in one or both countries—someone who can maintain stability if not a Western-style democracy, although we can certainly pressure them to try.

Benefits of a CT Focus
Pulling the bulk of U.S. troops from the two active wars means military spending drops sharply, freeing up greatly needed funds for other uses: to stimulate the domestic economy, to aid in healthcare reform, or simply to reduce the need to issue more debt and thus begin paying down our current tab. (As an added benefit, China and others who want to extract wealth from a less-secure Afghanistan must then foot their own security bill.)

Perhaps we become less hated in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps not, but we get out of the nation-building business that President Bush used to deride and can use our political, economic and military assets elsewhere. At that point we begin to rebuild those all-important reserves without which a great nation cannot aid allies, warn off adversaries, and sway those in the middle.

Costs of a CT Focus
A pure CT focus has substantial drawbacks, particularly for those who favor a foreign policy oriented toward human rights.

The U.S. will move from the current twin focus on winning civilian hearts and minds while killing insurgent leaders toward a pure assassination model—not a morally pleasing choice.

Lots of Afghans who have worked with the U.S. will flee or else die when their areas revert to warlord or Taliban control. Women's rights will vanish almost completely, almost overnight. Afghan opium will continue to utterly dominate world markets. Only the B-52 Effect will prevent a resumption of frank civil war along ethnic lines, but myriad "incidents" will occur at the cost of thousands of lives. Brain drain will resume and quickly accelerate.

And the U.S. will still spend billions per year to maintain bases in and supply lines to Afghanistan, and to prop up the Islamabad government and underwrite its occasional punitive expeditions along the Afghan border. (These costs will still be far less than the expense of a full-bore COIN mission, however.)

I believe enduring these stomach-churning tradeoffs is worthwhile because making them enables the U.S. to rebuild its reserves in every area: political, financial, and yes, moral, since it can then use its clout to be a broader guarantor of human rights worldwide than it can by continuing to bleed itself in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia.

To paraphrase the line from Kaplan's Warrior Politics that changed my mind: At the end of the day, America's power to do good is strongest when American hard power is both abundant and largely held in reserve.

I believe the U.S. is of greatest benefit to the world's oppressed overall when it serves as a beacon to the idealists and a threat to dictators and criminals—qualities that the U.S. will not possess as long as it is tied down by one or more land wars in Asia.

Holbrooke: "It's Complicated."

2010-01-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S MAN-ABOUT-AFPAK CHECKS IN AT BROOKINGS.

Richard Holbrooke spoke at Brookings this afternoon on the topic of the Obama administration's challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He gave some fairly standard answers to some fairly standard questions; when asked how the U.S. deals with the winner of a clearly fraudulent election, Holbrooke doggedly insisted that Hamid Karzai was the legitimately elected president of Afghanistan and that the U.S. would deal with him on that basis--a pragmatic statement if not one that will endear him to fans of transparency and the rule of law.

A few other notes follow.

On why the U.S. is in Afghanistan: During the Obama administration's review of AfPak policy, the conclusion was that "basic national security interests were at stake in these countries," an attitude Holbrooke says was confirmed during subsequent visits to everyone he could name, including the UAE, Russia, Afghanistan's neighbors and Egypt, among others.

On the new day at USAID: With a new administrator finally in place, USAID can start to get more serious work done, although Holbrooke notes that the agency is badly depleted with (for example) "just four engineers [of its own] left in the water area." Contractors handle the rest, something Holbrooke and Secretary Clinton seem determined to change. Look out, AED, DAI, JAA, et al!

On earthquake relief in Pakistan, 2005: "This is what a great nation does for a country that is under so much pressure." Again, Holbrooke is being pragmatic and in this case, excessively modest about what the U.S. hoped to gain from throwing "hundreds of millions" in aid at Pakistan's quake-stricken hinterland.

Holbrooke also noted that Georgia is currently training a battalion in Tbilisi that, when deployed, will make Georgia the most numerous per-capita donor of troops to the Afghan mission until the new U.S. deployments are complete. Again, Holbrooke insists there is no quid pro quo here--implying that the Georgians are doing this out of the goodness of their collective heart--but anyone familiar with Georgian-Russian relations knows that Georgia is creating a chit to be cashed in later if Moscow comes knocking.

Liebenthal Gets It

2009-11-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

Public diplomacy is primarily about exuding prowess or emanating skill or demonstrating compassion. It's about others observing your virtues without you having to trumpet them, and at some point in the future this turns into a usable reputational asset.

And Brookings' Kenneth Liebenthal clearly gets this in his comment to the Times on President Obama's China trip:

“The United States actually has enormous influence on popular thinking in China, but it is primarily by example,” [Liebenthal] said. “If you go to the next step and say, ‘You guys ought to be like us,’ you lose the impact of who you are.”

Diem TKOs Abdullah After First Round!

2009-11-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

CRINGING AT REPEATING THE SAME MISTAKES.

On Monday the Afghan Independent Election Commission certified that Afghan President Ngo Dinh Diem had won reelection against rival Abdullah Abdullah, removing the need to conduct a second round of voting at the onset of winter in an increasingly insecure country.

Oh, sorry—Diem didn't win reelection; he's been dead for decades!

It was Hamid Karzai who was (ahem) reelected.

You can't blame me for making an analogy to the one-time leader of South Vietnam. Vietnam War comparisons are a dime a dozen in the pundit business lately.

Unfortunately, they're usually the wrong Vietnam analogies.

These wrong analogies focus on the Afghan war based on how it impacts the U.S. They focus on U.S. forces, on the war's cost, on its impact on domestic politics, on how it affects presidential legacies. They focus on the problems of exiting a Vietnam-like quagmire, on sustaining Vietnam-like casualties, on how each new insurgent offensive is a potential Tet, on how our men and women train and strain to be capable soldiers, diplomats, medics and engineers, and how some of them die.

All this echoes how the U.S. focused on itself (or on the Cold War contest) during the Vietnam War, rather than on South and North Vietnam themselves.

The Vietnam analogy I rarely hear relates to how the U.S. is making precisely the same mistake with President Karzai as it did with President Diem of the Republic of South Vietnam.

As in the case of Diem, the U.S. wants an Afghan leader who can be effective on behalf of U.S. policy. And certainly, like the former South Vietnamese strongman, Karzai cleans up well (he wears recognizable clothing and speaks excellent English). His corruption, or that of his family and friends, is tolerable (if it's not overly publicized). There are few other Afghan leaders in Karzai's league (who aren't warlords).

Also like Diem, Karzai's writ stops a few kilometers outside the national capital. His military is undisciplined and untrustworthy (although not yet as treacherous as the ARVN, which shot Diem in 1963). Both Diem and Karzai rely/relied on U.S. aid and military force for their positions, and both made themselves appear indispensable to keep these resources flowing.

There are differences. Tribe was relatively unimportant in South Vietnam, although Diem belonged to the Catholic elite that helped the French rule a Buddhist nation; Karzai belongs to Afghanistan's majority tribe and Islamic denomination. Thanks to both royal and French rule, South Vietnam had a functioning civil service that Afghanistan lacks. Vietnam did not suffer through decades of civil war before U.S. intervention, as Afghanistan has.

Importantly, I don't see the Taliban as a primarily nationalist movement in the way the Vietminh and Vietcong are now considered (or at least nationalists first, Communists second). I see the Taliban as Arab-influenced provincials who manipulate Pashtun affiliations to their own ends.

The fact remains, though, that the U.S. is again propping up an ineffective leader and his light-fingered cronies in a nation that rates domino-like deference from U.S. policymakers. It is maddening to watch the U.S. support an election-stealing figurehead who alienates Afghans from the Kabul government as much as the Diem (and Nhu) families did the South Vietnamese.

Petraeus and Nagl's Counterinsurgency Manual (download the PDF from this link) advises that protecting and providing services to the host-country population are the counterinsurgent's primary concerns, and that the host government should be enabled to provide these services. It follows that counterinsurgents should do everything possible to help Afghans create an honest, effective central government—and then stand back.

Senator Kerry and others have inspired President Karzai to at least genuflect toward clean government. Following his election 'victory,' Karzai held a press conference where he vowed to clean the government of corruption:

"My government will be for all Afghans and all those who want to work with me are most welcome," Karzai said in a nationally televised victory speech.

"There will be crucial changes in our future government. Now we are determined to use all our forces, by any means, to remove this stain (of corruption) from our soil," he said.

But while Karzai said he was committed to reform, some analysts felt he did not spell out his plans in sufficient detail, indicating no major changes were planned.

The Communists won in 1940s China because they were seen as incorruptible, as well as competent administrators of the territory they occupied before 1949. The North Vietnamese copied this formula in the 1960s and won over Vietnamese peasants while the U.S. fretted over who ruled Saigon.

The Taliban national government of the 1990s was seen as incorruptible—at first—and provided security to Afghans, but few other services. Similarly, their insurgent heirs are trying to repeat this pattern by hand-picking a parallel government in areas they control, arguing that Kabul is corrupt and home to only a puppet government.

What will it take for the U.S. to stop supporting its 21st-century Diem and recognize that the first requirement for an Afghan leader is that he be honest and serve all of Afghanistan's citizens?

It almost doesn't matter at this point; the window on voting out the Karzai administration closed with a thump when Abdullah dropped out of the runoff. The next opportunity to get a competent, effective leader in office in Kabul won't be until 2013 or 2014.

Until then, I'm going to keep making the only Vietnam analogy that matters, the one that should flow off the lips of every U.S. officer and diplomat when they go to work in Afghanistan each day:

We saw what happened when we backed crooked leaders in Vietnam. What step am I going to take today, next week and next year—no matter how small—to make sure a clean, competent leader for all Afghans has a chance in 2013?

A Tout France

2009-10-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

Sometime correspondent (and blogger on all things culinary near Puget Sound) Ronald Holden is in New York for French Affairs, a conference put on by the French Government Tourist Office.

Although Ron rightly complains about this agency's overly busy Web site (although I love that it leads to a vlog called Lost in Francelation), he finds much to admire about France's unified national program for attracting tourist dollars:

France was the first country to target a wide variety of niche travel markets: gay & lesbian, Jewish, religious, Hispanic, luxury, first-timers, retirees, French expats. Theme travel, too: culinary, wine, ski, spa, and so on. There's no comparable agency promoting the entire USA; individual companies (airlines, hotel chains, Disneyland destinations) and individual states and cities are expected to do their own marketing campaigns. The Sarkozy government pitched in to help France's embattled hospitality sector by cutting the VAT on restaurant meals by 75 percent, but hotel revenues, in the world's most visited country (77 million foreign tourists a year) are still down 13 percent.

So: Not only does France go out of its way to welcome everyone and tempt them with everything, it's also applying good old-fashioned tax policy to make eating out cheaper across the entire country.

That can only encourage longer stays and accomplishing something I was unable to do last year: tear myself away from Paris proper and see the countryside.

It makes me wonder who could possibly take the reins and promote Brand America with one voice, 'round the world. I mean, besides Disney.

Cupping Rwanda

2009-10-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

COFFEE MAY HELP REBRAND A NATION BETTER KNOWN FOR GENOCIDE.

A few years ago I helped a client edit a paper on improving African value chains. The paper looked at out how, say, Ugandan growers who made just a nickel on each pineapple could capture more of the five euros the same pineapple fetched by the time it wound up at a Paris grocery store.

There are lots of ways to pull this off. Growers can band together to demand better prices from middlemen, or form their own middleman organization. Or they can pool funds for a processing plant that creates value-added foods like pineapple chunks or slices. Or get a reputable group to certify the pineapples as organic. Or create a brand around the supposed uniqueness of pineapples from a specific Ugandan region, much like the DOC system does for Italian wines. Even simply building cool-storage facilities that keep a surplus fresh for sale at a more favorable time can improve returns.

If you're Rwanda and you have excellent coffee beans but a slight image problem thanks to the 1994 genocide, rebranding seems to be the way to go. In this morning's Post, "A pick-me-up for Rwanda" details how some entrepreneurs are promoting Rwandan coffee here in D.C., a town that I assure you is in desperate need of better espresso:

Emblazoned on the windows of Bourbon Coffee is the phrase "Murakaza neza," which in the Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda means "We welcome you with blessings."

Rwanda is better known for the 1994 genocide that left more than 800,000 people dead than for its cappuccino. But that doesn't stop Arthur Karuletwa, founder of Bourbon Coffee, from dreaming big.

"If done right, it could be the platform to re-brand the country," says Karuletwa, former chief executive and now a shareholder in the company. Coffee can "create awareness that there's recovery, there's trade, there's investment opportunities, there's tourism. There's life after death."

Rwandan coffee growers experience some typical developing-world problems, including poor infrastructure for getting coffee to market, large numbers of small growers, and corrupt officials. But they've also got a product that raises eyebrows among coffee professionals:

"Rwanda is a very wanted origin," says Susie Spindler, executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, which runs the Cup of Excellence competition [the Oscars of coffee]. She says coffee traders and roasters visiting Rwanda are discovering unusual flavor profiles they never knew existed.

"It mixes a lot of regular characteristics that you usually only find in one area," agrees Stacey Manley, Bourbon's barista. "Latin American coffees tend to be lighter-bodied and kind of nutty with cocoa. But you almost never find an earthy, really heavy-bodied Latin American coffee. Those are typically Indonesian characteristics. And in Indonesia, coffee is very rarely bright. So the weird thing about Rwandan coffee is it'll have all these different characteristics in one coffee."

In the tradition of European wines, Rwanda has succeeded in establishing five distinct coffee appellations. Altitudes and soils vary among the appellations, creating unique flavors: spicy with hints of tea and cocoa in one, nutty with berry and floral notes in another.

So I'm going to go and try Bourbon Coffee, which is at 2101 L St. NW. Watch for stores in Boston and New York. Socioeconomic competitor: the three Juan Valdez Coffee outlets in D.C., which I tried once. While the decor was beautiful, I could barely gak down the espresso; Juan must have been having an off day because everyone else seems to love the joint.

Clinton, Russia and the Caucasus

2009-10-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

YOU DON'T HEAR MUCH ABOUT RUSSIA, BUT IT SURE DOES TAKE A LOT OF SECRETARY CLINTON'S TIME.

Secretary Clinton doesn't spend a lot of time at home lately, and I suspect one big reason is that she's taken on the Russia portfolio at State.

Not only does she have the thankless task of persuading Moscow to tighten the screws on Iran, prodding it gently on human rights, and supporting its WTO bid, she also appeared at the signing of the new Turkish-Armenian agreement that opens the countries' borders for the first time in 16 years and invites the establishment of embassies in each other's capitals.

What's this last task have to do with Russia? A financially exhausted Moscow would love to see a more stable Caucasus whose squabbling nations—Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, various "autonomous republics," etc.—didn't soak up quite so much money and attention.

It's no surprise that the first visit by an Armenian president to Turkey is to attend a Turkey-Armenia soccer match. Feelings about the match run high in both countries but at least neither is still in the running for the World Cup. As one Armenian man interviewed by the BBC put it, "Perhaps a draw would be the perfect score as it would be a show of goodwill between the two countries. ..."

BJP and the One-Party State

2009-10-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

This morning's Times had an interesting piece about the collapse--to near irrelevance--of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu ultra-nationalists whose rise interrupted generations of Congress Party dominance. What's interesting is that Lydia Polgreen explicitly compares the BJP's flameout to the U.S Republican Party's loss of the presidency last year:

NEW DELHI — It is an all-too-familiar political story.

First there was the electoral drubbing at the hands of a center-left juggernaut. Next came the recriminations, with party leaders taking nasty, public swipes at one another in dueling magazine articles, op-ed articles and talk show appearances. Then came the agonizing debate: should the party lurch rightward to consolidate its base, or rush toward the center to attract moderate voters? And finally, the purge: party members who do not make the ideological cut are cast out or pushed aside.

If the script sounds familiar to those who have followed American politics in the last year, this one is playing out in the majestic, colonial-era halls of power in India’s capital ...

Polgreen points out that, virulent though the BJP may have been, its emergence as a viable alternative to Congress drove New Delhi to actually get things done--which Congress, unopposed in the past, didn't excel at. In the U.S., the Republican Party also shook things up with its dozen years' control of Congress following Democrats' 40 years.

At its roots the BJP is a Hindu fundamentalist party that alienated many with its insistence that a Hindu temple should replace a Muslim mosque, a stance that caused rioting and hundreds of deaths over the past decade or so. Now that it's in the wilderness, the BJP will be forced to reexamine its core beliefs and, like the GOP here, has begun that process with a purge of those judged insufficiently zealous.

It remains to be seen whether later generations see the coming years as the point where these parties were reduced to merely regional power, or expanded their influence by beckoning a wider range of followers.

The GOP has experience with reinventing itself in precisely this way, dating back to the rise of Ronald Reagan. Will the BJP make the same choice, or doom itself to ruling Gujarat?

Israel, Hamas, and German Neutrality

2009-09-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

HEY, GAME THEORISTS! PRISONER'S DILEMMA, INDEED.

Sometimes soft power comes from being seen as neutral.

In Richard Boudreaux's account of Israel's effort to retrieve a soldier captured by Hamas during the 2006 Gaza war, one item stands out: Both sides see a German as an adequately disinterested party.

Israel wants proof that Gilad Shalit is even alive. Hamas wants the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has made an updated video of Shalit, but Israel doesn't trust that Hamas is providing adequate evidence of Shalit's well-being. Israel needs a way to know that the evidence is good enough without turning over the Palestinian prisoners and without seeing the video, which would generate expectations of a quid pro quo.

It's a classic prisoner's dilemma where Israel can't defect but is extremely reluctant to cooperate.

Here's what happens next:

Israel Radio reported that a German mediator had reviewed the recording in Cairo and would show it to Israeli officials. They would then decide whether it conveys enough information about Shalit's condition to go ahead with the release of the Palestinian prisoners.

It reminds me strongly of Martti Ahtisaari's role in brokering the peace in Northern Ireland. As I recall, Britain wanted proof that the Irish Republican Army's weapons had been destroyed; the IRA wouldn't do that but offered to put them "beyond use," whatever that was supposed to mean. Both sides turned to Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and a man whose word is considered beyond reproach.

Apparently the IRA took Ahtisaari (and a South African counterpart) for blindfolded rides somewhere, and they indeed saw that the IRA's guns were permanently unusable—without ever specifying how. They reported back that the IRA was true its word, which cleared the way for today's largely peaceful Northern Ireland.

The idea that a mediator from Germany—with its Nazi past (however distant) and its troops in Afghanistan (however reluctant)—is acceptable to both Hamas and Israel is an impressive if unheralded part of German soft power. If the parties cannot trust each other, they have at least found a neutral who they can trust.

Brazil Steps In

2009-09-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

SOUTH AMERICA'S 800-POUND GORILLA FLEXES ITS MUSCLE IN ... TEGUCIGALPA?

On the whole, Brazil has kept a pretty low profile on the international stage in the past few years, letting Venezuela's President Chavez bang his shoe on the table of the Americas. Brazil has seemed content to let Chavez preen and posture, especially in the case of the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

Chavez has wanted Zelaya, a fellow constitutionally elected rabble-rouser, returned to power, presumably so that he can count another leftist-turned-autocrat in his corner. The Obama administration has straight-facedly insisted it also wants Zelaya back in power, remembering the soft-power carnage wrought by the Bush administration's quick embrace of a coup that briefly ejected Chavez in 2002.

Now, after being repeatedly denied reentry to Honduras, Zelaya has popped up at Brazil's embassy in the Honduran capital, causing near-apoplexy in the de facto Micheletti government.

Brazil has already protested Honduran security forces' actions against its mission--but the question remains: Why would Brazil take the dramatic step of using its embassy as Zelaya's staging ground in the first place?

(Readers who served at State in the 1960s and '70s can stop laughing at the idea of Brazil, then perennially under military dictatorship, upholding any constitution. Stop it. Right now.)

I'm tempted to say the answer is profile, profile, profile.

Brazil, South America's biggest country and largest economy, has surely chafed at Chavez's hijinks--particularly since President da Silva is also mildly lefty but has tried to run his country somewhere besides into the ground. Brazil has called for a prompt meeting of the UN Security Council to consider the Honduran crisis. And Brasilia has the political capital and all-around muscle to weather a lengthy disruption to its diplomatic activities in Honduras.

In short, Brazil takes a welcome turn on the side of law and order; asserts regional leadership while stealing Hugo Chavez's spotlight; gets to make that dramatic call to the UN; and is now owed a favor by the Obama administration which, despite efforts to broker a deal in Honduras, has been unable to pull it off.

Maybe there's some quid pro quo on Brazilian ethanol in our future. ...

James Fallows at Gov 2.0

2009-09-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

John Podesta and The Atlantic's James Fallows did a nice let's-interview-each-other at Gov 2.0 today and Fallows provided a few scraps of wisdom, based largely on his past three years' residence in China.

He noted that Chinese impressions of the U.S. are not yet created by social media, but said that it's "still American movies and TV iving impressions of the U.S. ... Old media still tell more of America's story internationally than new media do."

Podesta said that "The role of English overseas is a marvel ... you see Poles speaking to Koreans [in English] and all the rest," meaning that English is now a true lingua franca in his experience; he sees an opportunity to engage ESL foreign audiences with English-language broadcasting across platforms.

He was hopeful about the idea of having conversations with foreign publics as opposed to issuing statements to them, noting that "this sweeping empowering steps may be one that the U.S. is better equipped to take than other countries."

On Chinese search-engine freedom, Fallows thinks Google remains a big improvement, in terms of sheer numbers of results returned, than Baidu or other Chinese-language search sites.

And not to end on a down note, but Fallows feels the "sense of American renewal" he says foreign audiences had immediately after President Obama's election has "evaporated completely."

Heading to Gov 2.0

2009-09-08T13:11:00.001-07:00

I'll be at Gov 2.0 to be among the twitterati for the next couple days, starting with tonight's reception at Google HQ. Please call rather than e-mailing if you're in town and would like to meet up: 818.749.2420.

Germany's Reputation

2009-09-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

During the time I was in Afghanistan last year, it would have been a mistake to say that German forces kept a low profile in northern Afghanistan. They kept zero profile, by report of everyone I worked with at Bagram: no active patrolling outside their base, some daytime reconstruction activity, all in all pretty hunkered down.

Whether the German soldiers themselves wanted it this way was beside the point since civilian leadership back home told them to stay put. That's because Chancellor Merkel wanted a twofer: to get Germany credit for being a pillar of NATO, but ideally to sustain zero casualties in the process by playing it safe with a minimal mission in the safest part of Afghanistan.

Shh--the German electorate is sleeping.

And this scheme worked for years, as Germans generally seemed unaware that their soldiers were fighting, or fighting to stay out of, a war thousands of miles from home.

Now, Merkel has gotten the worst possible outcome: German commanders decided to destroy two hijacked fuel trucks; they ordered an air attack based on single-source intelligence; many civilians died; and through some near-mystical lack of cojones, German soldiers weren't ordered to secure the site of the attack until the next day. In a singular episode of what my boss at Bagram used to call the "self-cleaning battlefield," there wasn't a single body left.

U.S. commanders will see a familiar pattern here: We bomb, good and bad guys die, everyone gets buried before even a rudimentary investigation gets under way. It's a universal problem of this type of war, and not a big deal for electorates in the U.S. and Britain which have no problem referring to an "Afghan war."

The real problem is back home in Germany, where some members of Parliament are going bonkers and "prosecutors in Potsdam said Monday that they were considering whether to open a homicide investigation into the decision by a German military commander to order the airstrike. ..."

In other words, a Germany that's unaware it's involved in a war, or refuses to call it that or certify its military actions as such, may have to decide what it really thinks. On the fly. Right before German national elections on September 27. Anyone want to ask former Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar whether any of this sounds familiar?

The Only Thing Worse

2009-08-26T09:08:00.001-07:00

...WOULD BE THOSE INTERROGATION VIDEOS THE CIA DESTROYED.

I'd been on the fence about whether someone needed to go after the folks who disobediently destroyed videos of some CIA interrogations. I'm still on the fence--but I personally am glad that those videos will never surface.

That's because the videos are the only thing that could be worse for the image of the United States than the interrogation protocols this morning's Post lays out in black and white. The first three grafs alone are stomach-churning:

As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small collar around his neck. The collar will be used later; according to CIA guidelines for interrogations, it will serve as a handle for slamming the detainee's head against a wall.

After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face -- to get the detainee's attention -- followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or "walling," which can be tried once "to make a point," or repeated again and again.

"Twenty or thirty times consecutively" is permissible, the guidelines say, "if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question." And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.

The article goes on and on and on--so just imagine the uproar that would have resulted if videos of some of these interrogations still existed.

I still don't think the administration should go after any of the CIA interrogators, particularly since, as the Post article points out, CIA continually asked for guidance as to what was legal and what was illegal. It's just terrible that the previous administration's first resort was apparently thuggery.

The Game = Iran?

2009-07-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

Always entertaining, Marc ("Abu Aardvark") Lynch spends an amazing amount of Foreign Policy's time comparing rapper Jay-Z's hegemonic power with the potentially rising power of his near (but not near-peer) competitor, The Game.

You don't even have to know anything about rap to appreciate this piece (my own knowledge of rap stops abruptly with Straight Outta Compton). Lynch lays out the hegemon's options as well as the challenger's, and you can just read along and enjoy the ride.

The War at Home

2009-07-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

Much as I'd rather not beat the Mexico-is-the-new-Colombia meme into the ground, it's worth looking at Ken Ellingwood and Tracy Wilkinson's "Calderon's Drug Offensive Stirs 'Wasp Nest.'" This L.A. Times story portrays a northern Mexico that is now fully militarized and occuped by the federal army.

The force's highly visible presence has caused the local assassins to change tactics, substituting pistols for AKs and beat-up cars for SUVs. In other words, the bad guys now have to get much closer to their targets to kill them, an undoubted benefit--but it remains to be seen how well the army treats Mexican civilians and thus, whether the civilians see the federals as liberators or occupiers.

The signs in the Ellingwood/Wilkinson story aren't encouraging, but then the Mexican army may just be experiencing the same (occasionally lethal) growing pains that U.S. forces met when they faced occupation duties post 9/11:

Activists say soldiers trained for combat, not police work, have run amok at times.

Margarita Rosales, a laundry worker in Juarez, said her son, Javier, 21, was found dead in April after he and a friend were seized by soldiers and federal police after a night of drinking. His body bore marks of a severe beating, she said. Rosales said the friend told her that Javier, an X-ray technician, was singled out because he was heavily tattooed.

"He didn't sell drugs. He wasn't involved in that kind of thing," she said. "If they had found kilos of drugs, kilos of cocaine -- but why? There is no reason why."

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, human rights ombudsman for the state of Chihuahua, said his office has received 200 complaints of abuse by the military, including allegations of suspects being tortured to extract information, wrongful detention and seven killings. Nationwide, complaints against the army tripled between 2007 and 2009.

Robert Kaplan Interview by Michael Totten

2009-07-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

Well worth the read. Totten caught up with Kaplan a few weeks ago, immediately after the end of the Sri Lanka insurgency, and their conversation ranges from the Horn of Africa to the Russian Arctic, with stops in between for how India, China, Russia and Iran will all affect U.S. interests.

Note that both Kaplan and Totten agree that Persian soft power is a strong and possibly decisive factor in places like Turkmenistan.

Twitter Silliness

2009-06-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

THE MICRO-MESSAGING SERVICE HASN’T MADE A DAMN BIT OF DIFFERENCE IN IRAN.

With advance apologies to my colleagues whose job it is to spread the Good Word about social networking services to yet-benighted duchies and baronies within the federal government:

A strange-bedfellows combination of public diplomats, bloggers and assorted techies has been frothing since Iran-election protesters apparently used Twitter to both organize gatherings and appeal to the outside world for help. For a few days it appeared (in Western media accounts) that all Iran was tweeting when it wasn’t being kicked and beaten.

And yet, Twitter has really changed nothing except to lightly augment accounts of election-related disputes and rioting—and it enjoys that prominent role only because there have been few alternatives, what with Iran’s idled Internet and cell-phone networks and its lack of Western reporters.

As Noam Cohen pointed out in last Sunday’s Times, only a relatively small number of Iranians apparently used Twitter to organize protests; Iran is still primarily a word-of-mouth country rather than a texting or an Internet country.

And Twitter has other problems, among them that it’s so easy to use that pro-government forces use it themselves to spoof protest organizers and disseminate propaganda. Not to mention that those tweeting almost always lack training as observers or journalists; they’re just people who are frightened or angry and liable to write whatever they’re thinking at the moment—which is precisely what Twitter was designed for.

If anything, YouTube should be given credit for getting Iranian civilian videos of thug violence out of Iran, rallying world opinion in a visceral fashion that 140 dry characters cannot. In fact YouTube is choked with videos of baseej violence, and nothing has changed because of them, either.

Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei continue to move all the levers of power, speculation about Moussavi’s and Rafsanjani’s whereabouts and intentions notwithstanding. After some initial restraint, the Tehran government has deployed its knee-breakers in earnest to lock down both the capital and the provinces, and they appear to be succeeding.

As someone pointed out in the quaint, analog world of radio here in D.C. today, the first street protests against the Shah started in 1977 but didn’t reach critical mass until 1979.

My advice to Twitterers: Wait a couple of years to see whether #Revolution occurs, then a decade or so after that for everyone to write their books, before anyone proclaims that Twitter has come of age.

The Slope Steepens

2009-04-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

RECESSION, SWINE FLU, DRUG-FUELED VIOLENCE YANK MEXICO DOWN.

I remember Mexico's economic crisis in 1994, with its abrupt devaluation of the peso and the deep recession that followed. The country recovered brilliantly then, but I continue to have a bad feeling that Mexico is heading to where Colombia was in the 1990s.

The recession has already hammered both domestic industry and workers' remittances from overseas. The swine-flu outbreak is about to crush the third pillar of Mexico's economy, foreign tourism, with Mexico City hotel bookings suddenly off by 30-50 percent, according to NPR this morning.

Most worryingly, drug-gang violence continues to expand from the area around Ciudad Juarez to yesterday's city-wide ambushes of police in Tijuana.

From a reputational standpoint, things can't get much worse for Mexico--or can they?

Currently the Mexican government, corrupt and slow to act though it may be, does function; as others have noted, the trash gets picked up, kids go to school each morning, the food supply is safe, mail is delivered, certain commodities are kept relatively inexpensive. As a result, citizens have at least a minimal level of confidence that the federal government is legitimate.

However, that feeling could easily be shaken if either of two plausible events occurs: a) swine-flu deaths increase sharply and the government fails to intervene successfully or in time, or b) drug gangs stage a stand-up, set-piece battle with Mexico's military, signaling the emergence of an alternative power center in the country.

Either of these events would also cripple much-needed foreign direct investment.

In all, it looks a lot like Colombia circa 1990: potential and actual breakdown of public services and safety with an attendant erosion of faith in the central government, while the narcotraficantes provide an alternative source of jobs and infrastructure.

I'll really start worrying if I read newspaper stories about the narcos setting up their own courts to try criminals and settle civil disputes, aping the authority and legitimacy of the legitimate government just like the FARC.

Up with USIA

2009-04-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

IN WHICH A SKEPTIC IS CONVERTED TO THE CAUSE OF A NEW, INDEPENDENT U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY.

I spent part of last Friday afternoon at the semi-annual meeting of the Public Diplomacy Council, a group of retired State Department and U.S. Information Agency employees whose primary goal seems to be to revive USIA through any means necessary. (I'm a member primarily because I write about PD and soft power, not from any past affiliation with these agencies.)

Not having been involved in foreign policy the Cold War, I've always wondered at some advocates' messianic zeal about reviving USIA. Luckily I ran into WhirledView's Patricia Kushlis, with whom I'd corresponded over the past few years but never met.

Pat boiled it down to unity of effort: When USIA was around, you had a specific group of people who had one mission, who had their own budget, and who had institutional knowledge and memory of how to communicate with overseas publics. Contrast that with today, where budgeting and control of USIA's functions is fractured among State, the BBG and even the Defense Department.

She implied that getting everything back under one roof would lead to smarter, more focused PD. I'm also sure that a reconstituted, independent USIA would be able to persist and carry out its work even in periods of parent-agency neglect, as the empty chair of the Undersecretary for PA and PD demonstrates today at State.

So I'm now fully on board with the new-USIA program. Extract the former USIA's functions from their current agency homes, and pour them into a new agency. Give nouveau USIA the authority to ask for its own budget. And let it start the quiet, decades-long business of rebuilding the U.S.'s reputation abroad.

Horns of Africa

2009-04-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

FOR THE NEXT 9/11, IS MINNEAPOLIS THE NEW HAMBURG?

I think Somali-coast piracy is self-limiting because Somalis have essentially zero blue-water capacity, with "blue water" being defined as the ability to stay afloat out of sight of land for weeks at a time.

In trying to knock over that Maersk ship a couple weeks ago, the pirates verified that their effectiveness diminishes directly with distance from the nearest friendly port--and at 200 miles out, that effectiveness clearly drops to zero. They can't run back to shore fast enough, they can't be resupplied, and they can't outgun even the smallest nation-state naval vessel.

For the U.S. and other shipping nations, the trick becomes a simple matter of containment and a shrinking of the containment zone, not one of having to aggressively, endlessly patrol all the "millions" of square miles of water off Somalia's coast. (However, I'll paraphrase Robert Kaplan's recent point and accept that the Indian Ocean is, essentially, the new Atlantic in terms of being a potential great-power arena.)

Unfortunately, there are secondary consequences of the U.S. and French navies' recent killing and capturing of Somali pirates: They have relatives in places like the U.S.

Thanks to Tom Barnett for making the lightbulb go off in my head that Somali-heavy Minneapolis could potentially be a Hamburg for the plotters of some future domestic terrorist attack.

Sports Ambassadors

2009-04-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

DOING GOOD ONE FOREHAND AT A TIME.

Players and fans of ultimate Frisbee know that it puts an extraordinary premium on sportsmanship, particularly for an highly competitive sport that involves cleats, running for hours on end, leagues, and the drive to win national championships.

Sportsmanship, and ultimate players' equally strong commitment to teaching new players, are particularly important when you're trying to coach and teach the game to Palestinian and Israeli youths.

That's what the top-level American ultimate players in this Al-Jazeera English story are doing under the auspices of the Peres Center for Peace.

Let's hear it for amateur-sports ambassadors who don't care about what American public-diplomacy policy should look like; they're just going out and being what we'd all like American ambassadors to be.

(Thanks to Tom Coffin and others in DC for the tip-off.)

Everyone Is Someone Else’s Pakistan

2009-03-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

AND SECRETARY CLINTON SAYS WE ARE MEXICO’S.

The infuriating thing about Pakistan’s federal government is that it never really owns up to any of the things it does or fails to do that might be helping insurgents in Afghanistan.

While Islamabad makes sporadic attempts to suppress insurgents on its side of the border, it doesn’t publicly own up to the fact that flows of narcotics and al-Qa’ida operatives from Afghanistan into Pakistani territory, and opposing flows of money, gunmen and materiel through its territory into Afghanistan, fuel warlordism and insurgency.

How refreshing then that Secretary Clinton has owned up to the idea that U.S. money and weapons are similarly destabilizing northern Mexico, and probably the Mexican national government as a whole.

This is partly caused by U.S. citizens’ drug use and partly by lax U.S. firearms policies—but it's still events occurring on U.S. territory that are causing the harm, regardless of whether U.S. nationals are directly responsible.

It’s refreshing to hear a sitting Secretary of State acknowledge U.S. responsibility for something, especially when that something inadvertently destabilizes a friendly neighboring state and important trading partner.

If we want the Pakistans of the world to take responsibility for events on their territory, it only helps American soft power for the U.S. to do the same.

Brief Updates

2009-03-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

A few quick notes:

--Last night I attended the kick-off bash for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy's new magazine, PD. The first issue's theme is "New President: New Public Diplomacy?" and hopefully it will help kick-start discussion on what directions U.S. PD should take.

(Especially since, as John Brown noted to me, there's no new Undersecretary for PD and not even detectable chatter about one.)

--President Chavez's entirely predictable spiral toward dictatorship continues as he continues to bully restive regions, muzzle the press, snuggle with the Russians, and even threaten to nationalize Polar, the country's tastiest non-narcotic export.

--NATO's brand got a boost as French President Nicolas Sarkozy handily won a parliamentary vote of confidence inspired by his decision to rejoin the European defense organization.

Sarkozy has been moving NATO-ward for months now; I remember being impressed by his and defense minister Herve Morin's lightning decision to fly to Afghanistan immediately after a deadly ambush of French paratroopers there last summer. It appears that Sarkozy has hitched his wagon even more firmly to NATO now, and hopefully European NATO members will welcome the volume that France adds to Europe's military voice.

You Could Always Just Hire a Professional

2009-03-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

JOHN BROWN ARGUES THAT IT'S TIME FOR A PRO TO TAKE THE P.D. UNDERSECRETARY'S POSITION. FINALLY.

Ex-FSO and PD gadfly John Brown argues for nominating Ambassador William Rugh to be the Undersecretary for PD and Public Affairs, hoping for a clean break with the recent string of hucksters, mouthpieces and so on that have held the position. (I know, I know--James Glassman is smart, he said the right things--but did he actually accomplish much during his time in office?)

Rugh's CV is voluminous, his reputation stellar, his knowledge of the Arab world apparently broad--and make no mistake, the PD secretary's primary if not sole task is to make the Arab world not "hate us" quite so much.

The only objection to confirmation that others might raise is Rugh's involvement with AMIDEAST, which the folks at AIPAC tend to see as an Arab fifth column. But you can't have everything.

Much more ominous is Brown's crippling ethical lapse in recommending Rugh--who once bought him lunch when Brown had "forgotten" his wallet at home!

Wired for War Follow-Up

2009-03-04T13:35:00.000-08:00

Joshua Fouts tends to be a bit ahead of whatever curve I'm currently on, and yesterday's Wired for War review is no exception: Josh notifies me that he and co-conspirator Rita J. King have a brief YouTube clip of their recent interview with Singer in Second Life.

Singer makes an interesting remark about the Three Laws of Robotics as impractical in the real world: Even if you could code the First Law, which specifies that robots shall not harm or through inaction allow humans to be harmed, how would a robot deal with a human building an armed robot? Definitely worth 2:17 of your time.

P.W. Singer's Wired for War

2009-03-03T05:53:00.000-08:00

A BRIEF REVIEW.

P.W. Singer’s Wired for War takes a lengthy look at current and future uses of robotic technology in war. Subtitled “The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century,” it ranges from today’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and bomb-squad robots to tomorrow’s fully fledged synthetic warfighters.

Although this blog is primarily about soft power, I’ll first comment on some hard-power aspects of robotic warfighting before considering soft-power issues.

While Singer could have written Wired for War as a Popular Mechanics-style summary of technological capabilities—Rifle-Armed Robot Makes 70 of 70 Bullseyes!—he knows better than to stop there. Since the ultimate robotic task is to replace human warriors, Singer tries to address the wider spectrum of issues that accompany robot-aided warfare, starting with the current use of unmanned vehicles and proceeding into a future that includes robots which make judgments about what to do and whom to kill. Some highlights:

Military culture clashes. Lightly trained UAV pilots currently fly lethal missions from the safety of their Stateside chairs at higher rates than pilots of manned aircraft. The manned pilots resent the chair jockeys, which wouldn’t be a problem except that it’s the manned pilots who tend to become generals and dominate policymaking.

Law of armed conflict (LOAC). Geneva Convention-style chains of command may be unclear in cases where an unmanned vehicle is in theater while its pilot is in an air-conditioned trailer near Las Vegas, its designers and programmers in Massachusetts, and its in-theater commanders in Qatar. Singer points out that under current international law, a Nevada-based pilot who attacks Iraqi targets via a deployed UAV is a legitimate target of war as he walks the streets of Las Vegas.

Liability for autonomous devices. LOAC problems will grow enormously in the context of the semi- or fully autonomous killing machines of the future. Singer believes these devices are much closer to deployment than most realize, perhaps as soon as a decade from now. If and when they are, responsibility for their actions becomes even murkier, particularly since certain rules of engagement become absurd: How does a robot return lethal fire in “self defense” when legally, it has no self?

Singularities and science fiction. Although he briefly detours into Ray Kurzweil-style Moore’s-Law-applies-to-everything! froth, Singer is on firmer ground when he illustrates the strong linkages between science fiction and science, which he says have driven robotics development to a greater extent than non-roboticists realize.

For example, even if roboticists agree it is impossible to express Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics in a programming language, Asimov’s stories of robotic moral dilemmas have deeply influenced what little thought has so far been put into the ethics of artificial intelligences. Similarly, the outright prohibition on thinking machines following the Dune universe’s Butlerian Jihad and fears of the Terminator movies’ Austrian assassins have also given roboticists pause.

(Speaking of science fiction: It’s outside Singer’s scope to cover the trickle-down of military devices to police forces across the U.S., but I'd like to note that Ray Bradbury addressed this concern beautifully many decades ago in his short story "The Pedestrian.")

Soft Power Implications
As this blog is about nations’ reputation and branding, the sections of Wired for War that most interested me cover how foreign publics perceive the U.S. and other countries’ forays into robotic warfare. It’s to Singer’s credit that he treats this question at some length—although the short answer is that foreign publics are likely to react badly to robotic warfighters.

Take the jihadi example. Jihadis are already prone to thinking Americans cowardly for bombing from afar, for not duking it out on the ground, for not showing the kind of commitment it takes to pilot an aircraft into a building or a truck into a checkpoint.

Unfortunately, the use of UAVs and (someday soon) armed ground robots plays right into this narrative: The Americans have become too cowardly to send even heavily protected soldiers into our territory. Instead they send satanic machines to do their killing.

Nothing could be calculated to further get a jihadi’s back up and make them resistant to surrendering. You can almost hear one saying to another, Dude, you got shot at by a toaster and ran? You’re a disgrace to the cause!

Robotic warfighters could also be bad news in the counterinsurgency wars the U.S. currently wages, which depend mightily on face-to-face contact and relationship-building of the sort that mechanized, autonomous infantry and air forces may only impede.

The second impact of robotic warfighters on U.S. reputation is less direct but also depends on understanding insurgents’ psychology. Despite its enormously precise war machines, the U.S. still occasionally kills innocents. However, many seem to think that only malice or some unannounced sinister purpose is at play when some gee-whiz technology goes astray.

Ever-more-advanced machines such as fighting robots will have to be ever-more precise lest any accidental killing or destruction be seen as intentional, giving rise to the colorful conspiracy theories that seem endemic to certain parts of the globe. As Singer reminds us, those shiny, wraparound, relief-pitcher sunglasses U.S. soldiers favored at the start of the Iraq war caused riots, thanks to rumors that they allowed GIs to see beneath Iraqi women’s clothing.

Third: Does the U.S. really want to take the damage to its reputation that will come from fielding a T100?

Wired for War has its tics. Its writing veers from brilliant to repetitive, never settling on a steady pace or grade level. Singer doesn’t think much of the revolution in military affairs (RMA) attempted by Donald Rumsfeld et al., which involved changing the U.S. military over to weapons and tactics that relied more heavily on high technology to achieve victory.

He also seems to conflate the RMA strategy with network-centric warfare tactics, and often holds military theorist Art Cebrowski and his “crowd” responsible for whatever has gone wrong with U.S. strategy and warfighting in the past decade.

However, I’d urge readers to just ignore these factors since on balance, Wired for War is an excellent primer for an era that has already arrived, unbeknownst to most diplomats and policymakers.

Thank Goodness for Pakistan

2009-02-26T05:57:00.001-08:00

IT'S MAKING AFGHANISTAN LOOK LIKE A SOLID, STABLE, MULTIPARTY DEMOCRACY.

I've spent a lot of breath and a certain number of electrons lately objecting to media portrayals of the Taliban as resurgent, of the Kabul government as corrupt or in chaos, of insurgents as somehow surrounding Kabul.

While Coalition casualties in Afghanistan do seem to be rising, with a record two dozen dying so far in February, the country overall seems relatively stable, with few civilians dying. (I'm not saying they're not intimidated or fearful, just that mortality is down.)

Perhaps this is the calm before the storm--eventually spring will come and the mountain passes will reopen, allowing Pakistan's besandaled warriors easy access to Afghanistan once again. And there's sure to be a spike in violence before the Afghan elections in August.

But all the media's fears about Afghanistan's future have already sprung to ghastly life across the border. The federal government caved to the Taliban on Swat, as noted in last week's rant.

On Wednesday, the Musharraf-picked Supreme Court not only denied Nawaz Sharif the ability to run for office, it banned his brother, the chief minister of Punjab, from holding office. This compelled Shahbaz Sharif to step down and led to direct rule from Islamabad, which is sure to please Punjabis everywhere considering the Sharif family's wide popularity.

Meanwhile, the ISI's power-projection-on-the-cheap fantasies seem to have collapsed as the Indian government has linked it ever more tightly with the Mumbai attacks. (Note to ISI leadership: Next time you send mooks to India, consider issuing them non-Pakistani identification and make sure they're not carrying Pakistan-made goods, such as pickles and Mountain Dew.)

The Mumbai attacks also apparently scotched peace talks between Pakistan and India that were making real progress, and you have to admire ISI's thinking that a war on its western front with insurgents wasn't enough that they had to ratchet up tensions on their east, raising the possibility of a two-front conflict. How well did that work the last time it was tried?

Swat Side Effects

2009-02-17T05:28:00.000-08:00

SOME SECONDARY CONSEQUENCES OF PAKISTAN'S INABILITY TO PROJECT POWER INTERNALLY.

The Times has a heartbreaker this morning in "From Pakistan, Taliban Threats Reach New York," which discusses how Pakistani Taliban in Swat target families with relatives in New York.

Speak out against the Taliban, or just demonstrate you have a steady income, and Taliban sympathizers in New York drop a dime on your family back home. Now you're on the hook for a handsome ransom to be sent or carried back to the old country on your next visit.

Bad enough that the Taliban, having discovered that operating on the Afghan-Pakistan border (within Predator range) is a bad idea, have taken their show into the next set of valleys east. Worse that Taliban mischief has already wrecked domestic and international tourism to Swat, formerly known as the Switzerland of Pakistan, reducing incomes and reducing contact with the larger world. And worse still that Islamabad is caving to the Swat Taliban in precisely the same way that it did with NWFP and FATA Taliban last year:

You fellas go ahead and enforce shari'a law, we take no interest unless you attack government forces.

All that's missing from this depressing script are the attacks on government forces, which should start around this time tomorrow. And then Islamabad will come in and messily kick the Taliban in the teeth, after which the bad guys will simply start over again in another set of valleys.

"Media as Global Diplomat"

2009-02-09T06:04:00.000-08:00

SUDDENLY, NO ONE IN D.C. IS AFRAID TO STATE THE OBVIOUS: POLICY DRIVES PERCEPTION.

House-hunting has kept me from commenting sooner on last Tuesday's "Media as Global Diplomat" session, put on by USIP on the breathtaking seventh floor of the Newseum. A few brief notes:

Ted Koppel moderated and told a story I'd heard him use before: A BBC documentary heightened U.S. policymakers' concern about Somali starvation in the early 1990s. The U.S. sent troops there, with an outcome we all remember (1x U.S. troops died, roughly 50x Somalis died, Pres. Clinton pulled everyone out). As a result, the U.S. and other nations refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide. Koppel tells this story to illustrate the power of unintended consequences.

Amb. Edward Djerejian was the first to state what it had been unwise to say during the Bush administration: Policy makes up 80 percent of other publics' perceptions of U.S., while our explanations of that policy make up just 20 percent.

Amb. James Glassman, the former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, was so in command of his facts and such a realist that I'm sorry he, like Robert Gates, wasn't just kept on at State. Start with our goals, Glassman urged: What are we trying to do? He also noted that the U.S. "can achieve a lot even without people liking us"; respect, he seemed to be saying, should precede affection.

But it was James Zogby who really impressed me: I'm paraphrasing here, but he felt free to say that repeating the word "water" slowly enough in Mexico so that the poor, dumb foreigners will understand is unlikely to get you a glass of agua. He also took poor, abused Charlotte Beers to task by saying, "You don't need to 'brand' America, it's already branded."

But because of that brand--what other people think of American values--expectations of U.S. behavior are very high. "People want to like us, they want to believe in us, and we continue to hurt them," Zogby said.

Google director of global public policy and government Andrew McLaughlin provided some unintended comic relief by trying to convince the group that he was from the future, where apparently there are no radio or television, only the Internet. U.S. efforts that revolve around an "authoritative speaker and unwashed masses will fail," he intoned, adding that he found the whole conversation about what to do with U.S. radio and TV broadcasting "stale." I won't go further into McLaughlin except to say the jeans they wear in the future look very sturdy.

A videoconference with Oscar Morales, credited with the Facebook campaign that brought millions into Colombia's streets to protest the FARC, had some technical glitches but Morales still managed the audience a hit of the possibilities of grassroots, self-organizing civic action.

In the audience was Amb. Cynthia Schneider (former envoy to the Netherlands), who noted that the mere idea of merit-based competition such as American Idol--duplicated several times already in the Middle East--was radical. Another speaker noted that Beijing attempted to suppress mobile-phone voting on a Chinese Idol-type program for a couple years before giving up and allowing it to happen.

Edward Borgerding, CEO of Abu Dhabi Media Co., outlined the problem traditional media face: Not only are non-traditional media taking share from traditional broadcasters, the total number of dollars in the media system overall may be shrinking.

I was surprised by Smita Singh, director of the Global Development Program at the Hewlett Foundation, and MTV's president of global digital media Mika Salmi. The two of them convinced me that large philanthropic NGOs are much bigger do-gooders on the world stage than I'd thought, and focus on amplifying their impacts through partnerships with for-profit media. (Salmi's company partners with the Kaiser foundation, for example, on an anti-AIDS program in Africa.)

Finally, I had to leave before the screening of the 1982 Lebanon War-focused Waltz with Bashir, but my colleague Cady Susswein seemed to find it worthwhile, a "beautifully constructed cultural piece dealing with lingering emotions from war memories and Israeli guilt."

Persians in Space

2009-02-04T04:53:00.000-08:00

THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC GOES WHERE NO MERELY ARAB NATION HAS GONE BEFORE.

I once horrified an Iranian colleague by suggesting that Iran and the U.S. were natural allies: ethnically diverse nations that were wealthier and better-educated than their regional peers, and both with whopping superiority complexes based on past successes.

Iran has always felt that it, not Egypt and especially not those nuts over in Saudi Arabia, should be seen as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, as it was during the Safavid period centuries ago.

Yesterday Tehran gave a big boost to its muttered claims of superiority by launching its first-ever satellite, a feat that no other Muslim country is even close to duplicating.

Like China's launching of men into space over the past few years, the satellite launch demonstrates technological leadership and discipline that's head and shoulders above any regional competitor.

Although the satellite is small, from a soft-power standpoint it wouldn't matter whether Tehran had launched a Nerf football into orbit. It's a clear win for Iran, and on the 30th anniversary of the Revolution to boot.

Understanding Islam, Digitally

2009-02-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

RITA KING AND JOSH FOUTS'S "UNDERSTANDING ISLAM THROUGH VIRTUAL WORLDS."

Comes word from Joshua Fouts* at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs that he and fellow fellow Rita J. King have some long-awaited work products from their "Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds" project.

They've either created or toured various Muslim-centric worlds within Second Life, made friends, conducted interviews, and concluded that virtual-reality worlds like this can be excellent venues for low-risk communication and collaboration between East and West.

Plus they've got the YouTube video, policy recommendations (PDF), and even comic book (PDF) to prove it.

There's a lot of potential to be mined here, particularly since the new U.S. administration is clearly more tech-savvy than its predecessors.

At this point I would make the same points I usually do whenever I hear anyone trumpeting the Internet as a key to international citizen-to-citizen communication: On a global scale, almost no one is on the Internet--barely one person in six, if you believe Wikipedia. There are especially few online in the Muslim world, and those tend to be disproportionately wealthy and well-educated.

Then I would normally ask, What's the point of trying to use Second Life to reach and communicate people who already have access to the Internet's massive buffet of information and opinion?

But then I remember that Cold War public diplomacy was not just focused on radio and other mass media as tools to reach foreign publics; there were also the U.S. cultural centers, touring jazz bands, speaking tours by prominent Americans and so on, all of which were almost unavoidably aimed at wealthy elites in other countries.

Seen through that light, virtual projects like "Understanding Islam..." should get serious examination by policy-makers as an additional arrow in the PD quiver, not to mention funding. Particularly since Dave Brubeck is now a bit too old to travel.

*Full disclosure: I worked for Josh and his former employer, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, at a public-diplomacy conference in early 2006.

"Media as Global Diplomat" February 3

2009-01-29T13:35:00.000-08:00

I'll be attending the above-captioned, USIP-sponsored conference at the Newseum next Tuesday, featuring Amb. James Glassman (late of Karen Hughes's old job at State) and Amb. Edward Djerejian of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. Ted Koppel moderates panels such as "Public Diplomacy 2.0: Rethinking Official Media" and "Independent Documentary and Participatory Media."

Beacon readers and assorted other characters: Feel free to e-mail my address at right if you're attending and want to chat over coffee or lunch.

How Goes the War?

2009-01-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

REMEMBER THAT THE TALIBAN HAVE PUBLICISTS TOO, AND IT’S ACTUALLY GOING PRETTY WELL.

The question I get asked most since I got back from Afghanistan usually goes like this:

“So, since you got a first-hand look at things over there”—

and here the questioner’s volume usually drops to a loud hush, one better suited for shared confidences about whether the U.S. government may be pulling the wool over our collective eyes—

“How do you think it’s going? It’s sounding a lot worse.”

I always start to answer by saying that I spent little time outside the wire and interacted with essentially no Afghan civilians who were not press. I also note that I’m a partisan and think that this is the war the U.S. should be fighting, I admire the job U.S. forces have been doing, and that it’s going to take one to two decades to accomplish anything that looks like a win.

With those caveats out of the way, I continue that from what I’ve read since returning and what I hear from those still deployed, the war sounds like it’s going pretty well.

The pace of Afghan civilian deaths, whether from insurgent action or U.S. mistakes, seems to have dropped off, although there are still times when U.S. forces are accused of killing or actually do kill civilians. (This most recent episode is still up in the air.) The pace of U.S. military deaths, which was a worry last fall when I left, has dropped as it does every winter. Western-sponsored infrastructure projects continue to progress, at least in low-lying areas that aren’t snowed in. While insurgents may threaten much, they control little.

But it still looks bad through the lens of the Western media. According to many reports, the Taliban insurgency is growing, is spreading, is surrounding Kabul, and is winning through whatever means. The Kabul government is ineffectual, the Western forces clumsy and ill-informed, Afghan villagers terrified, at least when you read the papers. What explains this?

The thing I ask people to remember about the Afghan war is that it is a counterinsurgency conflict, not a stand-up fight. The goal of Western forces is to suppress the insurgents long enough for the Kabul government to start winning its people’s loyalty and trust by helping and protecting them. In short: Anything that strengthens Afghans’ bond with their government is good, anything that weakens it is bad.

The insurgents are well aware of this. These groups, whether Taliban, HIG, al-Qa’ida, or the notorious al-Three Guys with a Grenade Launcher, are extremely media-savvy, and Afghan civilians are no shrinking violets either when confronted with Western cameras and microphones.

Here’s the sequence of events that seems to happen when U.S. or, occasionally, ISAF forces conduct a raid or drop a bomb that kills Afghans, civilian or otherwise.

First, the insurgent groups work the phones. When their fingerprints are on some new act, they are quick to call the media and glorify their latest suicide bombing, crow about the latest Western casualty, or fume (correctly, in most cases) about corrupt officials in Kabul. In this case, they fulminate about the latest Western misstep, painting U.S. and ISAF forces as bloodthirsty.* These assertions plug in nicely to the insurgents’ broader narrative of a Crusader force propping up a feeble government whose writ doesn’t even extend to Kabul’s city limits.

In the ensuing days, Afghan civilians and survivors of the raid pile on. They talk to the media about the loss of their innocent relatives and demand cash reparations. Payment of such blood money is the accepted norm in South and Central Asia, and Western forces are generally quick to pay it. This fact, and the lack of a paper trail to prove conclusively that a named person did or did not exist, creates a broad incentive to inflate the numbers of people—especially women and children—who were killed.

Third, Afghan government officials express outrage at the killings of their constituents for days or weeks on end, just as the governor of Oklahoma would at tornado damage or the governor of California would following an earthquake or mass shooting. The Afghan officials demand an end to unilateral bombings or raids by Western forces and generally grandstand to the limits of their ability, again according to South/Central Asian regional norms.

The combined effect of these actions—insurgent PR savvy, civilian demands for reparations and apologies, and elected officials’ professed outrage—is to produce a constant stream of stories about Western mistakes. This, I tell people, is one reason why it might seem the West is losing the Afghan war.

I’m leaving out a lot of details for the sake of brevity, but this model is broadly valid for occasions when Western forces kill or are accused of killing civilians. There are several other templates for how the media cover or are forced to cover this conflict—Suicide Bomber in Marketplace was popular last summer, Kabul Government Linked to Opium Trade is a spring/summer perennial, School Opens in Tiny Village works year-round, as does Insurgents Are Surrounding Kabul.

But the model I’ve just discussed, Western Forces Kill Civilians, is the one that seems to get the most play lately in this hemisphere. Knowing that it and other models exist, and that they are entirely predictable and repeating, goes a long way toward understanding how the war goes in Afghanistan.

*Secretary Gates testified yesterday that the U.S. actually does need to apologize faster for causing civilian casualties:

Civilian casualties resulting from U.S. combat and airstrikes have been particularly harmful to progress in Afghanistan and must be avoided, Gates stressed. "My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of their problem rather than part of their solution, and then we are lost," he said.

Moreover, the U.S. military must immediately voice regret for any civilian casualties, rather than waiting to investigate the details, Gates said in separate testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday afternoon.

Gates said this is necessary to counter Taliban insurgents, who he said hide among the population and then report civilian deaths in coalition military operations quickly and widely on the Internet. "The instant we believe there may have been civilian casualties, we have to be out there" expressing condolences, rather than arguing over the numbers, he said.

Foreign Desk's Foreign Policy Awards

2009-01-26T09:06:00.000-08:00

BEST MAKEUP? MY MONEY'S ON DEAR LEADER.

A brief plug: Today at The Foreign Desk, my colleague Andy Valvur has unveiled this year's nominations for foreign-policy Oscars. Highly recommended for indoor-pale policy wonks like us who delight in those obscure, page-A17 stories on the inner workings of Bangladeshi and Iranian politics. ...

The State of Smart Power

2009-01-23T06:05:00.000-08:00

PLUS, SEN. MITCHELL IS CALLED OUT OF RETIREMENT (AGAIN!)

In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, Joseph Nye penned a post-Inaugural summary of smart power that describes the State of Things as They Are in U.S. foreign policy and reputation. It's the sort of piece Nye has written--or has been forced to write--many times in the past several years while foreign-policy pragmatists were shoved into the back seat by ideologues.

Now Dr. Nye has both a platform and listeners in the new presidential administration; as he notes, President Obama, Defense Secretary Gates and incoming Secretary of State Clinton are making all the right noises about restoring America's reputation, particularly with Obama ignoring the naysayers and going ahead with a Guantanamo closure post haste.

One Obama move is particularly impressive to those who remember Northern Ireland's seemingly endless civil war: He has recalled former Maine Sen. George Mitchell, who helped broker the Good Friday peace agreements in 1998, to his country's service as a special envoy for the Middle East.

I can't think of a better choice as Mitchell is one of those figures who seems beyond party and nearly beyond country, which is something the Middle East peace-brokering business sorely needs.

It's Morning in Amriika

2009-01-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

Strange stirrings in the East: Senator Obama is about to be sworn in. Senator Clinton is about to become Secretary of State, replacing a justifiably exhausted Secretary Rice (and whatever happened to her? and President Bush?).

Secretary Gates, who I was sure would bolt Washington at the first opportunity, is not only staying on, but lobbying for more money for State, perhaps helping to end State's decades-long starvation diet. The war in Afghanistan is coming into ever-sharper focus as Iraq remains eerily quiet.

It's morning in Amriika, as Arabic speakers would pronounce it, and we'll see how well President-elect Obama's team tackles foreign policy even as domestic policy seems to overshadow everything outside the U.S.: Russia's stranglehold on natural gas, Israel's war with Hamas, China's deteriorating economy.

Someone should go to Washington to investigate how the Obama-Clinton-Gates team picks up President Bush's ball ... and that would be me. Next week I'll be heading to DC to live and work, reporting, for a change, from the belly of the beast. Stay tuned.

Smith-Mundt Symposium: Get Accredited

2008-12-30T06:46:00.001-08:00

BECAUSE THAT'S THE ONLY WAY YOU'LL GET INTO THE SMITH-MUNDT SYMPOSIUM.

When I got back from Afghanistan in October, my colleague Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner was flogging a January 13 symposium in D.C. on the Smith-Mundt Act, the enabling legislation for U.S. overseas propaganda efforts. While funding overseas propaganda, it specifically prohibits the U.S. from propagandizing at home.

Silly, I initially thought, in an Internet age where all information is local. Still, I asked Matt to keep me informed, worried that he'd be standing there on January 13 with a stack of blank "Hi, my name is..." stickers and too much undrunk coffee.

Boy, was I wrong. All 200 slots at this one-day symposium filled up, the waiting list is apparently zaftig verging on large, and Matt's saying only accredited journalists get to jump the line.

Somebody please get accredited today and let me know what goes on, as I won't yet have arrived in D.C. at that point. ...

Beacon Hiatus

2008-03-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Due to what I expect will be an all-consuming work engagement, I'm putting Beacon on hiatus for about the next six months. I'll try to post if and when I can, but meanwhile please look at some of the excellent soft power, public diplomacy and foreign policy blogs in my sidebar.

Thanks for reading,

Paul Kretkowski

The Madrasa We DO Know

2008-03-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

...HAS A CURRICULUM THAT MAY ACTUALLY INCLUDE SCIENCE.

Andy Valvur forwards a story from the Financial Times on how a U.S. provincial reconstruction team is building madrasas in Afghanistan's Khost province.

So much for separation of church and state, you might think--is this where U.S. taxpayers' dollars are going?

But wait: The PRT is making a rational calculation that it's better to build a madrasa in Afghanistan, where the government at least has some say in the curriculum, than have Afghan parents send their kids to madrasas over the hill into Pakistan and spend all their time memorizing the Qur'an. And State is on board as well:

John Kael Weston, the State Department's political representative in the Khost reconstruction team, holds weekly meetings with madrassa students.

"Just look at it from their perspective - if we just talk about girls' education, for example, it just plays into the propaganda about the US. They think that the Americans will be opening up strip joints and restaurants selling alcohol on every corner."

Building madrasas dovetails nicely with something I wrote awhile ago about how U.S. policymakers must address the primacy of religion in many other cultures. Chalk one up for this PRT's pragmatism.

Terrorists Don't Even Have to Succeed Once

2008-03-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

WHEN SOME U.S. SOLDIERS SHOOT THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT BY KILLING DOGS.

You can spend years developing counterinsurgency-warfare doctrine, deploy a fairly successful "surge" to tamp down violence, and train U.S.-born linguists until you're blue in the face, but if your own civilians stop supporting your efforts--if they lose the "will to fight"--you lose.

Charges that U.S. forces kill civilians in war zones--as happens unavoidably and usually by accident--enrage the people that counterinsurgents are trying to pacify.

Videos of U.S. forces killing or tormenting dogs in war zones create a whole different set of problems--on the home front. (I should note that the accompanying videos are graphic.)

These knuckleheads aren't Lt. William Calley, but they'll do until Calley comes out of retirement.

Looking Long in Pakistan

2008-03-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

THE DIFFICULTY OF PATIENCE, AND EVEN DOING NOTHING, IN PAKISTAN.

The BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones wrote a nice piece for the Stanley Foundation, Iowa's surprisingly prolific and well-funded foreign-policy think tank. In "US Policy Options Toward Pakistan: A Principled and Realistic Approach," Bennett-Jones argues that a long view is everything in American policy toward Pakistan--first because the U.S. left Pakistan to groan under the burden of millions of Afghan refugees during and after the Soviet war, and Pakistanis think the U.S. will shortly cut the country loose again; second, because a short-term focus on pressuring Pervez Musharraf to move against Taliban and al-Qa'ida elements in Pakistan has backfired; and third, because the only way out of Pakistan's consistent poverty, corruption and ineptitude is through a focus on education, which takes well over a decade to have any effect.

Bennett-Jones argues that the U.S. should grit its teeth and say less about perceived front-burner problems such as the Taliban, al-Qa'ida, and Pakistani internal politics and nuclear command-and-control, while increasing accountability for how Pakistan spends U.S. military funding and boosting the percentage of overall U.S. aid that goes to education.

I agree with Bennett-Jones' diagnosis and prescriptions but worry that it's unrealistic for the U.S. to do nothing when it has a wanted militant in some Predator's sights. However, he argues strongly that killing militants via missile attack is a short-term gain that only causes long-term harm in terms of Pakistani public opinion; the average Pakistani sees Islamic militancy as a lesser threat than day-to-day problems like inadequate medical care, and is outraged by perceived U.S. violations of Pakistan's sovereignty.

The problem with Pakistan for U.S. policymakers comes down, as it always seems to in counterinsurgency, to winning small today versus possibly, maybe, hopefully winning big sometime after you're out of office.

I could only advise them to think about Ronald Reagan, who was out of office by the time the Berlin Wall came down but is revered for taking a long view of facing down the Soviets, or Rep. Charlie Wilson, who only recently started to receive public recognition for aiding the Afghan rebels' decade-long war against the Soviets.

Disney, Management Consultant

2008-02-25T09:44:00.001-08:00

Bet you didn't know Walt Disney Co. was in the management-consulting business. They are, and today's Post reports that the Disney Institute is giving Walter Reed Army Hospital tips on customer service. Using video of an enraged Donald Duck. No, I am not making this up: "... experiential training, leadership development, benchmarking and cultural change for business professionals across the globe."

Africom, R.I.P.

2008-02-21T06:40:00.000-08:00

When President Bush announced plans for a DoD African Command (Africom) last year, it raised hackles across the very continent it was intended to help.

Africom's flaws were many:

—The administration put forth no clear rationale for why Africa needed its own command, when U.S. military interests in Africa were being managed adequately from Germany.

—Similarly, there was no strong idea for how Africom would differ from its more combat-oriented cousins, beyond vague ideas that it would be decentralized in five African nations and more focused on soft power.

—African nations were not consulted beforehand about hosting Africom bases or other operations.

In "No Bases Planned for Africa, Bush Says" in today's Post, President Bush admitted that Africom was dead in the water, but only after Ghanaian president John Kufuor was, well, rude to his guest:

...The Bush administration has had trouble convincing Africans that it wants to use the new command to coordinate humanitarian and security aid to Africa more effectively, not to station large forces on the continent.

The tension evidently came to a head during talks with Ghanaian President John Kufuor in Osu Castle, a 17th-century oceanfront estate once used as a slave-trading post and now the seat of government. By Bush's own account, Kufuor brought it up pointedly during their private meeting.

"You're not going to build any bases in Ghana," Kufuor told him.

"I understand," Bush recalled replying. "Nor do we want to."

It would have been preferable for the Bush administration to prepare the ground in Africa for Africom before making an announcement last year; the president could then have appeared with a stage full of African leaders to announce the new command as the final step in a consultation among partners. Now, unfortunately, those consultations have to take place ex post facto, and will be the next president's problem, as this quote by J. Stephen Morrison at the Center for Strategic and International Studies implies:

"They're now in a quiet phase where they're trying to build up their credibility and their consultations."

For now, the [Africom] headquarters remains in Stuttgart, Germany, home of the European Command.

The Wrong Briefing

2008-02-12T07:31:00.000-08:00

OVER WHICH A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR OUTS HIS OWN GOVERNMENT.

Peace Corps volunteers live in host countries’ hinterlands for years at a time, building, cultivating and teaching. And then, whenever the host government feels put upon by the U.S., it uses Peace Corps volunteers as convenient whipping boys because, of course, they are “foreign influences” or worse, spies.

A friend of mine had to abruptly evacuate her post in Chad’s hinterlands in the late 1990s after Libya’s Qaddafi made these kinds of accusations, and another friend had to flee the Philippines with just the clothes he wore after Abu Sayyaf threatened that country’s Peace Corps contingent.

And now to Bolivia, where U.S. embassy official Vincent Cooper apparently gave the wrong briefing to a group of inbound Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar:

[U.S. Embassy La Paz] released a statement Monday explaining that Peace Corps volunteers had been mistakenly given a security briefing meant only for embassy staff, asking them to report "suspicious activities" [of Venezuelans and Cubans in Bolivia].

"Nobody at the embassy has ever asked American citizens to participate in intelligence activities here," U.S. ambassador Phillip Goldberg said during a flood relief visit to the eastern city of Trinidad. "But I want to say that I greatly regret the incident that was made known this weekend."

Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, declared Cooper undesirable but no word so far on whether La Paz formally PNG’d him. Regardless, Cooper has left Bolivia, but not before creating an excuse for Morales et al. to jack up anti-U.S. sentiment and hysterically summon the armed forces to protect it from sinister yanquis.

How’d the story break in the first place? Apparently, a Fulbright scholar who Cooper also mistakenly asked to “spy,” John Alexander van Schaick, went public with the news:

"My immediate thought was 'Oh my God. Somebody from the U.S. Embassy just asked me to basically spy," he said. "I was in shock that something like that would happen to me -- just a humble Fulbright scholar who's here to do research."

...

The controversy erupted after van Schaick said Cooper asked him in a November meeting at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz to report the names and addresses of Cuban and Venezuelans working in Bolivia, according to the Bolivian Information Agency.

"I smiled and just sat there because I did not want to show that it completely dismayed me to be asked such a thing," van Schaick said, according to the news agency.

Van Schaick might consider turning the “shocked, shocked!” bit down in the future. The “humble” Fulbright scholar hasn’t been born yet, as indicated by the fact that he apparently outed Cooper to the press over a mistake, in the process damaging the Peace Corps program that’s probably helping Bolivia a lot more than his research.

Not to mention the Fulbright program itself, which is sponsored by the State Department and will now be looked on by host governments as yet another nest of spies.

But look on the bright side: Van Schaick is undoubtedly a hero in Caracas. He could always get a teaching post there.

The Burqa Business

2008-02-05T19:15:00.000-08:00

WAITING FOR A STUMBLE IN KABUL.

PostGlobal has a nice short piece on how cheap, machine-made Chinese burqas are displacing the hand-made (and Afghan-made) sort in Kabul.

I've heard some talk lately about how widely disliked Chinese workers are in any area of Africa where there are a lot of them. This is a purely economic dislike, as one person hinted, because when a PRC business does a big infrastructure project in Africa they tend to bring in a lot of Chinese workers, rather than employing local Africans. (Come to think of it, when the PRC constructs a new embassy in Washington D.C., they bring in a lot of Chinese workers too, but that's a different matter.)

However, when it's just inexpensive, well-made and even stylish goods that turn up in a foreign market, rather than Chinese workers visibly displacing locals, PRC businesses gain market share.

At least Afghans still have a choice about who they buy their burqas from. In contrast, the U.S. has completely lost the ability to clothe itself, a fact that must be widely known and operate to the detriment of America's usually can-do reputation.

The fact is that in 2005, 89.3 percent of apparel sold in the U.S. was manufactured abroad, and 98.5 percent of footwear, according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association's figures for that year. Insert your emperor-has-no-clothes gag here.

Mr. Musharraf in Davos

2008-01-24T11:56:00.000-08:00

WAIT FOR IT: PAKISTAN’S PRESIDENT LAUDS HIS COUNTRY’S STABILITY.

I usually try to emphasize that soft power is a function of branding: Make an appealing promise and then keep it.

That’s what makes it tough to keep a straight face when I see headlines like “Musharraf Trumpets Stability” in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The Pakistani president has been traveling in Europe the past few days and the Journal interviewed him at the World Economic Forum.

... Mr. Musharraf dismissed recent turmoil in his country as “minor irritations.” He said he would work with any government produced by Pakistan’s coming elections, even if formed by his opponents.

“Please differentiate Pakistan from banana republics” where a lowly colonel can take over the state. “These things don’t happen in Pakistan,” he said. “Pakistan is a nuclear state.”

The 64-year-old former army general, who came to power in a military coup in 1999 and was subsequently elected, ...

It just gets more surreal from there:

... rejected recent speculation that the U.S. could send special forces into Pakistan in search of Taliban and al Qaeda leaders such as Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Musharraf described the U.S.-Pakistan relationship as strategic and said the idea that a few U.S. forces could succeed better in Pakistan’s mountains better than 100,000 Pakistani troops was “sadly mistaken.”

“The real battle is not in Pakistan,” but in Afghanistan, Mr. Musharraf said.

Musharraf continues redefining reality for a dozen or so more paragraphs. Don’t have a URL, but all you really need to know is that the Journal’s reporters gave Musharraf more than enough rope to hang himself, brand-wise, and the Pakistani president happily put his head into the noose.

Douglas Johnston on "Speaking of Faith"

2008-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

WHY RELIGION MATTERS--AND HAS TO MATTER--TO U.S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY.

Krista Tippett's excellent Speaking of Faith recently interviewed Douglas Johnston, head of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, former submarine commander, COO of CSIS, presidential advisor, and all-around policy actor.

In books and in this interview, Johnston insists that U.S. public diplomacy engage the religious element in other societies as deeply as is consistent with the Constitution's establishment clause--not because religion is important to Americans so much as that it's the indispensable entry point for talking about anything else with the nations the U.S. most wants to engage.

Johnston, himself an evangelical, long ago found that listening to other people's faith frameworks ensures that you'll be heard when it's your turn to speak.

Listen online or download the podcast. It's well worth the hour you'll spend.

Innovation in India

2008-01-10T05:46:00.000-08:00

TATA MOTORS READIES INDIA'S MODEL T.

Pretty soon it will be as difficult for American car companies to sell their cars in India as it is right now for U.S. aerospace concerns to sell small jets in, say, Brazil.

This cheerful news arrives courtesy “How to Build a $2,500 Car” in Tuesday’s Times, which details Tata Motors’ efforts to build an Indian volkswagen. It’s being introduced in India today, but the Times ran a preview: 30-35 hp, belt-driven transmission, low-speed bearings, tiny trunk—and no radio, power steering, power windows or air-conditioning.

Cries of heresy! would ring out in the West for Tata’s as-yet-unnamed car—but it’s set to be India’s Model T Ford nonetheless:

... Tata is not looking to ply California’s highways. Instead, the company wants to provide four-wheel transportation for the first time to people accustomed to getting around on two, including hundreds of millions of Indians and others in the developing world. ...

“It’s basically throwing out everything the auto industry had thought about cost structures in the past and taking out a clean sheet of paper and asking, ‘What’s possible?’” said Daryl T. Rolley, head of North American and Asian operations for Ariba, which sources parts for Tata, BMW, Toyota and other carmakers. “In the next five to 10 years, the whole auto industry is going to be flipped upside down.”

Not only is the car inexpensive to produce, designing it has upstream effects that benefit the rest of Tata’s and other manufacturers’ lines:

Manufacturers are searching for ways to make small cars for the middle class in India and China; to produce small cars for their own markets, hurt by rising gas prices; and to improve the profit of existing larger cars. Tata’s car would be mined for applicable lessons, Mr. Rolley said, predicting that more would be designed with cost in mind.

Tata understands its market deeply and decided to innovate down to India’s mass market rather than up to its elites. Hopefully Ford and other U.S. auto manufacturers—sorry, I mean “the other U.S. auto manufacturer”—can take Tata’s lessons as a spur to their own innovation, particularly since the developing world can’t afford most of what they and other First World manufacturers sell.

As the Times drily notes, the cost of the Tata “People’s Car” is “as little as the equivalent of $2,500, or about the price of the optional DVD player on the Lexus LX 470 sport utility vehicle.”

THE CAUCUS EXPERIENCE

2008-01-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Grassroots with a Vengeance.

In 2005, when my wife first suggested moving from Los Angeles to Iowa so she could attend law school, I was skeptical for several reasons—but she reminded me that we’d have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play a role in the Iowa Caucuses. And so we have.

I wound up being a precinct captain for John Edwards in Iowa City, and—without going into details about the Edwards campaign, since I’ve promised not to—here are a few observations about the caucus process:

On-the-ground organization is everything; media counted for little. My counterpart in the Barack Obama campaign benefited from the Illinois senator’s swelling popularity here, but she also by several reports simply out-hustled the other campaigns. The Obama campaign in my precinct not only had red t-shirts, private-label cupcakes, sign-waving volunteers and a visible organizational structure, it offered staffed daycare complete with toys while the caucus process took place. This put even the well-organized Clinton campaign, not to mention my own paltry efforts, to shame. My wife also observed that the Obama campaign signs actually de-emphasized the candidate’s name (!) in favor of themes like “Hope” and “Unity.”

People can be won over at the last moment. I and fellow Edwards volunteers increased the number of votes we had by nearly 50 percent between the first and second rounds of caucusing, as fans of Sens. Dodd and Biden, Gov. Richardson, and Congressman Kucinich realized their candidates would not be viable.

But not everyone. By report, several Richardson voters walked out of the caucus rather than throw their weight behind another candidate. Contrast this with the reasonableness of Kucinich supporters, who generally shifted their votes to Edwards or Obama.

Digging in pays off. An audible, prolonged gasp swept the room when Sen. Clinton’s representative announced that she didn’t have enough votes to be viable. That wasn’t the case for long, as the Clinton team doggedly worked the room and easily came up with enough additional votes for viability. Even though Clinton won just a single delegate in my precinct (there were eight up for grabs), her team’s fast work impressed me.

Political debate thrives at the grass roots. Of course it’s easy to say this in politically saturated Iowa, but I was impressed by the thoughtfulness of practically everyone I encountered, and the respect accorded to every candidate’s representatives as they sought votes from a crowd that numbered 541.

Replacing Hughes

2007-12-17T06:23:00.000-08:00

WITH SOMEONE WHOSE OPTIMISM IS A LITTLE OVER THE TOP.

Thank goodness John Brown watches public diplomacy constantly, so I can relax once in awhile. He forwards an interesting quote by James K. Glassman, whom President Bush has nominated to replace Karen Hughes as America’s chief civilian PD officer.

Although Glassman has professed to be a libertarian and is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he freelances as both an optimist—he’s the guy who wrote Dow 36,000—and worse for PD purposes, a triumphalist, as the quote Brown forwarded demonstrates.

Written in April 2003, in the flush of an apparent U.S. victory in Iraq, it is about one parking space away from ugly:

... The anti-war protesters remain clueless. They're still planning their marches.

Instead, they should be apologizing.

Before the war, they told us that 500,000 Iraqis would be killed in Dresden-like bombing, that we would precipitate an eco-catastrophe by pushing Saddam to set fire to his oil wells, that millions of people would flee the country, that thousands of our own troops would be killed, that the Arab "street" would rise up, that terrorist attacks would resume ferociously on our homeland, that Iraqis would tenaciously resist our colonization of their land, that we would become bogged down in urban warfare, and on and on.

In fact, none of that has happened. It has been a war unmatched in history, with relatively few civilian and allied casualties and the prime objectives - control of the capital and the destruction of Saddam's regime - achieved in only a few weeks.

Conscientious opponents of the war should say they were wrong, wrong, wrong - on all counts. Certainly, if there had been failures, they would have condemned Bush administration officials and supporters of the war.

It’s tough when you meet your prime objectives splendidly but those niggling little secondary objectives refuse to budge. Here’s the end of Glassman’s original, written for Capitalism magazine:

And, as for supporters: no, it is not over yet, but a little celebration, even gloating, is in order.

It took political courage to tell the Security Council, the French, the Germans, the Russians, that inspections were a dead end. And it took personal courage for our troops to carry the battle 500 miles to the heart of the capital of fear and mass destruction.

Maybe it's time for a different kind of Stop the War parade in Washington - a victory march.

Unfortunately, it’s never time for gloating in public diplomacy. It’s never time for sweeping pronouncements about the future; that’s the president’s job, if anyone’s. It’s never time for up-with-the-war pronouncements that discount the idea of things going wrong.

And there’s no need to find a chair at State for someone who only sat down at the Broadcasting Board of Governors in August.

M-I-C, K-E-Why Do They Hate Us?

2007-12-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

Andy Valvur forwards this help-wanted ad from Walt Disney Co. It is a bit odd; Disney doesn't just want a security chief, they'd prefer someone with mid-level intel-agency experience who has or is clearable to at least a Secret level.

Clearly, Disney isn't willing to sit around and wait for federal agencies, particularly I would imagine the Dept. of Homeland Security, to realize or tell them of an imminent threat. You have to wonder just how pervasive an intel network this Disney official would need to achieve some semblance of the federal government's capabilities.

As I'd written recently, Disney actively helps the U.S. welcome foreign visitors. On the other hand, it considers those foreign visitors (and the domestic ones) a potential threat.

I'm tempted to make fun but won't. If I were running a $34 billion entertainment and hospitality business that spanned three continents, you're damned right I'd want to know whether unrest in Pakistan affected the safety of Space Mountain.

Noonan's "On Setting an Example"

2007-11-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

I didn't read it until long after it should have been fishwrap, but Peggy Noonan's "On Setting an Example" on November 17 pretty much encapsulates what I think the practice of public diplomacy should be.

Noonan, the former Reagan and George H.W. Bush speechwriter, tends to spend her weekly column inches in the Journal Clinton-bashing, but she remains worth reading decades after her mid-'80s heyday. Never more so than now, and her column is worth quoting at length:

In some rough and perhaps tentative way [during 2008] we will have to decide what philosophical understanding of our national purpose rightly guides us.

Part of the debate will be shaped by the tugging back and forth of two schools of thought. There are those whose impulses are essentially interventionist—we live in the world and must take part in the world, sometimes, perhaps even often, militarily. We are the great activist nation, the spreader of political liberty, the superpower whose meaning is made clear in action.

The other school holds profound reservations about all this. It is more modest in its ambitions, more cool-eyed about human nature. It feels more bound by the old advice attributed to one of the Founding Generation, that we be the friend of liberty everywhere but the guarantor only of our own.

Much has changed in the more than two centuries since he said that ... and yet as simple human wisdom, it packs a wallop still.

Those who feel tugged toward the old Founding wisdom often use the word "beacon." It is our place in the scheme of things, it is our fate and duty, to be a beacon of liberty. To stand tall and hold high the light. To be an example, to be an inspiration, to encourage. We do not invent constitutions and impose them on other countries; instead they, in their restlessness, in their human desire to achieve a greater portion of freedom, will rise up in time and create their own constitution. And because they created it, they will hold it more dearly.

So we are best, in the world as it is now, the beacon, not the bringer, of freedom. We are its friend, not its enforcer. ...

But if you want to be a beacon, it's actually a hard job. It involves activism. You can't be a beacon unless as a nation you're in pretty good shape. You can't be a beacon unless you send forth real light. You can't be a beacon unless you really do inspire.

Do we always? No. We're not always a good example for the world. And so, for the coming holiday, a few baseline areas, some only stylistic, in which we could make our light glow brighter in—and for—the world.

Noonan goes on to call for cleaner leaders, more issue-oriented political debate, a less obviously sex-focused culture and other efforts. But whether you agree with her recommendations or not, Noonan is still worth reading for a shot of inspiration about improving America's image abroad by improving America.

Exit the Bringonner

2007-11-19T06:32:00.000-08:00

WITH NO REASON GIVEN.

In September I'd written about Frances Townsend's ill-advised taunting of Osama bin Laden ("Bringing Them On"). Now Townsend, who is suddenly being called "Fran" by the President and the Post, has taken a walk. Spend more time with family? The Post doesn't know.

The Heart of the Matter

2007-11-14T05:48:00.001-08:00

Brief piece over at the Council on Foreign Relations regarding "nation branding," quoting not just founder-of-the-field Simon Anholt but my occasional colleague Joshua Fouts from USC's Center on Public Diplomacy.

The article ends with a quote from Anholt that sums up how policymakers should think about public diplomacy:

Anholt [argues] that nation branding is not the answer unless it is pursued alongside policy changes. “I don’t tell countries how to do marketing,” he says. “I advise them on what sorts of policies they need to undertake in order to earn the reputation they feel they deserve.”

It's that simple. Feel like your nation is the sole heir of Enlightenment rationality? Then act it.

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

The Hughes Resignation

2007-11-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

A GNAWING FEELING OF ICING THE CAKE, NOT BAKING IT.

The timing of Karen Hughes’ resignation as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is appropriate: Late to the job—she delayed showing up for work for months to oversee her son’s last few months before heading to college—she now departs it early, saying that she’d like to spend more time with her husband.* But I don’t necessarily buy that.

Sure, this is clearly not the gung-ho road warrior of Ten Minutes from Normal.

Nor do I imagine Hughes—no one’s shrinking violet—is simply ducking out to avoid the now-melancholy-now-panicky final days of the Bush administration implied by this headline.

I imagine—I hope—that Karen Hughes has simply succumbed to the knowledge that she has been in charge of the icing, not the cake. No matter how much she believes in President Bush’s foreign policy, Hughes may finally have realized that until U.S. policy changes, it’s impossible to make much headway with the Muslim audiences who are the key target of U.S. public-diplomacy efforts. Perhaps the Under Secretary realized that there’s a difference between fighting the good fight and beating one’s head against the wall.

*Contrast that with Hughes' ex-deputy Dina Habib Powell, who resigned to spend more time with money—hers and others'—over at Goldman.

The Man from K.A.U.S.T.

2007-10-29T06:16:00.001-07:00

ABDULLAH STRIVES FOR A SAUDI M.I.T.

Imagine the Swiss government chiding the U.S. over a lack of transparency in its banking practices, and you’ll have some idea of British reaction to Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s statement that the UK is not doing enough to fight international terrorism.

On the home front, Abdullah plans to turn the tide of Arab underachievement by creating a Saudi M.I.T. In an echo of past Third World megaprojects, the king is building an $12.5 billion university campus in the desert near Jidda, and will try to lure top-notch foreign talent to teach and staff there. (The Times' Thanassis Cambanis couldn't help but use the term "gargantuan" to describe it.)

Abdullah has taken the job of building this King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) away from his own education ministry and will ban the mutawwa—the kingdom’s religious enforcers—from within its walls. This will supposedly allow coeducation and a freer exchange of ideas than anywhere else in Saudi society.

The king imagines that KAUST will aid Arab development and begin transforming Saudi society from the top down. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia’s problem has always been the gap between its elites—who will continue to go to U.S. and UK institutions ranging from Oxford to Appalachian State regardless—and its populace. No one questions the level of education of Saudi elites or their relative open-mindedness and liberality compared with Saudi society at large.

Abdullah’s money might be better spent on the riskier and far more problematic path of initiating broad-based reform in Saudi society. It would be inexpensive, for example, to ban the mutawwa from a small but ever-expanding list of public places until their power is attenuated.

But this would take decades to accomplish, and the king may not feel he has that kind of time. Better to throw money at the problem and earn a quick score with the international media.

The Universal Symbol

2007-10-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

WALT DISNEY CO. WELCOMES FOREIGN VISITORS WITH SEVEN MINUTES OF SMILES, BUT NO WHITE HOUSE.

Anxious about declining numbers of foreign tourists to the U.S., Walt Disney Co. has created a seven-minute film for the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to welcome visitors from overseas.

Backed by some very upbeat, Aaron Copland-esque orchestral music, the film’s hundreds of Americans pause for a moment to smile for the camera. Cuts of these welcoming, diverse mugs are interspersed with photos of famous American landmarks (the Chrysler Building, Hancock Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Lincoln Memorial, Statue of Liberty) and landscapes (canyons, forests, seacoasts, painted desert, amber waves of grain).

The film portrays an almost exclusively blue-collar America at work: cooks, waitresses, building framers, showgirls, cowboys, truck drivers, baristas, farmers, fishermen. Only a few shots—a businessman walking down a city street in his suit and a shot or two of ministers, for example—reveal a white-collar world, and these images are general enough to be understood immediately.

There are problems with portraying white-collar work in a photograph or two. For example, a photo of me pausing from my work would show me turning my head to glare at the camera, never taking hands from the laptop’s keyboard except to gulp coffee. These actions would not be accessible to the casual foreign visitor in a second or two of screen time: What is that man doing?

Focusing on visible, blue-collar America serves two purposes: It portrays occupations that foreign visitors can connect with immediately regardless of their own station in life, and indirectly shows Americans as more down-to-earth and humble than many foreign visitors may think from portrayals in their own media.

There are no shots of office workers, none of the White House or U.S. Capitol, none of Disney properties, and none of any famous American.

The film, which Disney produced entirely on its own dime, is currently being shown at entry points at the Washington Dulles and Houston airports; see State’s press release for more details.

China Is the New America

2007-10-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

...AND HONG KONG IS THE NEW ELLIS ISLAND.

Andy Valvur forwards "Struggling Chadians Dream of a Better Life--in China," wherein Chadians who have never been to the U.S., and frequently have never been outside Chad, nonetheless see the PRC as their bright, shiny, 21st-century place to do business:

Behind the white archways of the old colonial market [in N'Djamena, Chad's capital], Abdulkarim Mahamat, 24, was selling soap and batteries to the few customers who dropped by. Things were rather slow, and the young man explained how he often imagines himself elsewhere -- flying off to a promising new land of cheap socks and smoothly paved roads.

"If I can go to China, life will be better than it is now," he said, adding that he has started saving up for his ticket. "I'll make a lot of money, and life will change. I can return to school, build a nice house and have a family. People say that China is a good place and everything is cheap."

...

The idea of China as a symbol of potential prosperity is taking hold, seeping into the consciousness of ordinary Africans and occupying a place that the United States, and to some extent European countries, once claimed.

Around here, the American dream is something quaint and unrealistic, while a new kind of Chinese dream, more pragmatic and attainable, seems ascendant.

"The United States is a nice place to visit," said Ahmet Mohamet Ali, a trader who had just returned from his first trip to China. "China is a place to do business."

I used to laugh at the idea that anyone might prefer China's relative poverty and political repressiveness to U.S. affluence and freedoms. But Africans have been sufficiently poor and closed out of economic opportunity, and the PRC is becoming less oppressive over time, so maybe the stars are aligning for an African-Chinese alliance that runs deeper than simple economics.

Of course, these dewy-eyed Chadians probably haven't heard much about this little episode.

Return of the Non-Native, Part Two

2007-10-09T05:56:00.000-07:00

DEFINING THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SYMPTOMS.

The Counterinsurgency Field Manual is U.S. forces’ official doctrine on combating insurgencies around the world. Co-authored by the current U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, it discusses the role of intelligence in great detail—and not just “mines have been laid on the road 2.5 km north of Tikrit” intelligence, but the understanding of a country’s culture, history and personalities that helps counterinsurgents make progress with the host nation’s citizens. (Download free here, order hard copy here.)

Section 3-2 reads:

Intelligence in [counterinsurgency] is about people. U.S. forces must understand the people of the host nation, the insurgents, and the host-nation (HN) government. Commanders and planners require insight into cultures, perceptions, values, beliefs, interests and decision-making processes of individuals and groups. These requirements are the basis for collection and analytical efforts.

That expertise has to come from somewhere, and once again, anthropologists are in demand. In “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” David Rohde explains how academic anthropologists are helping U.S. forces abroad:

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Of course, some anthropologists are uncomfortable with academics’ work with the military:

Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.

“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”

Prof. Gusterson may be confusing the Bush Administration’s larger political objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan with the U.S. military’s objectives in those nations. Whether you think the president ultimately wants a secure, democratic Iraq or simply a Mesopotamian gas station, it’s tough to disagree with having anthropologists on board to lessen friction between U.S. forces and civilians, decreasing bloodshed and the brutality that Prof. Gusterson rightly fears.

Ultimately, social-science help will enable U.S. forces to withdraw more quickly from the countries experiencing “occupation,” whether they leave behind stable governments or not. (How grandly Prof. Gusterson overstates the U.S. presence abroad, as though U.S. stormtroopers leer from every Afghan and Iraqi streetcorner.)

The anthropologists have quickly found fans among line officers in Afghanistan, who continue to face off against al-Qa’ida and the Taliban:

The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.

In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.

In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.

“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”

Women Behind the (Saudi) Wheel

2007-10-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

AS THE KINGDOM MOVES SOLIDLY TOWARD THE LATE 1800s.

I was out of town in Dallas two weekends ago, but luckily Amy, my wife, spotted “Saudis Rethink Taboo on Women Behind the Wheel” in the September 28 Times for me. Apparently women may now drive cars in Saudi science fiction, a great leap ahead from women’s driving being an entirely taboo subject:

In a recent episode of Saudi Arabia's most popular television show, broadcast during Ramadan this month, a Saudi man of the future is seen sitting in his house as his daughter pulls into the driveway, her children piled into the back of the car.

''Where have you been?'' the father asks.

''The kids were bored, so I took them to the movies,'' she replies, matter-of-factly, as she gets out of the driver's seat.

The scene may appear mundane, but in Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden to drive -- and, by the way, where there are no movie theaters, either -- the skit portends something of a revolution. From a taboo about which there could be no open discussion, a woman's right to drive is becoming a topic of growing and lively debate in Saudi Arabia.

Coming after other recent changes -- women may now travel abroad without male accompaniment (though male permission is still required), seek divorce and own their own companies -- the driving discussion is noteworthy. Whether it signals that women will actually be driving soon or merely talking about it openly remains to be seen.

It’s particularly significant that this TV show aired during Ramadan, where TV viewership in the Muslim world skyrockets to levels that the U.S. sees only during the Super Bowl.

Hassan Fattah’s article goes on to tie the increased discussion of women’s driving to the squeeze on the kingdom’s middle class; as women are forced out into the workplace and become economic actors, they also gain a say in what happens to their income.

This puts women’s role in Saudi society somewhere in the American 1870s—economic instability forces households to seek outside income via women. The 19th Amendment is still decades away, but hopefully it is as inevitable in Saudi Arabia as it was in the U.S.

Entering the Marketplace of Ideas

2007-09-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

STATE'S DIGITAL OUTREACH TEAM CALMLY, PERSISTENTLY TELLS THE U.S. STORY.

If Neil MacFarquhar can't be in the Middle East, he is at least informing us from Washington. On Saturday his article about the State Department's Digital Outreach Team appeared, chronicling a duo of Arabic speakers who cruise Arabic-language chatrooms with a purpose:

Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.

So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?

Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”

The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.

State will add four more Arabic speakers, plus two Farsi and one Urdu speaker, to the mix within a month although some observers question whether the program will survive the Bush administration.

This sounds like a program that should be continued by the next president, whether Republican or Democrat, as part of a full-court PD press. There is a void in U.S. PD efforts between war-room spinning and jazz-band visits, occupied thus far by high-profile actors like foreign aid, our diplomats, and disaster relief.

It can only help U.S. policy to have polite, persistent, day-to-day voices engaging the wired Muslim world, and sometimes asking tougher questions than Secretary Rice can.

Bringing Them On

2007-09-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

A LACK OF SENSE IN CALLING BIN LADEN “IMPOTENT.”

It was already tough to believe that White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend was considered for Alberto Gonzales’ slot at Justice. Despite her lengthy and impressive resume, Townsend’s published remarks never seemed very incisive, and when I saw her speak at a recent open-source intelligence conference in Washington, she largely stuck to thanking attendees for showing up and discussing how exciting the conference would be.

Now, trying to downplay Osama bin Laden’s importance in advance of September 11, Townsend mistakenly described bin Laden as “virtually impotent”:

Appearing on the Fox network on Sunday, the White House homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, said Bin Laden was now "virtually impotent" to launch an attack.

"This is about the best he can do," Ms Townsend said of Bin Laden. "This is a man on the run, from a cave, who's virtually impotent other than these tapes," she said. She repeated her claim that he was impotent again on CNN later that day.

The provocative characterisation came just days after Bin Laden attracted international attention with the release of a video in which he ridiculed Mr Bush about the Iraq war.

"There's nothing overtly obvious in the tape that would suggest this is a trigger for an attack," Ms Townsend said.

But her characterisation of al-Qaeda as impotent sits uneasily with the findings of the most recent National Security Estimate released in July, which found that the US faced a persistent and evolving terrorist threat, especially from al-Qaeda.

If you don’t know where bin Laden is, and certainly can’t produce him for trial, it doesn’t make sense at any level to characterize him as impotent. As Cascada Observer puts it, “Congratulations to Ms. Townsend for receiving her Ph.D. from the Bring Em' On College of Public Diplomacy.”

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for putting me on to Cascada Observer.)

The Return of the Non-Native

2007-09-10T06:11:00.000-07:00

SILVERWARE CLANGS, HEADS TURN AS A SELF-TUTORED ANTHROPOLOGIST HELPS THE MARINES IN IRAQ.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal brings down the curtain on a whole era of thinking about foreign policy.

I think of it as the “scratch an Iraqi and you’ll find a Westerner” school of thought, the idea that if you could just decapitate the Iraqi government, hold elections and install a few McDonald’s, every Iraqi’s inner American would emerge and flourish.

It looks like the military, or at least the Marine Corps, has gradually realized this isn’t the case, and the hunt for Americans who can understand Iraqi psychology and interaction at the ground level is as urgent as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

That is to say, anthropology is cool again.

In “To Understand Sheiks in Iraq, Marines Ask ‘Mac’” details the adventures of William “Mac” McCallister, a former marine self-tutored in Iraqi tribal customs and politics. He’s now working as a private contractor for the Marine Corps in Iraq, explaining the ins and outs of dealing with Sunni sheiks and helping marine commanders be more effective on the ground, particularly in meetings.

For example, conducting business with sheiks is radically different from conducting a meeting in the U.S., where everyone is expected to speak at room temperature and physically violent motions are usually seen as weakness. But that same reserve is counterproductive in Iraq, McCallister tells the WSJ:

“The Iraqis expect the grand gesture. It’s one of their rituals,” says Mr. McCallister. “You show them no respect when you don’t offend.” He compares discussions among tribal sheiks to symphonies. They often begin quietly, he says. Then they grow hotter often [sic] elevating into screaming matches before the debate calms down again.

The Marines say they have emulated this in meetings with tribal and government officials. In June, [Brig. Gen. John Allen], who says he prides himself on not losing his cool, was meeting with the governor of Iraq’s Anbar Province in a hotel restaurant in Amman, Jordan. With security improving, Gen. Allen told the governor he wanted his help to reopen Anbar’s criminal courts, which had been shut down after threats of violence caused many of the judges to quit. The governor was noncommittal.

Gen. Allen says he slammed his fist on the table, causing silverware to clang and heads to turn. “You have got to want those courts to open more than I do!” he says he yelled. “We are going to have the first trials in Anbar by Aug. 1!” Today, thanks to the governor pushing, the trials have started. The Anbar governors regularly refers to the conversation with Gen. Allen as a turning point.

At first, U.S. commanders incorrectly assumed that sheiks ruled as dictators, Mr. McCallister says. But a sheik’s power is actually defined by his ability to “attract others to him,” he says.

Ladies and gentlemen, for once, it really is all about soft power.

McCallister has become an expert in this field largely on his own, although his Special Forces training undoubtedly included more than a bit of training in diplomacy, persuasion and skills useful in persuading people not to try and kill or oppose you.

The U.S. could benefit from about a thousand more of these bush Ruth Benedicts fanning out across Iraq and soaking up the culture, and I’d love to hear news of any formal DoD or State program that helps or grooms these kinds of people.

Promoting the Balance of Terror

2007-09-04T06:43:00.000-07:00

SKIPPING BAGHDAD, THE PRESIDENT VISITS ANBAR.

Fresh from warning U.S. citizens about the danger of leaving Iraq in a hurry, President Bush visited Anbar province last weekend at least partly to demonstrate that he has left Baghdad.

Left Baghdad to twist in the wind, that is.

Several factors caused the president to shun Iraq’s capital for the first time in his visits to Mesopotamia. The central government there has been paralyzed or on vacation while a war of words between Maliki and Congress escalated, and the president naturally doesn’t want to spend time in Maliki’s company right now. In addition, the U.S. military has scored notable successes in quieting Anbar province, and the president wants to highlight those successes in advance of the Petraeus report.

These are the visible factors leading President Bush to skip Baghdad this time around. But as with icebergs, it’s the invisible factors that matter most. I believe the president is interested in showing Maliki, and Shi’ites generally, that the cost of refusing to share power with Sunnis or Kurds is that the U.S. will arm and organize them until they can no longer be ignored.

This is a fine strategy if you assume an extended U.S. presence in Iraq, as the president seems to. Sooner or later, the Shi’ites will realize that they cannot simply terrorize or shove aside their Sunni countrymen while the U.S. keeps a lid on large-scale violence, and will arrive reluctantly at a power-sharing deal.

However, if the U.S. leaves Iraq before there is effective central government in that country, it is leaving behind three major factions kept from each other’s throats only by a balance of military force among them.

To make this balance of terror stable, the U.S. will have to arm the Sunnis and Kurds with much more than small arms so they can hold their own in a post-occupation civil war with their Shi’ite countrymen. The analogy I’m thinking of here is Cold War Western Europe, where the U.S. developed technically superior weapons to offset the Warsaw Pact’s overwhelming advantages in troop and tank numbers.

I’d love to sit in on some of the scenarios that the DoD must be using to examine how an Iraqi civil war might start and play out. How do you say Fulda Gap in Arabic?

Postwar, by Tony Judt

2007-08-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

SUMMER READING, CONTINUED.

While I’ve been unable to make it through Moby-Dick this summer (just 480 pages left to go before the autumnal equinox), I have been making surprising time through Tony Judt’s epic Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Judt combines a superhumanly broad grasp of European politics and culture with a writing style that can only be called “breezy,” in light of what could be wretchedly dry subject matter.

He doesn’t just discuss Europe, but also the Soviet Union and the U.S. and their efforts to promote or denigrate Communism. Apparently, the U.S. brought a lot of public-diplomacy dollars to the task:

By 1950 the US Information Agency had taken overall charge of American cultural exchange and information programs in Europe. Together with the Informational Services Branch of the US Occupation authorities in western Germany and Austria (which had full control of all media and cultural outlets in the US Zone in these countries), the USIA was now in a position to exert huge influence in Western European cultural life. By 1953, at the height of the Cold War, US foreign cultural programs (excluding covert subsidies and private foundations) employed 13,000 people and cost $129 million [annually], much of it spent on the battle for the hearts and minds of the intellectual elite of Western Europe.

That’s about $890 million in 2003 dollars, if you’re keeping track. A lot of that money went to establishing “America Houses,’

with libraries and newspaper-reading rooms, and [to] host lectures, meetings and English-language classes. By 1955 there were sixty-nine such America Houses in Europe. ...

Which is not to say USIA and its governmental brethren did everything right:

Like American-supported radio networks, ... the America House programs were sometimes undermined by the crude propaganda imperatives emanating from Washington. At the peak of the McCarthy years the directors of America Houses spent much of their time removing books from their shelves. Among dozens of authors whose works were deemed inappropriate were not only the obvious suspects—John Dos Passos, Arthur Miller, Dashiel Hammett and Upton Sinclair—but also Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Alberto Moravia, Tom Paine and Henry Thoreau. In Austria, at least, it seemed to many observers that the US was sometimes its own most effective foe.

Who might appear on today’s multimedia list? The obvious suspects would be Christopher Hitchens, the Dixie Chicks, Al Gore and Seymour Hersh. Non-obvious candidates for book removal might include Bill Gates (critical of U.S. engineering talent), Bono (U.S. and EU policy toward Sudan) and Studs Terkel (Dos Passos’s nonfiction successor, I’d say).

Got others?

While You Were Out

2007-08-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

A LIGHTER, SUMMERY SIDE OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY.

While I was vacationing, my inbox filled with PD-related bites. Andy Valvur of Igor International forwarded to me this video of Condoleezza Rice at the WHCA dinner, getting roasted by Cedric the Entertainer. It's good to see the Secretary of State relaxed and laughing--and it's also good to see actual humor at a WHCA dinner rather than thinly disguised bile.

Tyler Davidson at Meetings Media sent word that Cal Ripken is now working for State as a "special sports envoy." (Video here, text here.) The legendary Orioles iron man can be expected to connect nicely with audiences in East Asia and Latin America, where baseball and its heroes carry a lot of weight. His work ethic and self-deprecating view of himself are exactly what the U.S. should hope to project abroad, so good call by Undersecretary Hughes.

Speaking of baseball, East Asia and iron men, Nolan Ryan is now pitching for the U.S. Meat Export Federation to revive sales of U.S. beef in a mad-cow-wary Japan. Ryan, who does a little ranching himself, "has his picture in the meat aisles at major [Japanese] grocery stores under the slogan 'Beef makes you strong!'" according to Thursday's Wall Street Journal. The Hall of Fame pitcher is well-known in Japan and as good a fit for pitching U.S. beef as Ripken is for pitching U.S. values.

Finally, one of my favorite bands, Los Angeles's Ozomatli, has been touring on State's behalf and performed in Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt in July. This is a much gutsier call by State and presumably by Karen Hughes; although Ozomatli exemplifies L.A.'s multicultural melting pot and plays in well-known Latin, African and American musical styles, some of their lyrics talk about American racism and fears of a coming race war.

But if you want to give people an honest idea of what America is about, along with a positive message of peace and a great vibe, I can't think of a better group to send abroad. See this video of their mellow "After Party" here.

On Vacation

2007-08-04T05:18:00.000-07:00

Taking vacation from today through August 19. Rural. Low-tech. Distant. Before I head to the hinterlands, a few quick shots:

Some U.S. brands' popularity may be declining because their newness has worn off or because people don't like America. Where does that leave China, with its latest product-safety disaster that the Wall Street Journal captioned "Poison Me Elmo"?

If you haven't read Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah, do. I'm only fifty pages in and it's been tough to put down since page one. Bowden interviewed participants on all sides of the Iranian hostage crisis and his reporting makes those events fresh nearly 30 years later.

Finally, the "Karen Hughes is too prominent/Karen Hughes is nowhere to be found" debate rages on as the undersecretary for PD quietly pops up on the West Bank, says a few words in support of U.S. policy, then leaves. I suspect Hughes simply can't find a happy medium that will satisfy the press between now and 2009, but wish her luck anyway.

Off to vacation.

PRC PR

2007-07-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC RENTS SOME DAMAGE CONTROL.

In Sunday’s Times, “China Moves to Refurbish a Damaged Global Image” documents Beijing’s belated efforts to institute top-down quality control and, more importantly from a public-diplomacy standpoint, show the world that it is doing so:

Last week, Beijing unveiled new controls aimed at fighting counterfeit drugs and substandard exports. High-ranking officials and regulators vowed to strengthen China’s food safety system, tighten controls over chemical use by large seafood and meat producers, and create a system that holds producers more accountable for selling unsafe products.

The government also announced that it had broken up a series of criminal rings that operated huge manufacturing centers, producing goods as varied as pirated Microsoft software, fake Viagra and imitation Crest toothpaste.

Authorities here have also reached out to Ogilvy Public Relations, an international corporate consultancy on crisis management.

As the article notes, Beijing has instituted reform drives before, only to see its efforts against corruption, food adulteration, and product counterfeiting peter out after weeks or months once public attention shifted elsewhere. These programs have for years spawned jokes among China-watchers about the Four Must-Nots, the Five Better-Do-Its and the Three Deadly Appositives. Perhaps China’s new list-based slogans will be export-based, e.g. the Three Must-Not-Adulterates: Tickle Me Elmo dolls, pet foods and erectile dysfunction drugs, in rough order of overseas outrage.

Ogilvy PR certainly has Chinese government officials keeping a higher profile, the better to publicize their reform efforts:

“They have not historically been advice takers,” said Scott Kronick, president of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide China, part of the WPP Group. “But they are reaching out in a genuine way to seek advice. I think they recognize everything doesn’t have to be rosy.”

Since then, officials from various regulatory agencies and ministries have held news conferences to announce new regulations or to brief the news media on successful crackdowns.

The PRC has lurched in just two decades from a corrupt overly controlled economy to a corrupt minimally controlled one. But as the Times article notes, China has 5,000 companies that produce medicine alone, and the PRC will have to backtrack toward its over-regulated past in order to arrive at a system that satisfies its trading partners of the safety and efficacy of Chinese products.

As long as those trading partners can make noise about China’s unsafe exports—China, through its inaction, is poisoning our pets and toothpaste—the PRC’s other public-diplomacy efforts will stall.

Sources Open and Closed

2007-07-20T05:59:00.000-07:00

ON THIS WEEK’S DNI OPEN SOURCE CONFERENCE.

Early this week I attended the DNI Open Source Conference, a two-day Washington affair keynoted by the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, and attended by roughly 900 people from intelligence agencies, private companies that want to do business with them, and academics.

The conference’s topic was the gathering, care and handling of open-source (OS) information, such as from news media, commercial databases and libraries—basically, anything that’s not stolen or obtained surreptitiously. OS has recently become a priority thanks to the efforts of McConnell and others who contend that OS should be the “source of first resort” for the U.S. intelligence community (IC).

I attended panel after panel in which current and former IC members described the virtues and drawbacks of open-source collection: how to vet it, recombine it, and even how to get access to it at all, since many IC computers are purposely isolated from the Internet. (Internet connections risk giving away IC intentions since an adversary could monitor intelligence-agency searches and results.)

Although some of these breakout sessions were useful, most were inordinately heavy on panelist presentations and light on Q&A time, reducing opportunities for useful give-and-take between panelists and audience members.

The plenary sessions, held in an amphitheatre, were uncomfortably repetitive. Officials with long experience in the IC each welcomed us, heralded a new dawn for the IC’s embrace of OS, asked our help, and solicited suggestions. Not one of these plenary speakers—high government officials all—provided contact information for themselves, so the idea of people in the OS community making helpful suggestions remains a bit distant.

Unfortunately this trend of one-way communication reached up to Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, whose talk on Tuesday followed the release of a two-page, unclassified summary of the new National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism. Perhaps trying to motivate his audience, Fingar briefly discussed the NIE’s findings, which boil down to: Al-Qa’ida still threatens the U.S. from its Pakistan “safe havens.”

After the director’s remarks, Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker asked Fingar why the NIE took three years to conclude what anyone reading the newspapers would already know. Fingar testily replied that a) the media don’t have as many sources as the IC, which therefore b) has a higher confidence level in its conclusions.

Considering that the conference’s purpose was to promote OS sources and thinking, Fingar's reversion to the old-school IC line—We know more than you, so please don’t question our thinking—was remarkable. Particularly on the topic of al-Qa’ida, whose plans and intentions the IC has misread more than once.

Afterwards, I shared a chuckle with Wright, a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Looming Tower, when I accused him, personally, of lacking both good sources and confidence.

Fortunately, the real story of the DNI Open Source Conference wasn’t on the agenda. Someone once told me it’s the ‘walks in the woods’ that matter at conferences, and the myriad conversations between panelists, attendees and exhibitors between sessions generated real sparks. I was hard-pressed for a moment to talk with many of the panelists since so many others also sought them out.

I have no doubt that hundreds, maybe thousands, of useful connections were made between IC, private-sector and academic intelligence professionals, whose enthusiasm for talking and debating one-on-one was obvious and contagious.

This is where the DNI Open Source Conference’s real value to the U.S. lies; hopefully, next year’s conference will move beyond the introductory, isn’t-this-great phase and plan in more time for people to mix, mingle and create connections that will lead to better OS intelligence collection.

Absurd Denials

2007-07-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

When the more clueless Iraqi imams accuse the U.S. of importing "Jews" who will somehow enslave Mesopotamia, the U.S. doesn't usually issue a denial because the idea is so absurd.

Unfortunately, British forces felt they should deny importing the dread honey badger to Basra.

A Note from Secretary Rice

2007-07-12T05:44:00.000-07:00

Len Baldyga forwards a cable that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently sent to all U.S. diplomatic and consular posts around the world. In it, she thanks U.S. diplomats for tolerating the State Department's redeployment of personnel from comfy, overstaffed places like Germany to more wretched, frequently isolated but vital postings.

The Secretary also explicitly puts Embassy Baghdad at the top of the heap in terms of getting first pick of staff—which is hardly necessary to emphasize to U.S. diplomats, who understand that the only route to advancement at State is through the Green Zone:

SUBJECT: RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGES OF OUR NEW ERA—A CALL TO SERVICE

1. Around the world, the men and women of the Department are doing important work. The work may vary, from traditional partnership and alliance building to the cutting edge of transformational diplomacy. Whatever your work, it is all necessary and vital to our nation's security.

2. I am very grateful, and pleased, that so many of you have responded to the Director General's call to serve in difficult posts. The changes he has instituted are making a difference for Iraq and all of our difficult yet critical posts. Those changes, together with global repositioning, are ensuring that more of the Foreign Service and the Civil Service are on the ground in transitioning countries. It is there, on the frontlines of diplomacy, that I believe we can have the greatest immediate impact.

3. As I am sure you are aware, the number of unaccompanied and limited accompanied posts has grown in recent years. The decision to serve at these posts requires personal sacrifice. I would like to extend a personal thank you to each and everyone of you who have made this decision. I would especially like to acknowledge the difficulties such service imposes on our families. We are now preparing for 2008 openings, and I am committed first and foremost to ensuring that Embassy Baghdad has the staff it needs.

4. Why is all of this so important? I believe we are at a crossroads in history. The decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our world for years to come. I believe that we, like our predecessors, must actively commit to building a better world where terror, injustice, and extremism cannot gain a foothold. To win this struggle, we must mobilize more than our military. We must also deploy our democratic principles, our development assistance, our compassion, and the power of ideas.

5. I, therefore, encourage each of you -- and your families -- to look to the future, consider where you can best make a difference, and then pursue the assignments and training that will get you there. I encourage you to serve in transitioning countries, to learn their culture and their language -- from Arabic to Chinese to Hindi -- and to share the principles and the story of the American people. I especially encourage your continued commitment to serve at our most difficult and essential posts, such as Baghdad and Kabul.

6. In the past, those who helped shape a better future became the leaders of their time, and of this Department. I urge you to seize the opportunities before you and lead.

7. Thank you again for your commitment to public service.

Item number six is perhaps the most interesting; Secretary Rice calls on staffers to sacrifice but also publicly implies a quid pro quo: Work hard now at your hardship posting and you too can be great, and perhaps even stride in the footsteps of Cordell Hull and Dean Acheson.

It's a small bit of inspiration, but it may be vital for U.S. diplomats to hear as it places them in a larger context of diplomacy stretching all the way back to the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson.

Much More than a Mouse

2007-07-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT FARFOUR, ON THE OCCASION OF HIS DEATH.

I’d been thinking that Farfour, Hamas’s Mickey Mouse lookalike, had quietly retired under a combined assault by Disney lawyers and world public opinion. Good riddance, I thought; Farfour had been used by Hamas to indoctrinate Palestinian kids on the importance of being good little martyrs, outraging Disneyphiles and trademark lawyers alike.

But I was wrong, as an un-bylined story in yesterday’s New York Times will show:

Farfour, Hamas’s TV Mouse, Dies ‘Martyr’s Death’ at Hands of Israeli

JERUSALEM, June 30—Farfour, the giant Mickey Mouse look-alike who was the host of a Palestinian children’s program on Hamas-affiliated television and drew international ire for what critics saw as incitement, died a “martyr’s death” at the hands of a fictional Israeli on Friday.

...

In the final episode of the program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” Farfour’s grandfather, a Palestinian refugee, entrusted him the deeds and a key for property abandoned by the family when Israel became a state and Palestinians fled or were chased out. After leaving his grandfather, “Jews” went after Farfour and asked him to hand over the deeds and the key. When he refused, he was beaten to death.

I used to get riled when right-wingers would refer to some Middle Eastern dictatorships as “totalitarian.” It was a stretch that the corrupt, ramshackle state structures of an Iran or a Saudi Arabia could drive every aspect of a citizen’s life and thoughts toward a specific thought pattern, as the Soviets once tried to do.

But there is nothing ramshackle about Hamas, which is attempting a total brainwashing of its citizenry from the crib on up. The merits of Hamas’s cause can be debated but its efforts to create an anti-Israel Jesus Camp of the airwaves make me regret my earlier lighthearted treatment of Farfour and Hamas.

I now wonder when some anti-Semitic version of Thomas the Tank Engine will hit the airwaves, and figure a Two Minutes Hate for adolescents can’t be far behind.

"Our Independence from Foreign Funding Is Our Only Strength"

2007-06-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

The Times magazine ran a depressing little piece this past Sunday on successes and failures in public diplomacy toward Iran ("Hard Realities of Soft Power"). It dissects the disposition of about $75 million in funds meant to influence Iranian opinion, but unfortunately, the funds—and administration officials' pronouncements in support of Iranian civil-society organizations (CSOs)—have had unintended consequences.

It seems like most of the failure has come from this combination:

Publicized U.S. Funding of Iranian CSOs + Administration Sabre-Rattling + Absence of External Oppressor = Tehran Crackdown on CSOs

I occasionally give Cold War-era FSO and USIA types a hard time, because some seem to reflexively reach for a toolkit that contains some combination of Voice of America programming and touring American musical groups as our front line of public diplomacy; but in this case, it would be nice to head back to a Cold War model that looked something like this:

Highly Covert Funding + Steady But Judicious U.S. Talk About Democratic Futures + External Oppressor + Patience = End of USSR

Maybe it's time to redouble U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are at least externally inspired and supported—and get out of Iraq, where we are the external oppressor of some large fraction of the population.

That Was the Zombie War That Was

2007-06-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

A SURPRISINGLY ACUTE BOOK ABOUT THE UNDEAD.

It’s an article of faith among fans that any time science fiction says something important, it is not taken seriously outside the fan community. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War fits this model, as novels with much larger palettes (Dune and Foundation) did before it.

Author Max Brooks sets World War Z 10 years after the last major world power has subdued a plague of zombies, which occurs sometime in the near future. It includes wide-ranging interviews with those who survived the decade-long war against the undead, putting the novel’s “present” somewhere around 2030 and gazing back at the 2010s.

Brooks’s zombies are pure George Romero: mindless yet strong, vulnerable only if you destroy the brain. Hungry. They spread, of course, by killing and partially eating victims who then return to ‘life’ as zombies themselves. They generally cannot climb obstacles, and the moans of one attract others within earshot to an unlimited extent.

But zombies are just the gory gift-wrap for some acute social commentary. Like Warner Brothers cartoons featuring smart-aleck rabbits and overconfident coyotes, World War Z works on several levels. For teenagers and young adults, Brooks paints a pulp picture of the near-destruction of humanity.

For adults who think about U.S. society and international relations, the book has a second level:

Take a threat with X qualities (add robustness and strength to normal humans; subtract reason, speed and tool use; the zombie disease spreads by direct contact). How will X threat affect Y type of society (post-industrial, high-tech, increasingly insular)?

Seen through this lens, World War Z is an examination of society’s weaknesses and strengths relative to that threat.

The zombies overrun large sections of the earth, including the entire U.S. east of the Rockies, before humanity manages to counterattack years later. World trade collapses, and widespread fires combine with a small nuclear exchange to drop global temperatures 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit.

Various societal weaknesses aid the zombies’ rise:

The high-speed international trade in bodily organs speeds zombies’ spread via transplants—especially from China, where the zombie plague is thought to originate. It also makes advanced Western hospitals the sites of zombie outbreaks, quickly crippling nations’ medical capabilities.

First-world militaries’ shock-and-awe attacks fail against opponents that cannot be shocked and awed (read as “non-deterrable” in current jargon).

Training riflemen to aim for center body mass, rather than to take head shots, also works against human forces.

Many spend time Googling for answers rather than grappling with physical-world factors that could help them escape or fight the zombies.

A sedentary class of white-collar workers is useless to a society that suddenly must fight a large-scale infantry war. Physical stamina and blue-collar skills (as farmers, machinists, factory workers, etc.) are suddenly highly prized, leading to general social upheaval.

The unwillingness of some societies to accept an unimaginable threat causes much unnecessary death, adding to the zombies’ numbers. For example, many Arabs initially believe the zombie plague is merely a Zionist lie.

China’s penchant for secrecy catches up with it, as it successfully deceives foreign intelligence agencies into thinking that early zombie outbreaks are themselves rumors spread by the PRC government to hide a massive political purge.

On the other hand, various societal strengths help humanity eventually beat the zombies:

White South African paranoia emerges as the unlikeliest virtue, in the form of an apartheid-era plan that becomes the basis of each country’s merciless decisions about which human groups to protect and which to abandon, essentially as bait, so that others may reach safety.

As with invaders throughout history, even one that gets behind its lines, Russia’s vast interior and unforgiving winters give it periodic respite from the zombie invasion (the zombies are inanimate when frozen, then thaw each spring).

After a disastrous opening engagement in Yonkers, N.Y., the U.S. military completely redesigns its weaponry, doctrine and training to fight a years-long war on foot, which sweeps the U.S. from west to east. Needless to say, this infantry focus does not please the Air Force, whose high-tech weapons platforms are now useless and largely mothballed in favor of low-tech aerial resupply.

Max Brooks had previously written The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, which treated episodes from horror movies as straight-faced fact and showed how one could avoid the mistakes that caused the deaths (and undeaths) of so many B-movie actors. World War Z is a logical brand extension—but one that also happens to illuminate some of our current world societies’ weaknesses.

I contacted Brooks’s publicists about an interview for Beacon in which we could discuss this further—does he realize this is the most entertaining social commentary in years?—but they replied that Brooks won’t be doing interviews until the fall release of the World War Z paperback. I’ll try and get hold of him then.

The Drift of “Public Diplomacy”

2007-06-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

SOON, THE TERM WILL CEASE TO HAVE ANY MEANING AT ALL.

For years the term “public diplomacy” has been fought over by specialists and pundits. I’d initially thought that public diplomacy could and should be defined as:

governmental expressions of the best of your nation’s culture, science and style of government in all their messiness

but the term has drifted as its use has widened. Readers will recall me insisting over the years that “public diplomacy” should not consist of a Karen Hughes-style rapid-reaction force that sat there watching TV all day, responding instantly to foreign badmouthing, but I lost that one and PD went through a period of being defined as:

top-down unity of messaging and prompt correction of disinformation about the U.S.

and now “public diplomacy” is becoming synonymous with mere “diplomacy”—the actions of our ambassadors. This latest watering-down of “public diplomacy” is illustrated in a bit of critique from Davids Medienkritik, which purports to analyze the German media:

The fact that members of the American Foreign Service haven't more effectively engaged German media has been a costly failure. The system of two year rotations in the US foreign service clearly makes it more difficult to establish an effective media program. The fact that the Foreign Service and State Department tend to lean undeniably to the left also means that there is currently less desire to go out and explain and defend the positions of the US government on mass media forums - despite the fact that that is the very mission of the public diplomacy officials.

No, day-to-day explaining and defending is not what public diplomacy is about! But I’ll probably lose this one, too, since “public diplomacy” now seems reduced to:

ambassadors and staff staring down hostile local media.

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

Science Fiction Writers Aid DHS

2007-05-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE, EVEN BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

In “Sci-fi writers join war on terror,” Mimi Hall describes Sigma, a group of science-fiction writers who are helping the DHS brainstorm ways to protect the U.S.:

The last time the group gathered was in the late 1990s, when members met with government scientists to discuss what a post-nuclear age might look like, says group member Greg Bear. He has written 30 sci-fi books, including the best seller Darwin's Radio.

Now, the Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government's latest top mission of combating terrorism.

Although some sci-fi writers' futuristic ideas might sound crazy now, scientists know that they often have what seems to be an uncanny ability to see into the future.

"Fifty years ago, science-fiction writers told us about flying cars and a wireless handheld communicator," says Christopher Kelly, spokesman for Homeland Security's Science and Technology division. "Although flying cars haven't evolved, cellphones today are a way of life. We need to look everywhere for ideas, and science-fiction writers clearly inform the debate."

Bear says the writers offer powerful imaginations that can conjure up not only possible methods of attack, but also ideas about how governments and individuals will respond and what kinds of high-tech tools could prevent attacks.

The group's motto is "Science Fiction in the National Interest." To join the group, Andrews says, you have to have at least one technical doctorate degree.

Bear is the perfect pick for a group like this; I had the good fortune to meet him a few years ago, at a conference that looked at ways to enhance human performance, and he had the twin attributes of deep insight (Darwin’s Radio and its sequel deal with periodic jumps in human evolution) and the affability needed to work in group settings.

Authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are also Sigma members, and they’re no strangers to thinking hard about the future, either. In fact, they’ve been doing it for over 30 years, by my count, having co-written the seminal asteroid-impact epic Lucifer’s Hammer in the mid-1970s.

All You Bhojpuri Speakers

2007-05-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

... RAN OUT TO SEE THE BHOJPURI-DUBBED VERSION OF SPIDER-MAN 3, SETTING INDIAN RECORDS.

Hollywood is increasingly cutting into Bollywood’s ticket sales thanks to simultaneous releases of blockbusters in Indian dialects like Bhojpuri, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

As this Christian Science Monitor article notes, Hollywood movies have frequently not done well in India since dubbed versions, if any, tended to be released only after English-language versions had finished their runs.

U.S. studios are wising up, and Spider-Man 3 is breaking the recent record set by Casino Royale—an American movie about a British spy that takes place in Africa and Europe—which was also released in multiple Subcontinental dialects.

It’s clearly worth the money for Hollywood studios to dub films into major foreign languages and dialects, although I’d love to see where the cut-off is; hypothetically, do the studios decide to spend money to dub for 101 million Bhojpuri speakers but consider dubbing for 90 million Gujarati speakers not worth the investment?

If Hollywood moguls can bring the cost of dubbing for smaller and smaller dialects down, they will. The question is, will Bollywood do the same, toning down its musical melodramas for non-Indian audiences and dubbing into Mandarin, English and Spanish for overseas consumption?

(Thanks as always to John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review for the initial item.)

From the Mouths of Mice

2007-05-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

HAMAS ADOPTS MICKEY AS ITS MOUSEPIECE.

It is extremely rare that Hamas makes a strategic mistake. But it has.

The Palestinian militia/political party/social-services agency has adopted a thinly veiled ripoff of Mickey Mouse as the mascot for one of its kids’ shows:

A giant black-and-white rodent — named "Farfour," or "butterfly," but unmistakably a rip-off of the Disney character — does his high-pitched preaching against the U.S. and Israel on a children's show each Friday on Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. The militant group, sworn to Israel's destruction, shares power in the Palestinian government.

"You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists," Farfour squeaked on a recent episode of the show, which is called "Tomorrow's Pioneers."

"We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers."

Children call in to the show, many singing Hamas anthems about fighting Israel.

The reason I call this a Hamas mistake is that the group can face down the U.S., stand off the Israeli Army, alienate the European Union, and even thumb its nose at various regional sponsors—but it is now subject to attack by the most relentless opponents in the Western Hemisphere: Walt Disney Co. intellectual-property lawyers.

Nothing can stop them. Nothing can placate them. Unmarked private jets have been seen flying east from Bob Hope Airport even as I write this.

It’s a shame that none of Osama bin Laden’s broadcasts have tried to appeal to kids in this way; Osama would long ago have been found by Disney lawyers and flown back to Burbank to face justice.

On the other hand, only after a pricey out-of-court settlement had been reached would Disney have released Osama to U.S. officials for trial.

Update: The last surviving child of Walt Disney condemns the Hamas ripoff as “pure evil.”

May 10 Update: Disney's lawyers have achieved the inevitable victory, and in record time: Mickey Hamouse has been taken off the air and "placed under review."

Thanks to Tyler Davidson for forwarding the initial story as well as a follow-up.

Beacon No. 103: National Security for the Sesame Street Set

2007-05-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

IN AN AMISH FARMING COMMUNITY, A WHOLE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LEARNS ARABIC.

It’s nearly impossible to see your foreign-policy tax dollars at work, but in one case your tax dollars are teaching dozens of six-year-olds to speak and write in Arabic.

In eastern Iowa.

At Kalona Elementary School in Kalona, Iowa, Susie Swartzendruber recently won a three-year, $600,000 grant to teach Arabic to all the school’s K-5 students. The Iowa native had lived in rural Egypt from 1982-1985, speaks the Egyptian dialect, and applied for the grant with the goal of increasing cross-cultural understanding.

That hopeful phrase has additional resonance in Kalona, a largely Mennonite farming community of just 2,300 where road signs caution motorists to yield to horse-drawn vehicles.

The Kalona Elementary grant is part of the interagency National Security Language Initiative (NSLI). It can be renewed twice depending on favorable reviews, so by the time today’s first graders turn nine, they’ll already have several years’ more Arabic instruction than almost any other native-born Americans.

I visited Kalona Elementary on May 2 for the premiere of Arabic DVD Dictionary, starring one of the school’s first-grade classes. This video is the brainchild of Erica Ruen, an about-to-graduate education student at the University of Iowa who taught at Kalona Elementary as part of her degree work. Arabic DVD Dictionary is designed to showcase the kids’ achievements and maybe teach viewers a bit of Arabic as well.

The dictionary begins with the first-graders welcoming viewers, introducing themselves (“Ana ismiy Hali!” “Ana ismiy Payton!” “Ana ismiy Paul!”), and naming months, numbers, and some of their favorite things (including several floppy dolls and stuffed animals) in Arabic. They’re clearly having fun and by report are picking up Arabic words and numbers quickly, to the point that can do simple math in Arabic.

The students pronounce their words with a distinctively Iraqi accent thanks to their instructor, Zahra al-Attar, an Iraqi immigrant living in Iowa City with her husband—a doctor at the University of Iowa’s hospitals—and their two children. Al-Attar left Iraq for the U.S. in 1994, finding life under Saddam’s regime intolerable, and lived in Georgia and Michigan before settling in Iowa.

Erica Ruen thinks that having Iraqi students create an English-language video dictionary would be an excellent tool for increasing cross-cultural understanding on the Iraqi end, and her fiancée Peter, on leave from duty in Iraq, agrees, saying it would help the U.S. mission in Iraq to have Iraqis know more about the U.S.

Iraq war or no Iraq war, the U.S. will always need Arabic speakers—and people who have a thorough understanding of the Arab world. Hopefully President Bush and his successors will extend and enhance NSLI funding so these kids can continue learning and, by the 2020s, be part of this country’s first post-9/11 generation of native-born strategic language speakers.

Thanks to Cedar Rapids Gazette reporter Lee Hermiston for writing both the original story that led me to Kalona Elementary and his post-premiere follow-up.

Freeway-Collapse "Terrorism"

2007-05-01T08:11:00.001-07:00

THAT FIRE AND FREEWAY COLLAPSE COULD BE A LOT WORSE—PSYCHOLOGICALLY.

All that separates the Oakland freeway collapse from terrorism is a claim of responsibility.

If some far-sighted aide had reached Osama bin Laden in his Peshawar apartment and successfully urged him to release a statement about how the tanker-truck fire was part of his Master Plan to bleed the U.S.—direct economic losses from freeway closings are at $6 million/day, never mind the repair costs—the entire United States would be on red alert right now: cops and dogs everywhere, National Guardsmen at the airports, air passengers being fluroscoped.

Better yet: The freeway fire/collapse was an accident, but imagine for a moment that the next such incident is intentional. Create a poisonous cloud by driving a second tanker-truck full of chlorine or anhydrous hydrogen flouride into the fire, add an Osama bin Laden claim of responsibility, and you combine big economic punch with a high body count and extreme terror—all at extremely low cost and risk to al-Qa'ida leadership.

I've previously written about On the Edge of Disaster and want to recommend it again. Stephen Flynn's book gets you thinking about how fragile U.S. infrastructure is, and how terrorists can use that fragility to magnify the effects of system disruptions. And it's got some pretty terrifying scenarios. ...

Frank Luntz on "Words That Work"

2007-04-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

Love or hate the guy who coined "Contract with America" and a bunch of other memorable phrases that defined GOP success in the 1990s, Frank Luntz is worth reading for a brief education on efficient use of language. Focus on results, not process, Luntz says; don't dwell on 'putting more cops on the street'—talk about 'public safety' instead. It worked for Luntz when he worked for Rudolph Giuliani.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear is not as colorful as Buck Up, Suck Up and Come Back When You Foul Up, but I'd recommend it for a look at GOP and corporate opinion-making.

PD applications? If you're of the "the policy's fine, we're just not telling it right" school, this book is for you. Luntz would argue, though, that efficient wording can arise only where a policy that people actually agree with is in play—and Luntz's descriptions of the mechanics of figuring out whether that's the case is another good reason to read the book.

In Memoriam: David Halberstam

2007-04-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

I was appalled to hear that David Halberstam died yesterday in an auto accident in California. He was 73 and had years of productive life ahead of him.

The Times's obituary and the Post's.

Typically, Halberstam died on his way to interview a subject for yet another book.

I had the good fortune to see him speak several years ago in San Francisco, where he uttered the words that became part of my e-mail signature for years: "This is a great country to be a reporter. Everybody talks."

Seven Days in April

2007-04-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

THE NEW SOFT POWER OF THE “RETIRED GENERAL.”

The best job title to have in the military right now is “retired.”

Groups of retired U.S. generals have recently sounded the alarm about climate change and slammed President Bush’s “surge” plan from big-media megaphones and the floor of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal ices the cake with “The Courting of General Jones,” an account of a politically hot retired Marine Corps general. James Jones is friendly with bigs in both major political parties and has indie cred, causing those parties to chatter about how he could help them in presidential politics:

Gen. Jones is a freshly retired Marine Corps general who stands 6-foot-5, speaks fluent French and served until December as supreme allied commander in Europe. He says he thinks that the troops should stay in Iraq but that the U.S. should close the Guantanamo military prison “tomorrow.” He advocates engagement with friends and enemies alike. And, more to the point, he pledges allegiance to no political party.

All of which has made Gen. Jones one of Washington’s hottest political commodities. As they look toward an election sure to be dominated by issues of war and national security, candidates from both major parties are clamoring to get Gen. Jones on their side.

How have generals (and admirals) gone from being the cagy coup-plotters of Seven Days in May to being accorded unlimited access and attention?

—They’re in a position to know the true state of the military and the situation on the ground worldwide, especially in Iraq.

—Their words, resumes and appearance are polished and measured, thanks to a lifetime of high-level education, grooming, and successful movement within the Pentagon bureaucracy.

—They have had to keep their personal opinions hidden for decades and are now presumed to be telling the unvarnished truth.

—They are usually tilting against the Bush administration—which is only expected from those wronged by the administration, like Anthony Zinni, but which is surprising in so many successful, high-level military men whose retirements were handled more gracefully.

The courtship of General Jones isn’t surprising; for those too young to remember the Eisenhower example, Gen. Colin Powell was similarly feted in 2000, declared himself a Republican and was anointed Secretary of State for the first Bush Administration. Unfortunately, at that point he had to participate in making U.S. policy rather than executing it, and had to either get on board with the Iraq war or resign. Powell chose the former, destroying much of his soft power and causing him to vanish from public life.

Will today’s crop of retired generals remain on the sidelines in blue-ribbon commissions and CNN green rooms, or will they jump into actual policymaking Wesley Clark-style, and risk success or failure in their second (civilian) careers? Watch for much side-taking and policy-making from today’s retired generals as grow more comfortable in their civilian suits.

Controlling Gaza Inputs

2007-04-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

FIRST, BOMB YOUR ENEMY’S CULTURAL CENTERS.

Anyone who doubts that soft power is important should look to the Gaza Strip where, as the Wall Street Journal reports today in “Uncertain Fate of Gaza Reporter Deepens Concerns,” a new breed of radicals is focusing on control of information:

JERUSALEM—Fanatical Islamists of the type sowing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to be operating with increasing impunity in the Gaza Strip, heightening concern about the rising danger posed by al Qaeda-inspired groups or similar violent fringe groups in the Palestinian territories.

...

The same day [a] claim about [the kidnapping and alleged killing of BBC reporter Alan] Johnston was made, two Internet cafes and a Christian bookstore in Gaza were bombed. That followed last week’s bombings at a computer lab and library of a cultural center. Since the beginning of this year, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights has documented a string of such attacks, targeting businesses or institutions with products or services that are deemed by Islamic radicals to be impure or potentially corrupting.

The article implies that these are not Hamas- or Fatah-inspired bombings, but either homegrown freelancers or the leading edge of an al-Qa’ida surge into Gaza. In either case, the perps are clearly concerned about cutting off Gazans’ access to any information flow but their own—and it’s unclear what their views are at this point. Next up, I’d watch for bombings of broadcast facilities and news crews, and there are a few in Gaza.

Best PD Quotes from 2006

2007-04-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

John H. Brown recently compiled his PD quotes of the day for 2006 here, and they're a hoot. My fave: "When you are persuaded by something, you don't think it is propaganda." Give it a look.

Arab Media React to Speaker Pelosi’s Trip to Damascus

2007-04-10T06:49:00.000-07:00

HEAD SCARVES WERE NOT ON THE RADAR.

Those who thought Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Damascus was purely about head scarves and poking a finger in the president’s eye might want to look at MEMRI’s roundup of Arab media reaction to the trip. It was as mixed as U.S. reaction, but for different reasons: Where U.S. reaction played out entirely along the left-right axis, Middle Eastern reaction questioned whether Pelosi’s visit presented possible changes in U.S. policy—some welcoming engagement with Damascus, others considering it a sham, still others dreading that it will leave Arab democracy activists twisting in the wind.

But all seemed to consider Pelosi’s visit a serious move of some sort, with the possible exception of Al-Riyadh, which hinted dismissively at “supreme interests ... that do not change with a change in leadership.” Now, who the heck could the Saudis be implying pulls the strings?

First Impression: John Edwards

2007-04-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

IOWANS GET TO LOOK AT THE CANDIDATES—EARLY.

This will be the first in a series of reports on the Democratic and Republican candidates as they make their rounds here in eastern Iowa, because even though the presidential election has little to do with public diplomacy it does have to do with soft power—reputation, branding, recovery from setbacks, long-term message management.

Iowa provides unique opportunities to vet presidential candidates early. For example, on Tuesday, April 3, I had the choice of seeing Hillary Clinton in Iowa City, or John Edwards or Rudolph Giuliani at separate events in nearby Cedar Rapids.

I chose to see Edwards because he threatens to disrupt the Clinton “inevitability” strategy which reportedly is playing out even at the local level; I read a newspaper account claiming that even minor-league Iowa Democratic officials are being buttonholed by the Clinton campaign and told to endorse now—11 months before the caucuses—or forget any future consideration from the nominee-presumptive.

I’m not sure how well this kind of hardball plays here—I’m not involved in Democratic politics—but former governor Tom Vilsack recently got on board with a Clinton endorsement in exchange for help retiring his campaign debts—a rather naked use of the power of the purse.

The Edwards town-hall meeting took place at Prairie High, about two miles from the Cedar Rapids airport. Hundreds—I would guess about 750—filed into a gymnasium festooned with one giant and two merely huge American flags, plus banners relaying Edwards’s message that “tomorrow begins today.” The gym was harshly lit to accommodate cameras from the local CBS affiliate and others; sitting behind what was the “stage” by virtue of the TV cameras being at the opposite end of the gym, I stared into high-powered lighting for over an hour.

Campaign workers passed out the standard “John Edwards ‘08” placards to wave before the cameras and then, somewhat more cynically, a large collection of handmade signs saying things like “Live Strong Elizabeth” and “Iowa Is a Blue State.” I should put “handmade” in quotes because although they were obviously made by hand on posterboard with Magic Markers, they were not made by anyone who wound up holding them at the rally.

Two officials warmed up the crowd for Edwards: the school’s associate principal and Linn County Sheriff Don Zeller, a white-maned Vietnam vet who also worked for Edwards’s 2003-04 run at the presidency. Here I encountered the rally’s only technical stumble: After Zeller gave a rousing intro emphasizing his first-hand experience with Edwards during the last election, there was a gap of 7-8 minutes before Elizabeth and John Edwards entered the gymnasium.

Still, the place went nuts—the crowd on its feet, applause, cheering, the former senator and his wife making their way, Moses-like, through the slowly parting sea of handshakes.

John Edwards gave a short talk warning against candidates who don’t give specifics about their policy plans, a clear shot at Barack Obama and an echo of last week’s Big Horserace Question about the Illinois senator: Isn’t he a little weak on specifics? Edwards also stated that he wants U.S. troops out of Iraq sooner than later, and outlined a healthcare plan that would put the country on the road to single-payer coverage. Both these lines got lots of applause.

In fact, the line I remember getting the most applause (besides curse-this-awful-war sentiments) was Edwards’s line about how his healthcare plan would eliminate pre-existing conditions. People connected very strongly with this idea, and I think this issue is one to watch through the remainder of the primaries.

Edwards, a former trial attorney, seemed to enjoy one-on-one interactions during the Q&A session. One questioner put him in Tony Blair’s shoes regarding the captured sailors: What would he do as commander-in-chief had the sailors been Americans? Edwards answered that he would first try to ascertain the facts; if U.S. sailors had indeed been trespassing, he would have no trouble apologizing—unlike the current president, he implied. But if U.S. sailors had been seized unfairly, he would have demanded their return and sent his secretary of state directly to Tehran to negotiate, another unsubtle jab at the Bush administration, whose secretary of state sometimes seems to operate only at the grand-strategic level.

I asked Edwards how he’d gone from an undergraduate degree in textile design (I believe) to a career in the law, and how that would inform his presidency. He answered that his father had been a mill worker, so that was one factor; but he’d also been concerned with being able to make a living once he got out of college, which ruled out a liberal-arts degree. (This got some polite chuckles.) Edwards insisted that he’d always wanted to be a lawyer, and thus his textile degree was a pragmatic move to be able to have an income until he could get into law school.

He then connected this remark with the second part of my question, saying that his career helping defend (mostly) little guys had given him empathy with them, and that this would influence an Edwards presidency.

It’s hard to overstate how focused Edwards is in answering this and other questions. He simply never takes his eyes off whoever asks him a question unless it is briefly, for the dramatic effect of including the rest of the audience in his reply. This makes him a potentially superb one-on-one campaigner—a crucial quality as the money primary continues and Edwards has to grip and grin with ever-increasing numbers of donors.