The Slope Steepens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?