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Defense and Foreign Policy
More Unwelcome Big-Think from Donald Kerr
Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, created a stir last year when he opined about “privacy” in a way that redefined the concept as congenially to the intelligence community as possible.
I put it this way in a critique at the time:
“If you’ve identified yourself to your ISP,” he appears to think, “you’ve identified yourself to me.” The folks in his world may think that way, but that’s not the way the rest of us look at it, and it’s not consistent with a sound interpretation of the Fourth Amendment or life in a free society.
Now he’s back at it with “cybersecurity.”
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports on two recent Kerr speeches that have “called for a radical new relationship between government and the private sector” in this area:
One approach would have the government take equity stakes in companies developing technical products, in effect expanding the practice of In-Q-Tel, the CIA entity that invests in companies.
Another proposal is to provide the same protective capabilities applied to government Web sites, ending in .gov and .mil, to the private industry’s sites, ending in .com, which Kerr said have close to 98 percent of the nation’s most important information.
* * *
“We have a responsibility … to help those companies that we take an equity stake in or those that are just out there in the U.S. economy, to protect the most valuable assets they have, their ideas and the people who create them,” he said.
The government-ownership-of-private-assets train is rolling out of the station and Kerr wants his agency to be on board. But he’s wrong. It’s the responsibility of private owners to secure their assets.
This is big-think we do not need. Just like with his contortion of “privacy,” Kerr would upend the roles and responsibilities of government and the private sector by giving government an ownership stake, for “cybersecurity” reasons or any other.
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State-Building vs. Counterinsurgency
In the National Interest (online), Amitai Etzioni argues that, in Afghanistan, the United States should avoid building out the central state, and instead co-opt militia leaders, including the Taliban.
Amen. Americans, even those writing counterinsurgency manuals, conflate counterinsurgency and state-building.
Both presidential candidates’ plans for Afghanistan share this failing. They both support a surge of troops and effort in Afghanistan based explicitly on the idea that our objective should be to build the Afghan state to win the loyalty of the people in the insurgent, meaning Pashtun, areas.
A better plan is a rough replication of what we did in Iraq’s Anbar province. There, we paid off the main body of insurgents and allowed them to rule in their area, provided that they turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Don’t believe the myth of the surge. This tactic, which pre-dated General David Petraeus’ assumption of command and had nothing to do with higher troop levels, was the main cause of the pacification of Iraq’s Sunni regions.
You could call this counterinsurgency strategy “appeasement” or “state-breaking,” as opposed to state-building. Having bought peace by dividing authority, there is no obvious way to put Humpty Dumpty back together — the dilemma we now face in Iraq. But if (a big if in Iraq) the division of power is remotely stable, that is not necessarily a problem, at least from a US perspective. You prioritize; sacrificing cohesive central authority for counterterrorism and rough stability.
This strategy stems from the idea that the trouble is the central state itself. You limit its sphere and leave the insurgency, essentially an alternative state, to its. Doing so is only possible where the insurgency has limited geographic orbit and ambitions — a common condition in divided societies with weak governments. Saddam Hussein himself employed this tactic late in his rule, as Austin Long explains in Survival.
In Afghanistan, where power has always been decentralized, the state-breaking strategy has more obvious merit than Iraq. Extending central governance is to undertake a struggle of indeterminate length, which is likely to fail at tremendous expense, while feeding the insurgency by antagonizing the Pashtun population. As Nir Rosen’s informative Rolling Stone article points out, the Afghan state reaches many Afghans not through the provision of services but via predatory national police. Our effort in Afghanistan, with its limited ambitions and reliance on local powers, has always had an element of this strategy, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. But Washington’s embrace of the idea that we have neglected state-building in Afghanistan in favor of Iraq threatens to change this.
Our enemy in Afghanistan is really three insurgencies, and even the main body of the Taliban is really a loose-knit group of militias. Summit-style meetings with purported Taliban leaders will not do the trick. Deals with Taliban commanders will be incremental.
Sooner or later, the United States needs to leave Afghanistan. The idea that we can only do so once it is a centralized, peaceful country that collects taxes and provides services throughout its territory is a recipe for staying forever. We invaded Afghanistan to deny anti-American terrorists haven and deter anyone from offering it. We can maintain those conditions without a strong central goverment, and therefore without a perpetual occupation, if we do something like what Etzioni suggests.
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The American Way of War
On TPM Cafe, a part of the Talking Points Memo media empire, I’m in a week-long discussion of a new book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril, which oddly takes the title of the Russell Weigley classic without acknowledgement.
The other participants are the author, Eugene Jarecki, who directed Why We Fight, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, Andrew Bacevich, the Boston University professor, Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, and Naomi Wolf. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is supposed to show up, but hasn’t yet.
I can’t recommend that you read the book, but I do recommend the discussion, especially if you’re interested in military-industrial complexes.
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If You Don’t Think You Should Be Searched on the Subway
The good folks at the Flex Your Rights Foundation have produced a Citizen’s Guide to Refusing DC Metro Searches.
A timely response to news that there would be random searches, which is poor counterterrorism.
A Welcome Change
The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports:
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has taken steps to make it easier for U.S. intelligence agencies to recruit first-generation Americans with foreign relatives.
The story, first broken by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, is likely to be overlooked given the focus on the campaign and on the financial markets, and might seem an obscure policy change given the high-profile national security challenges that our intelligence professionals and military personnel confront every day.
In fact, it is a crucial step toward leveraging our unique strengths as a nation. America’s openness is often seen as a vulnerability, but it should be seen instead as a sign of our vitality. The desire of millions of non-Americans to come to the United States and try to make a better life for their families remains strong, despite our recent troubles. To deny first-generation Americans the opportunities enjoyed by other Americans on the dubious grounds that they pose a unique security risk makes no more sense than any other form of blanket profiling. After all, we didn’t kick Lutherans of mixed Danish-Polish and German descent out of the FBI after Robert Hansen’s treason was discovered.
First-generation Americans, or Americans with other extensive foreign contacts (spouses, close friends, study abroad), are likely to have native or near-native proficiency in languages other than English that are in desperately short supply in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The hurdles for these citizens were never insurmountable; many ultimately do obtain needed security clearances. In his award-winning book The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright profiled one of them: Ali Soufan, a Lebanese-American FBI agent, the only Arabic speaker in the New York office at the time of the USS Cole bombing, and one of only eight Arabic speakers in the entire agency.
But notwithstanding men like Soufan, the laborious and time-consuming process associated with obtaining a security clearance, and the prevailing presumption against such persons, doubtless discourages many well-intentioned people from even trying to obtain a job in law enforcement or intelligence. Here’s hoping that this change helps to open the doors to qualified men and women who are every bit as patriotic as Americans whose families have been here for generations.
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Random Searches = Poor Counterterrorism
terrorism [ter-uh-riz-uhm]
- noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
So, one would think that countering terrorism would involve resisting coercion by resisting fear and submission.
That’s not the case in Washington, D.C., where Metro officials plan to start random searches of travelers’ bags. Not because of any specific threat, but because “Americans everywhere are at some risk from terrorism.”
Let’s get something out of the way first: Random searches do not provide security against terrorist acts. If it comes to it, a bomber can inspire fear just as well by exploding a checkpoint as he can by bombing any other part of the Metro system. Other kinds of attacks can be snuck past random checks or even comprehensive checks. Random searches are security theater, designed to make it seem like something protective is being done when it’s not.
What random searches do is reward past acts of terrorism by demonstrating that they have successfully cowed our society, made it fearful, and subject to coercion. This will tend to encourage future acts of terrorism. Seven years later, the 9/11 attacks are still paying dividends.
Searching at random in the Metro system plays into the terrorism strategy. Metro officials mean well, there can be no doubt, but they’re patsies to terrorism.