Making Political Predictions Is Harder Than Weather Forecasting

The Obama White House and the Republican House can agree on one thing: Our intelligence community failed to predict in acceptable detail the unfolding of political events in Tunisia and Egypt.  Both usually hostile parties also have agreed that each fears a repeat of the perceived "failure" with respect to other Mideastern countries such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan.

As usual, consumers of intelligence seem to think that there is a direct, linear relation between money appropriated for the collection, processing, and dissemination of intelligence and the quality of the final product.  There is a general belief that the vast amount of money spent on the US intelligence community should bring a result of unmatched accuracy and timeliness.  If the real world were only that easy, if the mythic relation between bucks and product actually existed, no one would be happier than the spooks.  Their lives would be so much easier and the rewards so much greater.

The problem comes in that the Mideast has been lurching along the ragged edge of political catastrophe every day for years now.  The basic problems--the absence of faith in the future, the alienation of a large "youth bulge," the existence of illegitimate, ineffectively repressive authoritarian regimes--all have been around for years, even decades.  Along the way, any number of sparks as compelling as the self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor have come and gone without consequence.

What was the difference this time?

Any number of had hoc working groups will or have been convened throughout the intelligence community to consider just that.  Different answers will come back and be fed up the chain of command.  Strong recommendations to follow the social networks more closely will undoubtedly top the list.  Special studies will be commissioned on relevant topics such as the percentage of internet competent youth, the number of citizens in country "X" or "Y" who belong to which social network.  What topics are trending in which direction.  All the usual suspects will be monitored closely.

And, who knows, maybe something useful will come from all the effort.

However intense and broad the after action effort might be, there will be some key factors which cannot be nailed down, cannot be put into a new, improved analytical protocol.  Highest on the list of these is the matter of political will.

What factors, for example, fed into Ben Ali's apparently snap decision to cash in his chips?  Did the choice rest with him alone?  Or was it due to the stance taken by the Tunisian Chief of Staff against allowing the army to be used as the Giant Foot squashing the unrest?  If it was the latter, what were the inputs to his decision?

In Egypt, what forces are at work in the minds of the armed forces supreme command?  To what extent are the assorted generals and field marshals operating in the context of the Young Officers' coup of 1952?  To what extent are they motivated by the sense of the armed forces as the ultimate repository of Egyptian sovereignty?  To what extent are they focused upon the threat presented by the Muslim Brotherhood?  Or, to what extent do they fear the potential unreliability of their own troops if these are ordered into robust action against the demonstrators, which now include the Muslim Brotherhood?

Then, of course, there are the imponderables of personal relationships.  No new effort at collection, no new approach to analysis can or will penetrate the mysteries of the personal.  The web tying Mubarak and the other senior officers of the military together are highly personal, long standing, and quite probably immune to rational understanding.

The same applies to an  even greater extent with the processes at work in the mind of Mubarak himself.  There is no way of knowing in advance when or even if he will hit a personal tipping point, a point where retirement with a couple of billion dollars in hand is an opportunity he is no longer willing to refuse.

We know now--but not at the time--that Ben Ali got on the plane out of Tunisia only with the utmost of regret and only at the whip of his banshee wife's tongue.  The same unknown, perhaps it is an unknowable unknown, applies to Mubarak  When or will he bow to the pressure and surrender power to the military?  No intelligence agency will be able to answer that question other than retrospectively.

No president likes it.  No politician either.  But, the reality is that the world is not predictable in detail.  This governing ground truth has become more potent with the growth of emergent systems, non-linear self-organizing collections of the disaffiliated, the disaffected, the disenchanted.  The capacities of self-organizing systems, self-organizing groups, have been magnified greatly by the explosive development of horizontal communications methods including but not limited to the social networks.

This implies it will be harder for intelligence agencies dealing with inherently orderly but highly unstable political and social systems such as those in Egypt to get ahead of the wave when some event goes viral.  An event which once would have rolled by unnoticed will have the ever greater potential to become the cliched firebell in the dark.  The difficulty will be that of identifying the one critical event among a host of other, seemingly just as compelling ones, which serves as the trigger, which launches the wave.

To maintain that such an identification will be almost impossible is not to admit defeat but rather to accept reality.  It implies that either decision makers must accept a world of teeming false positives or resign themselves to being caught by apparent surprise.  A second implication is that analysts must be willing to run more professional risks by either pointing a finger at an event which proves not be the dread trigger--or, as the alternative, be willing to admit the trigger event which went by unhighlighted.

In short, these are not happy times to work in the intelligence racket.  Even compared to a few years back, the world has become not so much more unstable as it has grown more volatile.  The volatility of self-organizing groups empowered by horizontal communication systems is with us to stay.  It will not admit of mastery by intelligence agencies soon if ever.