Stability Is Messy

Such is freedom, or so Donald Rumsfeld (in)famously observed apropos the looting of the Baghdad antiquities museum in the wake of the American "liberation."  History shows that the messiness of freedom leads over time to the inherently messy condition of long-term social and political stability in any country.

So, Geek, what brings this sudden fascination with messy stability?

Well, bucko, last week some yob holding forth in the op-ed pages of the WaPo lamented on how the US never, but never, "gets revolutions right."  (Sorry, the Geek knows that the link is supposed to go here, but he inadvertently dropped the bloody thing down the always open memory hole in his electronic universe.)

The deep thinking analyst, having apparently forgotten how the US was on the mythical right side of history with the "people power" overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines a couple of decades back, launched into the customary laundry list of liberal reasons why US administrations are more averse to political change in authoritarian regimes than a vampire is to holy water.  Most of the motives pulled out for our edification read like a compendium from Sins Of The Satiated Power.

(Alright, to be fair, the other day the Gargantuan Mouth of the Right, a fellow named Limbaugh, argued--well, that term may be applied at least generically--in favor of keeping tight with Hosni for all the reasons relevant to a satiated power.  So, the honors of non-perceptive appreciation of the nature of the relations between the US and authoritarian regimes reaching the end of their days, is evenly divided between Left and Right.)

There is a very simple, quite easy to understand and well nigh onto universal reason the US not only ties itself all-too-closely to obnoxious authoritarian regimes but keeps the connection long after it has become evident that the days of the dictator are ending.  The reason is confusion.

Say, what!  Confusion?  That doesn't seem to be a real reason, Geek.

But, bucko, it is.  The confusion involved here is not the simple type like mistaking right for left or night for day.  Rather it is one of time.  The US government--and many others for that matter--confuse the appearance of short-term order with the substance of long-term stability.

Stability--or its less effective second cousin, order--is essential in the conduct of international politics.  Admittedly stability and thus predictability is central to reducing the risks of life, personal, business or political but in the arena of global politics particularly from the perspective of a great power, it is the single most essential component of the context in which policy can be formed and executed with some measure of predictability.  The alternative to stability (or the diminuendo form, order) in international affairs is anarchy.

Our history of chumming up with dictators in the post-World War II decades was propelled by the imperatives of the Cold War but was not linked exclusively to the bipolar dynamics.  It was not sufficient for the dictator seeking US support to be anti-Communist, the successful candidate for American backing also had to show he could maintain order domestically.  From the perspective of Washington, the maintainance of political and social order at home was the overarching requirement.

Documents by the ton underscore the preoccupation with order.  And the blind confusion of order in the short haul with substantial stability over the sweep of years, decades, generations litter the archives of administrations from both parties.  The fear of disorder with unpredictable consequences is palpable.  Perhaps it was this fear or maybe it was the natural and expectable result of American administrations having only short term orientations, but there is no distinction made between the appearance of quotidian order and the existence of underlying, pervasive stability.

That confusion resides at the center of of the American dilemmas when faced with the crumbling of a dictatorship to which the US had provided much and from which the US had derived real benefits.  The confusion between order and stability also says much as to why the US has been so quick to link-up with authoritarian regimes even in the years since the Cold War ended.

Short term order is easy to supply.  It is easiest in an authoritarian context.  After all, as Rummy noted, "Freedom is messy."  Insofar as freedom can be instrumentally curtailed, order can be enhanced.  Not surprisingly dictators are good in the suppress and curtail game.  Equally unsurprisingly, much of the aid provided by the US to its authoritarian clients is oriented toward order imposition.

The historical record demonstrates conclusively that no authoritarian regime has been able to be sufficiently repressive in perpetuity.  This has meant and continues to mean the shelf life of a dictatorship is limited regardless of the amount of external support it receives.  With the explosive growth of horizontal communications mechanisms which serve to enhance the potency of self-organizing political groups, it is to be expected that the shelf life will get ever shorter.

Long term stability is a critter of a very different sort.  Stability does not rely upon coercion, upon repression, upon the imposition of limits.  Quite the opposite.  Stability arises over long periods of time as an organic consequence of increasing perceptions of inherent legitimacy within a population.  The single most important thing to keep in mind regarding stability is the brute fact that stability develops slowly, in fits and starts over time, much time, decades at least and more often generations.  Along with this truth it is essential to get a grip on a companion one: Stability is never completely achieved; it is always a work in progress.

This implies, no, it means that stability, like the freedom which produces it, is messy.  Sometimes, very messy. Arguably the core of stability is its messiness.  Like any construction work in progress, stability is never neat, tidy and, paradoxically, evidently orderly.

We Americans and, evidently, our European counterparts tend to forget (that is if they ever truly realized) just how long the process of achieving stability through perceived legitimacy has been.  In the US it has come about in its current incomplete form only after centuries of political brouhahas of a robust nature such as to make today's alleged climate of incivility seem to be a Christian Matrons Social Circle in comparison.  It took, after all, the most bloody war in our history among other things.

Demonstrations, riots, blood in the streets, dead bodies littering landscapes both urban and rural constitute the milestones along the route to today's political and social stability here in the US.  In Europe the process has been even longer, even bloodier, even more riven with the messiness of internal rivalries, but the result has been similar--a general perception that political, economic, and social systems are legitimate, deserving of basic support even when profound differences exist over the details.

Freedom links legitimacy with stability.  It is the unbreakable bond which allows for unity in the face of passionately held differences of view and opinion.  Since all three necessary components are messy, it is to be expected that the most stable societies and polities, the ones where perceptions of legitimacy are most widely spread and universally accepted are the ones in which disorder can show its seemingly ugly head most often.

When US policy makers fail to understand this, which is most of the time, the unfortunate default position is to back the authority who best promises order.  Policy makers want desperately to believe that as long as the streets are quiet, stability is abroad in the land.  The unwillingness to accept the iron dictate that stability emerges only over time and only as the result of freedom's messiness has condemned our policy to the recurrent failure of trying to keep a dictator in place.

In more recent decades our policy makers (and the Geek would hazard their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere) have tried to square the circle by attempting to nudge dictators in the direction of transforming short term order into long term stability.  This is evident in our emphasis on human rights among other gambits.  This well-intentioned approach is, of course, doomed to fail.  The development of stability demands freedom. Freedom exists only in the absence of effective repression.  And, as soon as the repression slacks even marginally, the pressures released are too great to be resisted without a very bloody, extremely harsh renewal of repression.

There is no way that an authoritarian regime can shift from short term order maintenance to long term stability enhancement.  Or, to err on the side of accuracy, the record of history is bereft of examples of such having occurred successfully.  Not even the Trolls of Beijing have done the trick, nor is there any indication that they will be able to do so.

The implications of the critical distinction between order and stability for US policy makers are manifold.  The most important of these is the simplest to state and hardest to put into practice.  At the policy level the assorted Deep Thinkers have to get a grip on the essential truth regarding the primal forces at work--stability depends on perceived legitimacy, which in turn demands freedom, and, it takes time to arise organically.

Stability can not be rushed.  Neither can it be imposed.  It cannot be called into existence by command or instituted by fiat.  Stability is never achieved with finality but always remains a work in progress.  Stability is never pretty, never orderly, never neat and tidy.

Stability, again like the freedom which produces it, is not predicable in its consequences.  This is another reason why the business suited folks sitting around high gloss conference tables in well appointed surroundings in the White House or Foggy Bottom are not overly fond of the beast.  To be real, to be the organic product of consensually defined perceived legitimacy, stability must express itself in boisterous, robust, passionate disagreements as to the details of social, economic, and political organization and systems.  Stability demands emotion, rests on disagreement, calls for sweat, tears, and, on occasion, blood.  The results of stability cannot be predicted with accuracy.

In comparison, the order provided by an authoritarian regime is, well, so, orderly.  The dictator can produce predictable results--until the last days come, that is.  The dictator is a single actor, easy to understand, manipulatable, predictable.  He is everything genuine stability is not.

The fact that the dictator and the order he presents is everything stability is not is also the reason the dictator must go.  And, the reason he will go.  In the contest between imposed order and organic stability, the latter will always, eventually, win out.  That is the lesson of history.

Are they aware of this in Tehran?  One can only wonder.

Tis The Season To Be---

Thinking about religion. Not theology or doctrine or liturgy or even the favorite of skeptics, plausibility but rather the ways in which religions become the foundation of political acts.

The Geek has posted often about the nature of Islamism, his shorthand term for politically oriented Islamic groups and individual Muslims. He has also posted frequently on jihadism which is the armed and violent progeny of Islamism.

Overall, in so far as a single goal unites all the Islamist and Islamist jihadist groups it is that portion of the Islamic belief system as expressed not only it Islam's sacred writings but in the vast and ancient corpus of Islamic jurisprudence which calls for constant struggle to both protect the Muslim community of faith and expand that community until it incorporates the entirety of the human race. The "House of War" as non-Muslims are characterized must be confronted and ultimately defeated if the age of perfect peace, harmony and justice for all people everywhere is to be achieved.

The longing for social, economic and political harmony, an absence of turbulence and a presence of community solidarity is deeply rooted in the human mind. It is a longing that is addressed by religions generally--as well as by assorted ideologies which are purely, even militantly secular.

Advocates of a religiously based harmonious and just community, whether it be one which is limited in size or global in nature often point to some allegedly Utopian time and place far in the distant past. The mythic Garden of Eden is such a time and place. So also is the Arabian Peninsula of the Eighth Century for at least a goodly portion of Muslims. And, for some Christians the halcyon time and place was Europe in the centuries between the fall of the Roman Western Empire and the coming of the Enlightenment.

Anti-modernity is the thread which connects Islamists and their Christian counterparts. (Hmm, what to call them? Kierkegaard has already used the term "Christendom" to cover the institutional Church so that one is out. How about "Christianists?" At least that term is equivalent in derivation to the use of the word "Islamist.")

Christianists view the Enlightenment and its aftermath as having destroyed the presumably stable, allegedly communitarian, and putatively harmonious later Middle Ages. In the estimate of Christianists such as those who founded and operate the Discovery Institute and its many ancillaries, the Enlightenment brought in its wake a dissolution of morals, a rampant materialism and a degenerate focus on the individual. In the estimate of these folks and others of like mind the consequences of the Enlightenment regardless of any progress in technological and scientific matters has been destructive overall of both the human community and the human spirit.

It seems that Christianists take as their paradigm for a more perfect society the Medieval Chain of Being. The well-ordered and of necessity harmonious human social, economic and political structures explicit in the Chain of Being with its hierarchical placement of all people, creatures and things from the deity down to the rocks and hills constitutes the ultimate touchstone. In a way which is nearly identical the Islamist sees the life of Mohammad, the Perfect Man, and the society which surrounded him over a millennium ago as being the infallible guide to how life should be lived.

Both the Islamist and the Christianist would agree that individuals and societies which exist in perfect keeping with the divinely appointed strictures would be pleasing to the deity. Each would argue to his listeners that the way to end the unpleasant, discomfiting, disconcerting complexities of life in the present would be by way of invoking the power of the past, the potency resident in either the Great Chain of Being or the life of the Prophet, the Perfect Man and his society.

Both Christianist and Islamist would agree that the evils of the world today have been and are the work of stiff necked people who refuse to submit to the strictures and requirements ordained by the deity. If only these stiff necked and evil doing people would either come to their senses and submit or, in the alternative, be removed, the Utopian past would be restored.

The Geek agrees that life can be very confusing, quite messy, often frustrating, and that it might be nice to call, "Time Out!" every now and then so that changes might be chewed, swallowed, and effectively digested. There is no doubt but that people at all times and places have felt exactly the same.

There is no doubt but that generation after generation, "Those were the good old days." Yep, the Good Old Days when life was simple, orderly; when people were nice to one another, children always polite and respectful; a bygone era when an honest day's work brought an honest day's pay, the customer was always right, the trains (or stagecoach) ran on time; when devout folks met every Sunday at the little church in the valley; a golden hued time when politicians were public servants; an eternal Spring when the ice cream was always made from whole milk and real chocolate. You get the point. The myth of the good old days is as old as the human race.

You also see the corollary, right, bucko? The corollary which reads, "The Good Old Days never were." That one. The one the Christianists and Islamists alike overlook. The corollary upon which their movements will, of necessity, founder.

The Great Chain of Being never really existed. Kings did not bow to Popes--particularly after the nation-state started its long emergence accompanied with such features as armies. Peasants never sweated happily for their "betters" as the numerous pre-Enlightenment revolts demonstrate in all their bloody colors. (Even animals did not walk cheerfully to slaughter back then or now, if the proliferation of wild cows, the escapees from nearby ranches indicates to the Geek whenever he hies himself into the forest seeking firewood.)

Nor is Eighth Century Arabia a halcyon place, a perfect model for life today. In all probability the people of the time periodically bewailed the changes wrought by the Perfect Man--particularly when the inevitable power struggles for succession reared their bloody heads.

A Utiopianized historical period is a pathetic guide for a dynamic life. And, make no mistake about it--human life is dynamic in nature. It must be. The alternative is stultification, decay and ultimately, death.

The underlying dilemma facing all of us is the tension between the need for a dynamic of constant change less we stultify and die and the need for a secure, harmonious social, economic, and political life along with the appearance of security those features provide. With the coming of the myriad events lumped under the names, "Renaissance," "Reformation" and "Enlightenment," the people and states of Europe and North America took one direction--the road sign reading "dynamic." Other peoples, other states, which for whatsoever reason did not partake of the type of events subsumed under these three terms took another direction, the direction of stasis, decay and ultimately a form of national death.

The people at the Discovery Institute who seek to put the genie of the Enlightenment back into the bottle from which it sprang by denying Darwin, denouncing Wallace, pretending contemporary geology and cosmology do not exist are engaging in a labor of Sisyphus. Like that mythic figure, the rock will always roll back upon them. The most extreme Christianists, the men of Christian Dominionism (this merry bunch is Taliban with a Bible, al-Shabaab with a Cross) are doomed to even more ignominious failure.

Ultimately, so also are the Islamists, particularly those of the jihad. As events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even Somalia have shown, people may find the back-to-the-past-as-the-future attractive in the abstract but they find it most distasteful in practice. Christians found the limits of theocratic rule centuries ago in Calvin's Geneva experiment or the pale imitation in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Christianism, Islamism, like Facism and even Marxism-Leninism can exist only if all features of human creativity are well and truly suppressed. Such repression, totally effective repression, can only exist for short periods and then only at the cost of all innovation, all invention, all discovery, all genuine progress. Progress can come in any field only by a dynamic of creativity. And, all creativity in any field comes only with concomitant destruction of the old.

We are divided in our own minds as to which is more important: security or freedom. We are internally torn over whether dynamic change should have priority or should pride of place go to stability, harmony and consequently lowered risk, increased predictability and certainty.

While the chasm may exist in the psyches of each of us, the answers have already been entered on the pages of history. You can read them by comparing the past five hundred years history of Europe and of the Muslim societies.

Any questions?

The Proof Is In The Plots

As has been the case through human history, today's confrontation between the American and other governments and the Islamist jihadists of the world is a battle between central authority and self-organizing groups. In this contest, the advantage, or at least the initiative, rests with the self-organizing entities.

Less abstractly, the recent Islamist jihadist terror plots show that the enemy is not, as Joe Biden and President Obama would have it, simply al-Qaeda. Nor is the enemy solely the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan, important as those areas are as places of training and indoctrination.

The enemy facing the US, and much of the rest of the world as well, is Islamist jihadism. The enemy is intangible but real. It is, at root an idea. But, ideas must exist first if action is to come later.

There have been a few attempts to link the individuals arrested in New York, Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and North Carolina by means of socio-economic speculations. People excluded from the American dream according to one CNN "expert" yesterday serves as one example of the species.

While the Jordanian illegal alien arrested in Texas and the American prison convert to Islam popped in the second of two sting operations might fairly be seen as marginal members of American life and society, the same cannot be written of the men arrested in Colorado and New York. It is beyond the realm of fact to claim the North Carolina men arrested last month were among the wretched of the Earth.

As has been argued so many times, by so many people, in so many fora, the socio-economic explanations for adherence to the ideas behind Islamist jihadism simply do not work. They do not accurately nor completely address the skein of motivations behind the wannabe martyr.

The only thing in common, the only bind between the men arrested in the US over the past month, is True Belief in one particular interpretation of Islam. This is also the only thing held in common by the Islamist jihadists of 9/11, of 7/7, of Madrid, of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Shaabab in Somalia, the assorted terror groups in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere around the world.

Islamist jihadism is the idea around which individuals and groups organize. It is the central, the critical axis without which the terror could not, would not exist.

It is important to understand that the terror tactics employed by Islamist jihadists are rooted in soil fundamentally unlike that which has given rise to previous practitioners of the dark arts of terror. Whether the anarchists of a century and more ago or the more recent traditional terrorists of the assorted Palestinian entities such as Fatah, the motivation was purely political, and the goal was the removal of a particular regime or set of regimes.

Classic terror groups were quite secular.

Classic terror groups self-organized around a specific political ideology and pursued a specific political goal. Even the anarchists who walked a very bloody path for a couple of decades had a particular goal in mind: the removal of governments. Other groups best typified by those which organized in the wake of the Six Day War had a very limited (if equally impossible) goal: the ejection of Israel from the occupied territories.

At the beginning, even al-Qaeda was more secular than religious in its stated goals. Taking Osama bin Laden at his word, the goals of al-Qaeda in the mid-Nineties were limited to the ejection of the US from the Land of the Two Mosques, ending US support for Israel, and ending the "apostate" rule of Saudi Arabia. Religion per se played only a supporting role in the early days of bin Laden's war against the US and its "puppets" in the Mideast.

These rather abstract goals were mighty thin gruel on which to nourish an organization which called upon its adherents to die. As the months and then the years went by, the religious focus of the al-Qaeda message went front and center. No longer were the goals confined to the merely political, the mundanely secular.

Now the name of the game was Furthering The True Faith. No longer was it sufficient that the US take its forces out of Saudi Arabia or even toss Israel to the Arab wolves. Now it was necessary for the US and all those who lived there to sincerely repent, and, (drum roll, please) convert to Islam. The American eagle must exalt the One True Faith.

The putting of Islam at the center of the message allowed further self-organizing even when al-Qaeda was reduced to fugitive status seeking shelter in the FATA. Being a totalistic belief system in which there can be no distinction between faith and politics, faith and the individual, faith and the community, Islam lends itself quite well to the needs of an incomplete personality.

Putting it simply, an incomplete personality is one which has no sound, well-defined sense of personal identity. The incomplete personality seeks completion, seeks the establishment of a powerful sense of personal identity in some idea existing outside himself. Islam, particularly that of the Wahhibist or Salifist sort, is particularly attractive to the incomplete personality as it promises a degree of certitude, a sense of completion, and a totality of identity that cannot be equaled by any other belief or ideology.

Beneath the surface differences, the men arrested in the US over the past month have something very basic in common not only with each other but with the Islamist jihadists everywhere. They are incomplete personalities who discovered a compelling and fulfilling sense of personal identity and worth through becoming True Believers. True Believers in not simply Islam, but that particularly demanding form of Islam--Islamist jihadism.

None of these men needed to be recruited let alone directed by some central authority. They did not need to shake hands with a recruiter for al-Qaeda. They needed only exposure to the ideas comprising Islamist jihadism.

The same is true of the Islamist jihadist groups which jointly are dubbed "Taliban." It has been well understood for some time that there was no single, monolithic entity behind the name but rather an assemblage of groups having different goals in detail, following different local leaders, pursuing different tactics, but all united by the belief in Islamist jihadism.

Only the idea is necessary to create the appearance of joint action by many controlled by a central authority. We need to get a grip on a couple of ground truths here.

The first is that Islam in and of itself, common, everyday Islam has a very real power for many people around the world. It gives a sense of community, a feeling of belonging to something far larger than the mere individual which is not surpassed by any other religion and equaled by few. The totalistic nature of Islam assures that people know their roles in life and are comfortable with that knowledge. It's emphasis on justice (at least rhetorically) reassures those who see themselves as the victims of injustice.

Islamist jihadism adds to this powerful mix a message of self-sacrifice for the greatest of Great Causes--the defense and advancement of Islam. It also promises eternal reward for that sacrifice which is no small matter given the fear of eternal hell which is so much a part of Islam's preaching.

Humanity has long been marked by a willingness, even eagerness, on the part of individuals to die in the service of a great, compelling, and totalistic idea. Islamist jihadism simply continues the pattern with a particular focus on dieing in the process of killing the enemies of Islam.

The pervasiveness and power of the ideas constituting Islamist jihadism render the existence of a central command and control authority both unnecessary, and, arguably, undesirable. The ideas of Islamist jihadism are both quite powerful and highly personal. They provide for ready volunteers but not sheep commanded to the slaughter. Each jihadi makes his own decision, keeps his own council, joins associates as a purely volitional action. He does not need a commander. At most he needs only a local leader. More generally he needs only a symbol.

Osama bin Laden is such a symbol. That is and has been his only role for years now. Even if he were to be killed or, worse, captured, his value as a symbol would not be decreased. It would only be enhanced. This is why specifically targeting him is conterproductive: When we place value on the symbol it benefits only the symbol.

The power of the ideas underlying the term Islamist jihadism has been shown with undeniable drama since they emerged from the shadows of Islam a couple of decades ago. These ideas are not either countered or destroyed easily.

This means the self-organizing Islamist jihadist group or adherent is particularly difficult to defeat. Each one must be neutralized in a retail way. And, for each neutralized, at least in the short- to mid-term, others will emerge.

Only persistence of the most extreme sort will do the job. However, persistence alone is not enough. The US and other governments must learn and acknowledge as must We the People that ideas, even ones such as those underlying Islamist jihadism which are repugnant to us, are possessed of a terrific amount of power and appeal.

Islamist jihadism and its violent excrescences will be with us a long, very long time. Not until their appeal is so undercut by failure that they disappear on their own will we be rid of the incomplete personality who seeks True Belief driven completion by dropping a skyscraper, destroying a subway, or flying an airliner into the side of a building.

Hey! Who ever said life would be a pleasant walk in the sunshine of a forever Spring.

(Illegal) Drugs And Insurgency

Hang on, bucko, the Geek is not going to do a replay of all the bloviation on the relation between the opium trade in Afghanistan and Taliban's financial base. Nor is he going to blather on about how FARC is really a narco-trafficking protection racketeer or the similar joining of the renewed Shining Path and the cocaine trade in Peru.

No, siree. Not a chance. Been there; done that.

Today, kids, the focus is on the identity of dynamics between the emergence and development of drug distribution networks and that of insurgent groups and the movements which arise from these. The point of commonality between these two disparate, equally illegal, types of entity is that both are self-organizing, dynamically stable, and far more inherently flexible and adaptive than the social, political, and legal structures which seek to confront and defeat them.

The Geek first noticed the commonalities when he came back to the world after a fun filled multi-year tour in a far away country experiencing armed political turbulence. He had the chance to live for some time in a small city in southern New Mexico which was not only convenient to the international border but possessed a moderately large university with a diverse student body including a number of people from Mideast countries.

As was (and is) so often the case, New Mexico lagged behind the rest of the country in social trends. The Summer of Love had long since come and gone. The "Hashbury" out in San Francisco was overrun by Gray Line buses filled with camera toting tourists, and the hippies had departed for other pastures of plenty. Only then when even Fargo, ND had experienced an influx of drug use did the town where the Geek temporarily lived find the joys of LSD, pot, hash, and other such substances.

Where a demand exists, a supply will surely follow. Adam Smith's "hidden hand" exists to assure that. The Geek watched as the HH went to work.

Several distribution networks emerged in the Fall and Winter of 1968. Of the "big five", three developed among locals, two of these were of middle class Anglo nature with one forming in the Mexican-American contingent. The other two emerged from out-of-state students at the university.

Importantly, all of the "big five" self-organized within social groups comprising people who either had or wished to have psychedelic experiences. The first stage of self-organizing was simply the sharing of stashes and expressing a desire for more of whatever, usually pot, 'shroom, LSD, or, less frequently, speed.

Within each group--groups which were united primarily by a taste for drug use and place of primary residence and little else--one or more individuals showed themselves willing to acquire more for the benefit of the group. It was really rather like the tune done by New Riders of the Purple Sage--the one where Henry goes down south of the border to meet the man "who has it growing from the ground."

After the preliminary couple of trips down south or out to Los Angeles, the intrepid specialists in procurement self-organized into a loosely coordinated "importers association." This allowed for both economies of scale and specialization in procurement. For example, one person ran the speed connection out of LA. Another was oriented toward the acquisition of hash from North Africa coming through Lebanon. Yet others worked the rat line into the interior of Mexico for both weed and 'shroom. Yet another couple of individuals had firm contacts for acid made in labs both in Arizona and California. (For the sake of being complete, peyote was available locally. All one had to do was go out in the desert southwest of the valley and take a look--and harvest.)

The import association assured there was little chance of the "whole town is dry." It also made certain that profits were equitable and greed was restrained for mutual advantage.

Importantly there were no guns involved. (OK, one dude liked to go around strapped, because he had a real macho thing, but his piece was always unloaded.) Neither was there any aggressive marketing. No one hung around the local high schools or middle schools saying, "the first one is free. Heh, Heh. Prices on the street were low, lower than in larger cities such as Albuquerque, Tucson, or El Paso.

The reason for the low prices was quite simply the lack of risk. The movers and shakers of this town had no clue that there was an emergent system in their midst. The low profile, self-organizing nature of the drug distribution network coupled with the absence of violence or spikes in crimes against property as well as the lack of aggressive marketing assured that the emergent system flew below the local radar.

Law enforcement had no priority on counter-drug efforts. The city, for example, had but one drug cop. This man was unambitious and liked to sit in his unmarked car eating Cracker Jacks to an extent that the back seat was so overflowing with the empties that it would have been impossible to put a prisoner in it. Anyway, everyone knew who he was, where he was, and saw no reason to worry.

After a year of development, the multi-group, two tiered network was well developed. Everyone involved seemed quite happy with the arrangement. Well, they went around with quiet, knowing, and pleased smiles on their faces. It looked as if a satisfactory stasis had been achieved.

To the Geek it was all quite similar to the opening phases of the multi-stage process by which latent political discontent slowly evolved toward a political movement with vague goals and hazy leadership. In the area of political discontent and the progress of self-organization toward insurgency, the initiative always rests with the status quo. The Geek suspected it was the same in the evolution of drug distribution networks.

So events of Spring 1969 proved. The precipitating incident was small, even trivial. The results were totally non-linear. That is the output was disproportionate and unpredictable on the basis of the input.

The precipitating event was the discovery by a parent of some pot in the possession of her high school age son. The kid had taken some from the stash of his elder sister as he admitted to dear old mom.

Mom was an activist in the local Democratic Party. She went to a man who was not only a state senator but the president of the biggest bank in town and a genuine heavy hitter in state Democratic circles.

This man saw an opportunity. And he took it. The banker was one of those people who wondered often, loudly, and boorishly about "what the hell is wrong with the kids these days?" Tossing his considerable political weight around, the banker forced the formation of a multi-agency task force to end the drug menace in the county.

The country sheriff as well as the county district attorney was a man with lofty political ambitions. Both had watched enough TV to know that an anti-drug crusade would be beaucoup important to their futures. So they joined the banker with a will, a whoop, and a holler.

Because the banker was head of the relevant Senate committee, the state police joined the effort. Not to be outdone and suspecting an "international" connection, both the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (as DEA was known back then) and the Border Patrol/ Customs joined the wolf pack.

In no time at all an inter-agency task group deployed a flood of undercover officers and sought to recruit informers by the bus load. The banker was pleased. His efforts had created a coalition of city, country, state, and federal lawmen which had a total roster of over sixty sworn personnel and, ultimately, over seventy-five informants. The law enforcers outnumbered the aggregate import association and local dealer assemblage by nearly ten to one.

The high point of the state's reaction to the self-organizing system was a pre-dawn raid conducted by more than two hundred badge wearing men. Over a dozen (fourteen to be precise) dangerous drug dealers and narco-traffickers were arrested. The front page of the local newspaper was filled with pictures under the screaming end-of-the-world size type headline "Handcuffed and Waiting!"

The status quo's exercise in coercion resulted finally in either acquittal or overturning on appeal of all but two of those arrested. More embarrassing to the status quo was the simple fact that virtually all of those arrested were good products of good homes of a solidly middle class and primarily Democratic families. None were the scourge of humanity criminals TV convinced many were at the root of America's drug crisis.

It deserves mentioning that the state's mis-fired attempt to end the drug "menace" only had an impact on two of the "big five" groups and then only in part. The day after the big raid, those who wished to purchase a no-no substance had no difficulty doing so.

In the years following the Great Drug Bust the nature of the drug distribution networks changed. Prices went up. Aggressive marketing tactics were employed. Turf battles occurred. Opiates and cocaine replaced lower profit items. Guns were carried. And used. The new self-organizing systems became more structured, more hierarchical, more, in a real sense, professional, more businesslike, more Mafia like.

Over the next thirty years or so the Geek spent a fair amount of spare time beavering away in archives, old police records, and other documentary sources to get a handle on whether or not what he had observed in the small New Mexico city was standard. He found out that it was.

Starting in the Fifties and ranging forward in time to the Nineties, the pattern was repeated in town after town, city after city, even those cities with pre-existing criminal syndicates. The pattern was simple.

All drug distribution networks are self-organizing. All start at the bottom and organize upwards. Where law enforcement is lax, prices are low, violence is absent, secondary crime (crime committed to obtain habit maintenance resources) low, aggressive marketing nonexistent, as are turf battles. Enhanced law enforcement measures drive evolution of the networks in the direction of greater structure, more aggressive recruitment of new customers, more violence, and all the the other high profile consequences.

At the same time, the enhanced law enforcement is ineffective because the networks never lose the self-organizing capacity with its inherent flexibility. At bottom, enhanced law enforcement is an evolutionary challenge. The new stresses, the increased risks, drive a process of adaptation in which the initially self-organizing dynamic of the network gives it an advantage so that the law enforcers can never, have never, gained and retained the initiative.

In a race between the ponderous structures of the state and the bottom up, self-organized networks, the latter always have the advantage. Indeed, the record suggest that the networks have such an inherent advantage that while some are caught, some are killed, the network will continue--and expand. The proof of this contention rests in the constant dollar cost of an effective dose of whatever illegal drug. Because of improvements in technology which have resulted in ever increasing potency and purity, the average cost of a user's "effective" dose of drugs as disparate as pot and smack have dropped consistently over time.

It is fair to conclude that the state's attempts at coercion have not only failed, they have been counterproductive. As the price of drugs has dropped and availability increased, the consequences of increased pressures such as greater violence and more aggressive recruitment of new customers have grown. From the perspective of the law enforcers it has been a lose-lose situation--for them.

The Mexican government has been learning this lesson in a particularly bloody way in the past two years. So are others albeit in less sanguinary fashion.

Now, bucko, you might have the question, "What has this got to do with insurgency?"

Well, the Geek suggests that you look in tomorrow or the next day. Thunderstorms make the Geek's postings a bit unpredictable right now.

History Sides With The Insurgents--Usually

Insurgencies, whether defensive (AKA "separatist" movements) or offensive (AKA "revolutions"), appear complex, even chaotic. The reality is far different. While there can be an overlay of complexity caused by the precise local conditions which produced the insurgency, the overwhelming majority of all such wars for which sufficient information is available follow the same basic dynamic.

In the beginning there exists a climate of political disaffiliation within a definite portion of the population. The climate of nascent political disaffiliation and disaffection provides the human broth from which one or more anti-status quo groups self-organize. Almost inevitable the status quo, the government, which controls public space, ignores the self-organizing groups, making no effort to use them to mediate between grievances and government.

Over time, often a very short time, these new groups will coalesce and become structured organizations. Now the government will, indeed, must take notice of them. It is at this point the status quo must make its most critical single choice.

It must decide whether to seek to maintain total authority or accept effective operational dominance. It must choose between repression and some variant of power-sharing, exclusion, or inclusion. The typical response has been to opt for total authority, repression, and exclusion.

At this point the dynamics of the relation between the emergent system (as chaos theory uses the term) of the anti-status quo groups and the government assures two factors exist. The first is that the government and its supporters, having better mechanisms of decision making and execution, will drive the progress along the road to armed conflict. The second is counterintuitive but factual--the anti-status quo groups being self-organizing and emergent have the flexibility necessary not only to counter the status quo's repressive efforts effectively but also to raise the ante.

The status quo government's repressive efforts will ultimately have the effect of consolidating the anti-status quo forces as well as radicalizing them. The proto-insurgents will move to ever more radical positions and extreme demands since advocates of these are generally better organised, more committed, and possess the simple, appealing plan for the future.

Under pressure and with the impetus of tightly organised, totally committed radicals, the anti-status quo group will become ever more structured. It will finally be structured sufficiently to have all the operational features of a quasi-government including the capacity to coerce the unwilling within the population under its influence if not control.

More often than not it will be an ill-considered government action which precipitates armed conflict, but if that does not happen it is only a matter of (short) time before the insurgent entity will. When this happens it is because the insurgent leadership fears a collapse of will within its supporters. Fighting, will, it is believed, restore and enhance political will on the part of the membership.

Insurgent entities, even those with a very highly structured command and control system remain, at root, self-organizing. It is this feature which makes decapitation oriented counter insurgent tactics less than universally effective. The insurgents maintain a fundamental flexibility that all governments (and their "foreign" supporters) lack.

The war once started is not a war which can be won simply by killing people and breaking things. Whether both sides realize it or not, the avenue to victory is the progressive reduction of one side or the other's political will to continue the effort. Much of the effort by both sides must be bent not only to undercutting (more accurately, enervating) the opponent's political will but also to mobilizing support from the uncommitted majority of the population.

The contestant with the greater flexibility and greater ability to assist or facilitate the self-organizing of new support groups will have the greater chance of success. The side which acts coercively so as to compromise its legitimacy in the estimate of the uncommitted majority has the greater chance of defeat.

In most insurgent conflicts the insurgents have the advantage in these areas. The self-organizing and emergent system properties of the insurgents generally allow them to better incorporate an expanding base of support. The status quo with its generally greater reliance on coercion lacks the flexibility and ability to mobilize new support within the uncommitted population. (Of course, there are exceptions as demonstrated by the Islamist insurgents in Iraq.)

The combination of self-organization and fear of the consequences of losing gives the insurgent entity remarkable staying power. Even when the violence seems to have been suppressed effectively (as in the Chechnya and environs a few years ago), the insurgents continue to exist, biding their time, developing their strength, and waiting a better tomorrow.

This means that hostilities termination does not and never has equated with conflict resolution. This results again from the inherent flexibility of the insurgent entity. The insurgent controls the degree to which actual shooting and dying exists. If it is in the longer term interests of the insurgent to go to ground, stop shooting, and focus on population incorporation, it will.

When (and if) the active hostilities, the attention grabbing "war" stops, the problem of genuine conflict resolution continues to exist. The ground truth is that both the anti-status quo people and the status quo aligned people will have to coexist. The degree to which this coexistence is either genuinely peaceful or merely a time out before the noise picks up again is up to the status quo.

The status quo once again faces the same choice it had before the shooting started: inclusion or exclusion. While outside supporters of the status quo may hope for the former, for repression, even obliteration, of the insurgents, the best choice for the status quo is inclusion, power-sharing, the keeping of effective operational dominance.

This option remains a bitter pill to swallow for any government and the elite which aligns with it. The choice is all the more difficult when a powerful external supporting power urges keeping on with the effort to eradicate the insurgents.

Bitter or not, outside pressure or not, the historical record shows that only when the status quo opts for the risky attempt to maintain effective operational dominance is there any actual end to the insurgency. Any other course of action means the insurgency will be back, bigger, badder and better than before.

An even more stark picture emerges from the examination of the several hundred insurgencies the world has seen in the past two hundred fifty years. That picture is of successful insurgencies of both varieties outnumbering failures by better than four to one. This reality is the one upon which American policy makers must take the firmest grip before briskly marching the troops off on yet one more interventionary operation.

It is not that counterinsurgency cannot be successful. It can. The US has some splendid experience in doing just that. (As we have splendid experience at being a successful defensive insurgent.)

Rather, counterinsurgency is the toughest kind of political-military row to hoe. And, that is because the advantages reside with the emergent system called the insurgency.

It's Our Space! Get Out Of It!

A corespondent who is unwilling to post comments has requested the Geek to dilate upon the role of self-organisation. The Geek is happy to oblige, hoping he is usefully elucidating rather than merely bloviating.

Political science has a very useful concept: The division between public and private space. Public space is open to intervention and regulation by the state through law and regulation. Private space exists for the self-organizing social and political groups of both formal and informal nature. The blunt (and brutal) reality is that public space--the space in social, political and economic activities liable to regulatory control by the bureaucratic state--has expanded at the expense of the private. The proponents of government owned (or at least regulated, policed, and controlled) public space argue that such is necessary for the accomplishment of the commonweal.

There is a powerful irony at work in the seeming triumph of public space. In the pursuit of lofty and seemingly utterly necessary goals such as assuring that no group is "victimized" and no group "privileged," the expansion of the public space has resulted in a private space push-back through the formation of self-organizing groups.

Self-organizing social, political, and economic groups are an ancient and honorable tradition in human experience. Their formation and dynamic stability as well as capacity for evolution, flexibility, and long duration are and have been universal--even in the most centralized examples of the bureaucratic state. Indeed, history demonstrates that in any tightly controlled venue, unless the organs of repression are highly effective, every increase in public space is countered by evasion and resistance oriented self-organizing groups.

Of course, not everyone living in a public space dominated environment will be part of evasion or resistance oriented self-organized groups. Some will collaborate as is the case with populations in territories occupied by a foreign enemy. Others, perhaps the majority, will duck and cover hoping to stay invisible to those who control the expansionist public space. Some few, again as is the case when the outsider conquers and occupies land, will self-organize so as to evade the regulated public space and resist its further expansion.

Regulatory, bureaucratic states practicing centrally controlled public space predominate in Europe, particularly in the West. Evasion and resistance are and have been commonplace. Consider, for example, the wide spread tax avoidance and flat out cheating which is of legendary proportions in Italy and France but far from absent elsewhere.

Admittedly, centralized bureaucratic states can extend public space to the extent that virtually no private space remains. Further, some such states can possess internal police mechanisms of very high efficiency. But, as the example of the former German Democratic Republic shows, the slightest weakening of either resolve or capacity to efficiently repress results in the very rapid implosion of the state. The same may be seen in the former Soviet Union, which quickly dissolved into a vast array of self-organizing entities of sizes ranging from the microscopic to full fledged states.

In short, the human impetus to self-organizing can be delayed but it cannot be denied. It is so deeply rooted in our very nature that it cannot be expunged, it cannot be extinguished, it cannot be conquered by threats, coercion, force, or violence. It is the basis of all our resistance movements of whatever size, nature, or opponent.

In the US ever since the emergence of the progressive movement and agenda over a century ago, both major political parties have shared a progressive belief in the supreme efficacy of the bureaucratic, regulatory, and centralized state. The two parties may disagree on the goals of the ever expanded public space, but they subscribe to the notion that the extension of public space at the expense of the private is both desirable and necessary for the benefit of all Americans.

For the majority of the past half-century and more, the available private space has steadily contracted as have the number of established but initially self-organized groups both formal and informal which mediated between the individual and the public space. Much of this dynamic occurred for reasons which may be seen (and were) as laudable: economic justice, equality of opportunity (and, in many cases, outcome,) internal security, and so forth.

While many, if not all, the posited goals would have been achieved through the interplay of the mediating groups of private space, it is important to recognize that the expansion of public space was brought about from the top down. It was an imposed expansion, imposed often not by political processes but by judicial fiat. Legions of litigators not precinct captains, squads of judges not divisions of citizens, decreed the public space with its regulations, controls, and dictates must supersede the messy, inherently chaotic emergent systems of the private space.

It is and has been argued that the very nature of the United States, its large and quite heterogeneous population, its mixed economy, its complexly organised structures and institutions, demand the expanded public space. It is and has been argued that without the regulated and controlled public space the people of the US would be at the mercy of the darkest emotions--greed, fear, exploitation, inequity.

Proponents of the ever larger public space view human nature with the most dour of Calvinist eyes. To them the individual and his private space is the residence of evil. This evil must be both exposed and constrained by the ever vigilant government operating bureaucratically in the public space.

Of course, being True Believers, these proponents are indifferent to the base desire for power, even total authority, which their agenda brings with it. These proponents of the expanded public space always understand their motives and goals to be of the highest, purist, and most lofty sort.

It doesn't matter if the motives and goals are secular (from neocon to Marxist) or religious (from Evangelical Christian to Islamist Muslim), the True Believers are always morally certain of the correctness of their intents. They impose from on high as did Calvin in Geneva with the sureness of the saved working to save all others from their own evil.

This delusion is powerful and pervasive. It might even be seen as universal. It is also wrong. That is why it is ultimately doomed to fail just as certainly as the Soviet Union and the DDR collapsed.

Humans will and always have evaded and resisted the imposition of public space upon them. They have evaded and resisted the reduction of their private space, the creation and operation of their self-organizing groups.

It is also why "nation-building" in Iraq or Afghanistan will fail. The well meaning outsiders including those from the US all represent states with expanded public space and a deficiency of self-organizing groups. They are in the process of attempting to impose these views on people who have no desire to give up the messy, chaotic dynamics of self-organization and the emergent systems which the interplay between self-organized groups must produce.

The dour view of human nature held by the advocates of an all-inclusive public space, their sincere belief that such will protect people from their own worst aspects, is not generally shared in non-Western cultures. While the Islamist may have an expansive understanding of evil, it is not the same as the Western proponent of the centralized, bureaucratic state. Nor is the bleak view of the Islamist or the Western state-lover shared by the vast mass of people in the world.

Europe and later the US have been on a century long voyage into the world of all-inclusive public space. The faults, the weaknesses, the failures of the public space orientation have already made themselves evident. Nonetheless, we press on both in our homelands and in our foreign adventures.

Perhaps the clear failure of "nation-building" which is unfolding in both Iraq and Afghanistan will give impetus to reexamine what we are all about in our well-intended effort to defeat the deep rooted human need to self-organize, to tell the powers that be, the powers on high, to get the hell out of our lives.

Well, one can hope. Can't one?